Harriet Dwyer went from working as a grant researcher to revolutionizing support work in Australia as the Chief of Staff at Hireup. By removing the traditional agency middleman, Hireup’s online platform connects people with disabilities directly to support workers that fit their lifestyle.
Previously, people with disabilities in Australia had virtually zero control over how government funds were used for the support they needed. The money was usually given to nonprofit organizations that decided how the support was structured and who was sent to assist each person.
Hireup's co-founder, Jordan O’Reilly, witnessed his brother suffer through this inadequate system and decided it was time for a change. The rise in peer-to-peer platforms like Uber and Airbnb sparked an idea — what if receiving disability support was that convenient and personalized? Intrigued by the thought, he set out to remove the middleman of disability support care in Australia.
"What I think Jordan did really well at the start is he hired entrepreneurial people," Harriet says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. It was vital to be surrounded by individuals who could work together to figure out answers for challenges they had no idea how to approach, such as funding, regulation, and safety.
One of the most important — and at the time, controversial — decisions Hireup made was to hire its support workers as employees, rather than independent contractors like most other platforms did. Harriet says this decision "just felt right," as they wanted their workers to form longstanding, healthy relationships and feel valued.
Hireup describes itself as a "profit for a purpose" company. It was the first purpose-led business to top Deloitte's list of fastest-growing tech companies and its market share will only continue to grow as it empowers more people with disabilities to make their own support decisions.
Featured Challenger
👩 Name: Harriet Dwyer
⚙️ How she challenges: Harriet is revolutionizing support for people with disabilities as the Chief of Staff at Hireup, an online platform that connects support workers with those who need them.
🤝 Company: Hireup
💎 Noteworthy: Harriet isn't just the Chief of Staff at Hireup — she also serves as a disability support worker herself! She's one of the many employees you can find on the platform, ready to help people with disabilities if it's the right fit.
🔍 Where to find Harriet: LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom
💡 The ingenuity of young entrepreneurs could be the key to success
"This is part of the novelty or fun about why and how [Hireup] has worked. It really was a sense of the ingenuity you can have as a young entrepreneur with not much to lose. You really think you can deliver something big and bold, and you don't realize at the time just how big and bold it is with not a lot of precedent, examples, or experience that it will work, especially at the scale we're at now."
💡 Enjoying the privilege of the challenge
"There are definitely instances where we came up against questions that were around quite serious, important stuff like funding, regulation, or safety. The sort of stuff that we didn't have an answer to when we were first asked, but we were just really good at quickly forming an answer. There are reasons and logic as to how we did that, but it's just that we really enjoyed the privilege of the challenge."
💡 The decision to hire people as employees instead of contractors
"At the core of Hireup, the support workers that deliver our services are employees rather than contractors. … Yes, it places more liability on the business and requires us to go above and beyond by comparison to a contractor model in all kinds of ways. … But how can we possibly ask a bunch of people to go out and care for other people when no one's there caring for them? There are so many ways you can care for a worker that isn't just the categorization of their work, but it felt like being an employee was a really important part of that — that we could maintain that control and standard that we wanted for our customer."
💡 Business ideas aren't always as obvious as they seem in hindsight
"We get this a lot now — 'Gosh, Hireup seems so obvious!' But, at the time, it wasn't. It took Jordan heaps to get the right kind of funding and to convince people there's a viable business in this, and that actually putting control back in the hands of people with disabilities and redistributing that power from big government organizations is worth banking on. It's worth saying there's an important product here that can be quite powerful."
💡 The value of being a tech-led, customer-centric platform
"There's a huge amount of value that being tech-led brings us — yes, in the software and scalability of that — but right through to the incredible changes that tech companies have brought to customer-centricity. Ultimately, we're here to serve people with disability to make changes that are empowering for people with disability. If that's not customer-centricity, I don't know what is."
💡 Capturing additional market share in a newly tech-enabled niche
"We have had phenomenal growth but we're still not a significant proportion of the market. There's still heaps we need to do in our core, so we're really focusing on that. … Hireup … is still not really right for the whole market. There are people with different types of disabilities and different types of living environments that the platform solution hasn't yet addressed because it is so much more hands-off. There's a value that case management, in the traditional model, has brought for people in different circumstances, so we're starting to think about what that looks like in a tech-enabled world."
Top quotes from the episode:
Harriet Dwyer:
Quote #1
"If there's anything that's worked to our advantage over the last five years, it's been ignorance. It never felt daunting. It always felt big, but it never felt overwhelming."
Quote #2
"As a business model, we call ourselves a ‘profit for purpose’ rather than just a traditional for-profit. We were the first purpose-led business to top [Deloitte's list of fastest-growing tech companies]. They were really thrilled to see this rise in purpose-led business."
Quote #3
"[Hireup is] a thing that needs to get done. There's a community of people that deserve so much better and you can see a really small light at the end of the tunnel. ... For that reason alone, It's worth withstanding whatever question or challenge comes your way."