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Tropic is the procurement system of record for companies like Notion, Zapier, Nextdoor, and Plaid. The platform streamlines workflows, giving businesses visibility and control over every contract and supplier while uncovering opportunities to reduce costs—saving Tropic’s customers an average of 21% on software purchases.
But the team is dedicated to more than building great software. The company’s Head of Talent, James Parker, is “bullish on delivering an excellent experience to every candidate that interviews with us,” says Dave Campbell, Tropic’s CEO. James had been manually undertaking what he calls “employer branding content delivery” for as long as he’d been in talent acquisition. “No company had tackled the automated engagement space until candidate.fyi,” he explains. “Suddenly we were hearing about this candidate portal from a lot of people in the industry. So we got in touch with the team to understand their vision for the future.”
- James Parker, Head of Talent @ Tropic
Tropic’s talent team understands how critical it is that candidates can articulate what the company does if they’re going to be enthusiastic enough to accept an offer. James describes this as “a kind of self-fulfulling prophecy. If, by the time the candidate gets to the final interview, they know enough that they’ve become an evangelist for the platform, they’ll sell themselves on the role. And we can equip them to do just that with employer branding content—delivered at the right time to keep talent engaged, and to keep us top-of-mind between touchpoints.”
When a role goes live in Tropic’s ATS, it gets pushed to candidate.fyi automatically, at which point the candidate portal goes live. The portal automates content delivery, “empowering talent leaders like myself to create—and update—a content archive in real-time, rather than waiting on a busy developer to refresh something on the careers page,” James explains. It used to be that the careers page was the only place candidates could go to find company information, and that information was often “stale” and onerous to change. At previous companies, James used “templatized emails with links to everything we wanted candidates to read. But that was a very manual process that was inconsistent across recruiters and roles, since some interview loops were five stages, and some were only three. Team members didn’t know when to send each email. It also left too much space between touchpoints, giving talent time to become interested in another role elsewhere.”
“We’ve had 13,500 sessions, averaging 5 ½ minutes each. Candidates are spending hours on our brand content.”
James and his team also have access to an insights dashboard that reports on candidate engagement with the platform. “The way I quantify ROI is: how many people are logging in?” he explains. “If there are over a thousand sessions happening every month—and there are—there’s clearly something of interest here. Just seven months into our partnership with candidate.fyi, we’ve had 13,500 sessions, averaging 5 ½ minutes each. Candidates are spending hours on our brand content. What that tells me is we now have a very cost-effective way of delivering a ton of information to people. That’s taking our brand to the next level.”
James describes candidate.fyi’s platform as having “two functions: servicing the candidates, and serving the talent acquisition team.” Both functions result from the information candidates have access to concerning each stage of the interview process—who they’ll be meeting with, what date and time, and how to prepare. James admits that initially he saw the advantages for talent, but couldn’t foresee how the platform would benefit his team. But “in hindsight,” he says, “I see the impact of that readily-available information on the team. There’s a lot less manual back-and-forth because a candidate forgot what time their interview is at, or what time zone it’s in, or what the assessment will test, or where the Zoom link is. Candidates now self-serve the answers to those operational questions instead of wildly searching email threads or frantically reaching out to the team. It’s improved the candidate experience exponentially, and saved our recruiters a ton of time.”
Matt Papa, Talent Partner, echoes James’ sentiments—adding that the portal has allowed for more animated and engaging conversations with candidates. “I used to spend hours each week prepping candidates for every interview, or in lengthy phone screens answering a multitude of questions about our company or our hiring process. candidate.fyi centralizes the information I used to share individually with candidates over email and phone. Now on calls, candidates recite details they learned while exploring our candidate portal. And because they arrive to our calls more informed about our business, our product, and our process, a remarkable space has opened up for for more vibrant and engaging conversations with candidates.”
“We’ve shortened our interviews from 45 to 30 minutes. Managers are doing their jobs more because they’re interviewing less.”
Tropic’s talent team has been able to shorten its recruiter and hiring manager screens “from 45 minutes to 30 minutes,” James says. “That means managers are doing their jobs more because they’re interviewing less. If I take a salesperson off the floor every 30 minutes to conduct an interview, that adversely impacts company productivity and revenue. But if I can save our sales team 15 minutes per interview and we do a thousand interviews, that’s 15,000 minutes that translate directly into dollars.” James says that’s where candidate.fyi’s value is most easily quantified—“because we’re delivering answers to questions in a more efficient format than each team member explaining it to every candidate. It also respects talent’s time. They have perpetual access. Why not jump into the platform when you’re free and see for yourself?”
Prior to candidate.fyi, Tropic’s talent team collected candidate feedback through their ATS. But there were a handful of problems with that method, James explains. “When candidate sentiment isn’t collected until the process is over, that invites recency bias: Candidates who are extended offers are much more likely to give positive reviews, which doesn’t support overall process improvement. It also fails to tell you which stages of the candidate experience need the most tending to. The ATS questions weren’t great,” James remembers. “We had response rates between 10 and 20%—if we were lucky.”
With candidate.fyi’s Pulse Checks, Tropic collects candidate sentiment on a stage-by-stage basis—“something no tool I know does,” James says. 60% of Tropic’s candidates have given the team feedback so far. “That sounds outrageous,” he admits, “but it’s true. And the ability to deep-dive into every stage means I can deliver more precise feedback and truly hone in on my hiring managers’ growth areas. Maybe four candidates have mentioned that a certain manager showed up late to their interview. That’s hard data I have to tailor a coaching journey.” Conversely, James uses candidate feedback for positive reinforcement. “This happened just yesterday,” he says. “A candidate was so inspired after an interview with a hiring manager who described the future team and the product roadmap. I copied that feedback into a Slack channel, @mentioned the hiring manager, and said ