Case studies:

The client 

Urban Foodies is a culinary hub that consists of a high-end catering arm - Bay Leaf Catering, a cooking school - Urban Kitchen, and their venue in North Melbourne Woolstore + Co.

At Urban Foodies, the team is their most valuable asset, with each brand and event having a distinct difference in service level and staffing requirements. 

Georgie Vile, the Director at Urban Foodies and Victoria Black, the Events Manager at Urban Foodies described the challenges they’ve had with previously used traditional events staffing agencies before Sidekicker. 

The challenges

Having enough staff

One of the challenges with a seasonal events business is having enough staff, especially during the peak seasons. 

Finding the right match

Due to the extent of Urban Foodies product offerings from cafe to catering and cooking school, it’s really important for Urban Foodies to have a great team with diverse work experience and skills. 

With traditional events staffing agencies doing the worker selection for them, it has been difficult to match Urban Foodies with the right talent. 

The solution

Now Urban Foodies use Sidekicker for their casual staffing to easily scale their seasonal workforce, and handpick their preferred workers. 

User friendly platform

Urban Foodies are really impressed by how easy the Sidekicker platform is to use, and they find it quick and simple to make a request onto the platform and select their own workers. 

Handpicking selected workers

Urban Foodies' favourite thing about the Sidekicker platform is the ability to see transparent staff profiles outlining the work experience, ratings, and reviews from other businesses. This way, they can make sure the staff who are selected will meet the needs of the specific event, and are a great culture fit as well. 

Saving great workers into Talent Pools

Once Urban Foodies find great staff, they save them to their private Talent Pools which makes it easy for them to find the workers again, and send a request to them directly in the future.  

The results

Urban Foodies turn to Sidekicker to seamlessly scale their seasonal events workforce for their Melbourne venue, consisting of baristas, waiters, cooks and chefs, and kitchen hands.

“We’re not relying on an agency to select staff for us, we really understand our needs and it puts the power back to us.”