I’ve got to go straight in: TribePad / Talent On View…..what’s that all about? I’m confused.
(laughs)
Yes I know. Let me start from the beginning. My background is recruitment…15 years in agency, some time in HR, but mainly working as an agency recruiter. I went off and had my first child, came back and had a pretty senior job and…..

….. how long is this going to take?
(laughs)
I know! But I best give you the background…..

(15 minutes later)

….so the premise behind Talent On View was a software solutions company to extrapolate the recruitment process. But because of Talent On View and the use of video within this sector we were given the opportunity to build the TribePad platform, So basically TribePad was the product that Talent On View launched, but it’s since become much bigger than the parent company and going forward, we’re going to be TribePad, creating talent communities on behalf of corporate clients.

OK, so TribePad. In a nutshell?
It’s a Talent Community platform which underpins direct hiring processes, a destination for job seekers to go in and engage with your brand.

Dumb it down for me Lisa
I tell my mother we build private Facebooks for corporates.

Got it. Let’s have an example from you.
OK. Here’s an analogy you’d like which one of our clients use! If you have a community on LinkedIn or your Facebook wall, or anywhere else, it’s great to have, but every time you use it, it’s like you’re playing away from home (sportswise, readers). What people have realised with social media and other channels, that it’s important to have the ability to signpost back to a single branded portal. We produce a community which allows you to play home all the time. And, of course, the atmosphere’s always better at home.

Let’s look at it this way: You’ve got a direct hiring strategy, you’re looking to cut agency costs, you’re looking to reduce advertising costs and you are trying to leverage social channels. A great deal of time and money is spent on candidate attraction and acquisition – getting job applicants to come to your brand – but very little time is spent looking after them once they are there. So every time you have to recruit you have to rebuild Rome and start the campaign again. What we do is build a pool of talent for present and future need.

(Wise Man Say continues to be puzzled. Sadly it’s all too obvious…)

Let me try it this way: Everything you can do on a social network, you want to do on your own branded community. For example, we are about to engage in a project with a client where there are a 1000 existing employees. But they are all homeworkers. They are using the platform – the same platform for job seekers – but we’re giving them a place to go, to interact with each other, an accessible resource – a destination where they can build a community but a private one locked down from public view. There seems to be a full circle going on…. private and niche is becoming attractive.

I’m going put a grey cardigan on that. Isn’t this just Intranet 2.0?
…..Well…..yes…. it is. But Intranets have their place and they are still useful tools. Problem has always been accessibility and usability. We’ve created a solution where we think that people will want to go and they can get to it from home, on mobile, where ever they like. Here’s a question for you: What is the difference between social network and a community?

(Wise Man Say has no idea)

Social networks are about people’s common interest. A community has a business purpose.

Let’s look at the business purpose of one of our clients. G4S plc. They hire 200,000 per year. The second largest private employer after Walmart. Using the TribePad solution, we have helped them acquire over 70,000 job seekers. Now for their hiring managers, the first port of call is this talent pool rather than an external job board or advertising directly. They can do a CV search on the 70,000 job seekers with a pre-stated interest in G4S. Furthermore, it’s all integrated with their ATS systems so when they put a job on to the system, they can automatically match candidates skills and experience and immediately generate a list of engaged candidates who are matches for the role.

A geek question for you: How do you deal with data currency?
With TribePad, our philosophy is by improving candidate experience, you get better information in return. For example, there is a resources section within TribePad which can give the job seeker advice on job hunting, more about the company and so forth. This gives a candidate something back – quid pro quo.They are providing a welcoming candidate or job seeker experience, providing job seeking collateral and support and gaining brand ambassadors by doing so. And you also get much improved the rates of response from requests on update information. Job seekers are more likely to respond to those requests if you have already previously engaged with them and given them great value in being part of the community.

You have been compared to other companies. How are you different?
Our proposition is about engagement. Other providers out there are what I call ‘agnostic’ about brands. They help job seekers identify a good company to work for, and signpost candidates to that company. And other companies that they job seeker is interested in. It’s not about one brand, it’s about multiple brands. TribePad is about privacy, a single brand, talent management within a branded community, the recruitment process & engagement with your brand.

