Roleshare secures $1.2M seed funding - a job sharing platform that helps companies retain diverse and valuable employees
Roleshare, creator of a unique job sharing marketplace and management platform, announced a $1.2 million seed round from a notable slate of investors. Roleshare’s platform makes it easy for enterprises to retain and redeploy women and employees of diverse backgrounds and circumstances seeking more flexibility, by matching complementary skills to share mid to senior jobs, or with Roleshare’s own fractional talent community looking to share roles.
This novel approach allows companies to retain employees who love their jobs but need or want a more flexible role to accommodate family and personal needs, or other interests and passions. Employers also benefit from increased productivity and wellbeing. Roleshare enables a novel way to improve business continuity and create unique peer-to-peer accountability. "Many talented people are forced out of their dream jobs because they can't or don't want traditional employment anymore. Roleshare makes it possible for companies to keep these employees and benefit from their diverse perspectives, joint skills and mutual accountability," says Sophie Smallwood co-founder of Roleshare.
Roleshare is personal for Smallwood. She and her husband, David Smallwood, co-founded the company after she sought a half-time role to spend more time with her young child. But Smallwood found the quality, seniority, and relevance of flexible roles did not match her career ambitions. Roleshare has already attracted some high-profile clients including JP Morgan, BP, and Alphabet’s X Moonshot Factory, where pilot programs are underway.
“With the changing expectations of the modern workforce, job sharing is a business necessity. Creating a scalable approach is critical to its adoption and success, and to achieve this we require unique technology. Partnering with Roleshare enables us to reach a diverse pool of talent, manage the challenges of bringing two people together and create an efficient and frictionless process, coupled with reporting capability to prove its success,” said John Bennett and Libby Sibbert, who are scaling the JP Morgan Job Share program via Roleshare's platform.
The need for job flexibility is greater than ever as more women returning to the workforce seek parity with their male counterparts. According to a study by McKinsey2, $12 trillion could be added to GDP by 2025 if women played an identical role in labour markets to men. At the same time there is a global talent shortage. By 2030, according to a Korn Ferry3 study, there will be a worldwide talent shortage of more than 85 million people as demand for skilled individuals exceeds supply.
Roleshare's platform not only helps reduce the gender and diversity gap in mid to senior roles, but can also address the global talent shortage by combining complementary skills together in a single role to generate better outcomes.
“Roleshare has the potential to redefine how we think about work and career growth. In the current workers market and with changing expectations from GenZ, it is more important than ever to give employees flexibility. Dave and Sophie are incredible and with their first traction show that the sharing economy has arrived in HR. We're thrilled to be part of such an innovative and mission-driven company and are looking forward to scaling their solution globally," said Carolin Wais, Director and EMEA IC Member at Plug and Play Ventures, an early-stage investor in Roleshare.
The World Economic Forum recognized Roleshare as having the potential to play a major role in transforming the economy by enabling a dramatic improvement in participation by women and underrepresented groups — the same groups that were most likely to drop out of the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Roleshare’s seed funding was led by Plug and Play VC, accompanied by Forward VC, Rethink Capital Partners, Techstars VC, Invested (Anna Brandt and Noor Van Boven), angels the likes of Phil Chambers (co-Founder, Peakon), David Blake (co-Founder, Degreed), Athena Karp (Founder, HiredScore), Roger Wade (Founder, Boxpark), Dave Pell, Richard Fearn, Vuyiswa M'Cwabeni, Scott Mackin, Brian Lo, Laurent Christen, Kevin Withane, Ayesha Ofori, Tessy Antony de Nassau and Frank Floessel, Catherine and Jonathan Lenson, Neha Tanna, Samantha Johnson, as well as angels from Alchemy including Alex Macdonald (co-Founder, Velocity Black), Elissa Grey, Abby Wong, Adam Howe, Harmeet Rehal, Nicholas Macdonald, Daniel Afan-Williams, Henry De Zoete, Matthew Bell, Andrew Jackson, Aarish Shah, Matthew Roberts, Jean-Michel Gauthier, David Buxton, Christopher Judd, Christopher Jones, Sam Marks, Scott Dann, and angels from Lumus Investment Collective, encompassing expertise in enterprise saas, impact, networks, marketplaces, and edtech.
This investment will help Roleshare accelerate its technology platform and product development, and expand its sales and marketing efforts into new markets. "We're just beginning, but Roleshare could make it possible for enterprises to better retain, redeploy, and hire 3 billion women and employees of diverse backgrounds and circumstances globally by normalizing and scaling this sharing of roles” said Smallwood.
To learn more about Roleshare, visit https://www.roleshare.com
About Roleshare
Roleshare was developed to help create a sustainable, diverse, and equitable workforce. It is the premier talent marketplace matching professionals to co-apply and share full-time jobs, driving positive impact toward gender equality, economic growth, and wellbeing. To learn more, visit https://www.roleshare.com.
Sophie Smallwood
Roleshare
+ +44 7595446348
Sophie@roleshare.com
1 http://www.roleshare.com/
2 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/how-advancing-womens-equality-can-add-12-trillion-to-global-growth
3 https://www.kornferry.com/content/dam/kornferry/docs/pdfs/KF-Future-of-Work-Talent-Crunch-Report.pdf
