What Catchers Is Changing About UK Temporary Staffing

A request for temporary workers can arrive with very little warning. A warehouse needs extra people for tomorrow’s shift. A retailer has a busy weekend ahead. Someone does not show up, and a replacement is needed before the next crew clocks in. Finding an available person is only part of the job. Before that individual can start, there may be identity documents to check, right-to-work requirements to complete, contracts to sign, and payroll records to create.

Catchers-IT has built its UK staffing model around doing much of that work earlier. Instead of beginning the verification process when a client asks for workers, the company creates a pool of people who have already completed onboarding and can be matched with available shifts.

The company is still relatively new to the UK market. Incorporated in London in 2023, it says it began trading with UK clients in 2025. In April 2026, Catchers took Silver in the Newcomer category at the In-house Recruitment Supplier Awards. The awards’ judging panel included talent acquisition professionals from Yusen Logistics and Elastic. It was also shortlisted for RPO/Embedded Solution Provider alongside Wilson, Group GTI, Join Talent and Chapter 2.

Those early recognitions raise a more interesting question than whether another staffing platform has entered the market. They offer a reason to look at what happens when a familiar recruitment process is rearranged.

Temporary Staffing Involves More than Finding an Available Worker

Most temporary staffing models eventually have to accomplish many of the same things. A worker is identified, their eligibility and relevant documents are checked, contracts are completed, shifts are assigned, attendance is recorded, and payroll follows. How those tasks are handled may vary considerably across different platforms.

Some platforms have used self-employed worker models, while employment businesses and traditional agencies take responsibility for employment and related administrative work in different ways. Other platforms have developed their own combinations of digital booking, interviews, and onboarding.

Recent changes in the UK staffing market show how varied those models can be. YoungOnes and Temper attracted attention over the employment status of workers using their platforms, while Coople closed its UK operations at the beginning of 2026.

Those developments arose under different circumstances and do not provide a simple verdict on any one approach to temporary staffing. They do, however, leave an industry still experimenting with how technology fits alongside the administrative and legal work involved in placing temporary workers.

For Catchers, the answer has been to concentrate on what happens before a shift becomes available.

Verification Starts Before the Client Makes a Request

Right-to-work verification alone can follow different routes depending on the worker. Non-UK nationals may use a Home Office share code, while British and Irish citizens can be checked using eligible identity documents, or through an identity service provider where applicable. Certain jobs can introduce additional requirements involving driving licenses, DBS checks, or other documentation. 

Agency workers also have rights tied to their assignments. Under the Agency Workers Regulations, some rights apply from the first day, while equal treatment for basic employment and working conditions generally applies after a 12-week qualifying period in the same job.

According to the company, before launching, Catchers commissioned a small qualitative study of in-house talent leads working in UK logistics, retail, and e-commerce. The company says participants described temporary roles that could take weeks to fill, along with problems that continued after workers were placed. 

Those requirements can affect how much work sits between identifying an available person and having that person ready for an assignment. They also vary by worker and role, which makes the timing of information collection an important part of how a staffing system operates.

Those checks can occur after a candidate is being considered for a particular assignment. Catchers’ model works to move them toward registration.

According to the company, a worker entering its system provides the identity and right-to-work information required for onboarding, along with additional documentation when it is relevant to the type of work they may perform. Contracts are also completed electronically.

That leaves the company with what it calls its “bench,” a pool of contracted workers who have gone through the verification process before a client requests staff.

The difference is mostly timing. A client request does not necessarily have to trigger a search followed by the entire onboarding process. Catchers can first look among the workers in its system who meet the requirements for the shift and are located within a practical distance of the job.

Catchers reports an average time-to-fill of four hours compared with a 28-hour baseline, though its UK operating history remains short. Still, pre-verification offers a straightforward explanation for why some of the time between a staffing request and a completed placement could be reduced.

Automation Makes Earlier Verification More Practical

Building a pool of verified workers before there is a specific job available can create another problem. Verification takes time and costs money, and some registered workers may not be immediately placed.

Catchers relies heavily on automation to make that model workable. Rather than treating automation primarily as a way to make an existing agency process faster, the company uses it to complete parts of onboarding before there is revenue attached to a worker.

That changes the economics of maintaining a ready pool. If every additional registration required substantial staff time, verifying people before knowing whether they would be needed could become expensive.

Dedov says the challenge differs between markets. Where a single state identity service exists, he describes pre-verification as a lookup.

“In the UK, the complexity is precisely identity verification and everything wrapped around it. Many legal frameworks, many sources, each with its own rules and document formats. When we show a client that all of that happens inside one registration flow, before they have even sent us a request, the reaction is very direct: we need this,” he says.

In that framing, innovation depends partly on the market in which a product operates. Catchers positions its approach around making pre-verification economically viable within British compliance requirements, using automated onboarding rather than a self-employed worker model.

The client side remains managed rather than operating solely as an open shift marketplace. A client submits its requirements, and workers are matched and confirmed for the assignment. Catchers says it also reconfirms workers before a shift begins and charges clients according to the agreed hourly rates for hours worked.

The company’s website describes automated matching based on location and role requirements, along with digital onboarding, check-ins, check-outs, electronic document signing, and payments. Together, those functions extend the system beyond finding an available person and into the administration surrounding the assignment.

The Same Record Can Follow a Worker Through the Shift

Getting someone to the workplace is not the end of a temporary staffing transaction. Attendance, hours, payroll, and records still have to align after the shift ends.

Catchers uses the same system to carry information from initial verification through shift confirmation, attendance, and payment. Instead of creating separate records at each stage, information generated during the shift can remain connected to the worker’s existing record.

That also creates a record of what happened during each stage of an assignment. The information used to verify the worker can remain connected with the shift they accepted, whether they attended, the hours recorded, and the eventual payment. If questions come up later, there is no need to reconstruct records that are already in place and organized.

The idea has roots in an earlier business developed by the company’s founder, Vadim Dedov. In that operation, software generated contracts, completion records, accounting entries, and payments for confirmed shifts. Catchers has adapted parts of that architecture for the UK staffing market.

The system also checked whether a shift had already been paid before processing another payment. In that earlier operation, the focus was largely on speeding up payments after work had been completed rather than dealing with the verification requirements Catchers encountered in the UK.

The company reports that earlier deployments cut time-to-hire to a quarter of its previous level and achieved 100% payroll accuracy. These company-reported results should not be treated as benchmarks for the wider staffing industry.

That does not eliminate the work that begins when a client needs staff. Before supplying an agency worker, a temporary work agency will collect information about the assignment, such as where the person will work, what the role entails, what the expected hours are, and whether there are any qualifications or experience that the hirer requires. Some clients may even have health and safety requirements before placement.

Catchers handles that part of the process through the same system. Clients can go to their website and create a shift template that is repeatable. They can also publish multiple vacancies. This helps match workers depending on their location, work experience, and the requirements of the role. A worker who has completed onboarding can then be considered for a position, but the actual assignment still determines who is suitable.

The company will also reconfirm all provided details before a shift begins. Once someone has been officially matched with a job, Catchers says it will check in with the worker to verify they are still attending instead of assuming an earlier acceptance means the worker will show up.

That extra confirmation is aimed at a familiar problem in temporary staffing. A worker can accept an assignment and still fail to arrive at the job. The company reports that earlier deployments of its technology reduced no-shows by 78%, which can help explain why the platform continues contacting workers after a match has been made.

Catchers is still early in its UK operations, and more time will show how the model performs with a larger client base. For now, the company has taken the familiar parts of temporary staffing and changed when and how some of that work gets done. In a business where a shift can need filling tomorrow, even a change in timing can have practical consequences.