When you add it all up, it can be hard to predict which trend will prevail on the day when you suddenly need to hire another fulfillment team or expand the drivers in your delivery fleet.
Fortunately, as the saying goes, there’s an app for that—or, in this case, a whole slew of apps. In recent years, a new generation of workforce apps and online platforms have emerged to provide employers with better tools for finding and hiring workers—including workers they might have missed before. And the ranks of apps with supply chain-specific labor-matching abilities seem to grow by the day. Examples include Adecco, Allegiance Staffing, BlueCrew, EmployBridge, LaborMax, PeopleReady, PrideStaff, Prologistix, Traba, and ZipRecruiter.
One common thread across these new job-matching tools is the idea that there’s not just one big labor pool, but rather many different “ponds” of workers, each with a distinct profile—such as workers with specific levels of training or experience or those with specific windows of availability. The right app can help to filter those ponds to identify custom-picked candidates that match the requirements of specific jobs, whether they’re certifications, licenses, language abilities, or other variables.
WAREHOUSES TURN TO A PATCHWORK OF APPS
That ability to match workers and jobs with precision—as opposed to the old practice of posting a “help wanted” ad and hoping that suitable candidates apply—has never been more important, according to Instawork, a San Francisco-based firm that describes itself as a marketplace for bringing together businesses and skilled hourly workers.
Market conditions have changed in recent months, with employers shifting their focus from seeking longer job commitments to seeking extra flexibility to swiftly adjust their workforce levels, the firm said in its “2025 State of Warehouse Labor Report,” which is based on a survey of warehouse employers in the U.S. and Canada. That shift has occurred as companies respond to unpredictable inventory swings triggered by tariff volatility and global trade tensions.
To fill open slots under those challenging conditions, many warehouses rely on a patchwork of labor services specialists and apps, with nearly half of surveyed warehouses reporting that they use two or more staffing agencies and platforms to fill their shifts, Instawork said.
And because today’s labor market remains tight by historical standards, many warehouse employers are offering incentives to attract new workers and hold onto the ones they have—incentives like higher pay, flexible schedules, rewards or gifts, and extra time off. They’re also launching training and upskilling programs as well as focusing on providing career growth opportunities. “Retention is the new recruitment,” the Instawork report said. “As competition for skilled workers intensifies, leading operators are investing more in training, career pathing, and workplace culture.”
In some cases, employers are turning to the workers themselves for advice, soliciting their feedback on exactly which incentives would be most effective in finding and keeping good help.
That was the motivation behind San Francisco-based warehousing engagement platform WorkStep’s recent acquisition of WorkHound, an engagement platform for the transportation and logistics sectors that collects job-related feedback from transportation workers, primarily drivers, for employers. According to the two companies, the move comes at a time when turnover in some supply chain jobs is running as high as 90%. WorkStep says it now plans “to create the most comprehensive engagement platform on the market” in a bid to help users tackle the worker shortages, retention challenges, and high turnover rates plaguing domestic supply lines.
STAYING SQUARE WITH THE LAW
Along with matching employers with candidates who meet their precise requirements, today’s hiring apps offer a further benefit: helping users vet those applicants. Many of the apps are connected to placement agencies that can screen job candidates for specific skills or attributes. For instance, an agency may prequalify workers by checking to see if they have a commercial driver’s license (CDL), a criminal conviction, or specific technical training or proficiency with certain software platforms.
That capability may be particularly important in an era marked by sudden changes in federal labor policy, forcing companies to scramble to stay in compliance with new requirements in order to avoid federal legal scrutiny or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigations.
For example, a workforce app could help employers distinguish between candidates with permanent resident status, those with green cards, and those who are naturalized citizens. Or it could simply screen candidates for English language proficiency, which hasn’t historically been a requirement for many entry-level jobs but will soon become a necessity for most commercial truck drivers under a presidential executive order issued in April … assuming it’s not successfully challenged in the courts, changing the labor landscape yet again.
The logistics workforce recruitment and retention landscape has never been more volatile than it is right now. But, as is often the case nowadays, there are tech tools that can ease the pain—in this case, a broad array of labor-matching apps and online platforms designed to help employers rise to the new challenges.
