Nick La
Nick La is a serial entrepreneur with a strong background in operational finance and international business. Over the course of his career, he has founded five different companies; successfully taking each one from bootstrapped to seven figures. In 2016, Nick co-founded Weploy, the fastest online hiring platform for customer experience talent in Australia. Fast forward 4 years and whilst successfully operating Weploy Core (proven business concept), Nick co-founded Weploy’s newest venture, TalentTap. TalentTap is a modern-day workforce management software solution, allowing companies to have better visibility over their business operations. Both Weploy ventures have won numerous awards since their launch, including the ATC Leading HR Innovation Award, voted by Australia’s top HR professionals. “My co-founders and I want to see technology solve big problems and enable companies to focus on what really matters - growing their businesses. Once people get too busy, they often forget why they got into their line of work in the first place, so we want them to work on their businesses as opposed to working for them,” says Nick.
Weploy’s first venture can be described as a marketplace attracting talent whilst combatting unbiased and biased barriers regularly seen in traditional recruitment methods. This passion for a level of equilibrium within hiring was especially important to Nick, coming from an immigrant background. “Until now, the traditional agency recruitment model has never been able to disrupt the way we hire. Job seekers and companies still use résumés to apply for jobs, which involves a lot of bias and a lack of diversity in decision making,” he explains. For example, Nick’s mother was a banker in Vietnam, but once she relocated to Australia, she struggled to find work before finally accepting a service job as a hairdresser. Weploy hopes to correct similar situations by creating equal opportunities amongst job seekers.
With this passion, experience and business acumen, Nick along with co-founders, Tony Wu and Vince Luong, launched Weploy to penetrate the customer service and contact centre space. The company has matured over 4 years, successfully supporting business in financial services, insurance, and retail organisations, with their broad contact centre and e-commerce teams. With strong ambitions, Weploy is on a mission to expand its international footprint from New Zealand, to global domination. Nick attributes the company’s growth to its engineers and talented sales teams. “Our technology allows us to cast a larger net to people - similar to Uber. As a Weployee (casual employee of Weploy), you can accept jobs within minutes,” he explains. “Weploy offers much faster results than visiting a traditional agency. Clients come for the speed & stay for the quality.”
TalentTap is Weploy’s sister company and was discovered when Nick and his co-founders began seeking an efficient way to manage workforce transactions overseas. “While Weploy provides customer service, TalentTap helps to manage how they go about it,” says Nick. “It’s a workforce management tool - born to provide other companies with the same technology we use.” In creating TalentTap, the co-founders utilised their experience from Weploy, as well as the platforms they had built for time sheeting, payrolling, rostering, and scheduling. Currently, the company is focused on helping recruitment agencies, labor hire agencies, and commercial cleaning companies simplify their operational processes.
Before relocating to Australia, Nick first entered the workforce at age 19 in Asia’s food and beverage industry. Learning operations through firsthand experience, he worked his way up from a bartender to a beverage director, managing 32 leaders. He soon began sharing his knowledge on building brands and businesses. This ultimately helped in repeating the same process again in Australia with Weploy and TalentTap. Although he has always maintained an operational role in both businesses, he is now moving to TalentTap’s front line to lead enterprise sales. “My co-founders and I got into this space because we found that many facilities management and agencies were either using legacy processing systems to build spreadsheets or they weren’t using technology at all,” Nick explains. “So, we decided to take a very simple approach—to make every product we design user-friendly so that people would have the tools and solutions they need to work on their businesses.”
Contact:
Nick La
Cofounder
Weploy and TalentTap
Australia
website: https://www.weployapp.com
LinkedIn: Nick La
Download the magazine and see Nick's feature on page 50.