Tell me about the recruitment process. I’ve got all these candidates in my talent pool – what do I do?
It’s a hiring manager driven process. We don’t get involved in the assessment, or the candidate qualification or screening but we may well in the future. We provide the environment which allows the engagement to happen, Here, let’s have a look and I’ll show you:

(Lisa fires up the laptop, and after a bit of jiggery pokery, demo’s the TribePad solution. It’s very good)

This is why people use TribePad. We aggregate data for sharing talent. We improve direct hiring strategy (i.e. save money). We build the employer brand, improve candidate experience, provide better service to internal customers (i.e line managers) and recruit talent for future needs. The great thing about it is that is underpins existing technologies so there is any massive change in the organisation more of an “enhancement”

I’m guessing you are going to need resources to deal with all of this?
G4S has 628,000 employees. They’ve got one person running this but that isn’t to say they won’t have more in the future as we roll out to more countries.

One person dealing with all of this??
They’ve got a community manager. TribePad is fully automated but keeping the community aspect very personal. For example you can autotweet out of the platform, you can converse and engage with community members through the platform, there is group discussions going on, forum posts and so on.

OK that’s more than impressive. Let’s take a look from the job seeker perspective: What is my experience?
Here’s the dashboard. You can do Job Search, these are job applications, you can put jobs on your watch list – like a shopping basket. Now all of these are pulled in from different ATS’s but it’s all seamless from a job seeker’s perspective. You can track application status of the job here, so you can see whether you have been shortlisted, have progressed and so on. And here are a list of jobs that are available…

…is there any kind of intelligent recommendation engine behind that jobs list?
Those are the jobs you have applied for. But we are in the process of developing a intelligent recommendation engine, which will give Job seekers sort of an Amazon experience. i.e. 33% of people who applied for this job, have also applied for this. It’s about bringing the jobs to the candidate, rather than have him search for it but also giving them the experience they are coming to expect of any “shopping” experience online

(Wise Man Say endorses the idea. Lisa is thrilled at this important outcome)

I’m staying with the Amazon idea. People rate and review books on Amazon. Are you going to allow people to do the same?
Absolutely. Why not? Job seekers need to know what is a good opportunity is and this is in line with the our focus on candidate experience. Right now – - we have social features such as ‘rate’, ‘tweet’ and ‘share’ on the jobs that job seekers have ‘experienced’. Eventually we will allow comments, so job seekers have got the ability to report in detail what their experience has been. They can also refer jobs to friends, and this will eventually transfer into a fully fledged company ERP scheme.

Where else is TribePad going to fit? Is it mega companies only?
No. In many ways, we are a victim our own success because we have had success with big brand names, there is this perception that TribePad is only for the enterprise level. Yes, we do have enterprise technology, yes it is scalable, yes it can handle millions of users users, but it’s absolutely customisable for your needs. Anyone who wants to underpin their resourcing activity with more engagement and a better candidate experience should be thinking TribePad.

But is there a….er…..size limit?
It would work technically, but I think you need to have some volume to have a vibrant community. I don’t know a figure, but I’ll give you another analogy!. It’s like walking into a pub that is empty compared to a pub that is full. Which one would you go to?

OK. How do you make your money?
We charge subscription model. We host it, we manage it. They use it, and pay us monthly. On the platform, we don’t charge on candidate attraction, because I think that sort of penalises success. And I know some platforms do charge that way.

How long to til world conquest?
Well, I think the easiest way to answer that…..people are becoming used to the idea of thinking about candidate experience. Their calculation is how much are we losing through bad candidate experience? How can we affect that in the recruitment process? People are becoming a lot more aware of that. From our point of view, we are in a really sweet spot in the market. We are having some interesting conversations at the moment, with companies large and small, with regards to what TribePad can do for them. World conquest? Er….watch this space…..oh dear, that so fluffy isn’t it?!
(laughs)

Yeah it’s definitely fluffy. Thanks Lisa, it’s been a thrill
My pleasure. Let’s do it again.

Thanks to Lisa Scales, CEO of TribePad. Find out more about TribePad at www.TribePad.com and follow Lisa on Twitter