57589Development of digital recruitment tool to match UK unemployed to farms experiencing labour shortage as a result of Covid 19ClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UK**Specific need:** T**he UK farming industry requires up to 90,000 seasonal workers** at peak, to grow and harvest its crops. The labour to grow our crops has, for the last 30 years, traditionally come from Eastern Europe, as seasonal migrant workers. COVID-19 restrictions on movement of people and global lockdown of transport infrastructure currently prevents them from returning. At the same time, claims for Universal Credit in the UK surged to 950,000 since the -COVID-19 lockdown. The UK is suffering job losses on a scale and speed un-precedented even after a global financial collapse. It is expected that the unemployment rate will rise from 3.9% pre pandemic to 5.2% in April, further in May and June. There is a significant potential UK workforce, likely to want to engage to resolve this key worker crisis. Providing the infrastructure needed to connect farmers with this resource is a sector priority. **Innovation:** A unique mobile recruitment app and cloud application which takes details of applicants, pre-checks them for suitability, and offers them to farm subscribers by matching answers to set questions. Employer selects which worker(s) to offer work to, using redacted data and supplies information on their farm and jobs offered. On acceptance, the worker's full details are passed directly to the employer and their contract begins. The app pushes a periodic satisfaction survey to both employee and employer which acts as a 2-way review. Employers notify the system when a contract ends. Through this PCR extension, applicants will be able to view a collated video about the job they are being offered which will be part of a growing collection of stock interviews with people actually doing various jobs over a period of time. This is innovative in that it is managing potential employees expectations in a different way than is currently available and provides greater engagement between employers and applicants and less recruitment churn. An extension will also allow the project to create and split test multiple social media campaigns to attract applicants and automate those wherever possible. This enhances potential engagement with unemployed domestic workers and increases the availability of workers for available jobs. This is innovative because it creates a more targeted and automated solution to a currently manual and protracted process. **Delivery:** Cropdesk has been operating in the technology market for 5yrs, focussing on technology, with a CEO who is a soft fruit farmer himself of over 30 years. We have multiple initial routes to market: * Through Cropdesk's customers and contacts including Berry Gardens Ltd, the UK's largest soft fruit cooperative * Through Enterprise Europe Network connections and overseas partners and the Knowledge Transfer Network, with potential sector support through the Knowledge Transfer Network * To applicants through a national social media campaign and potentially the DWP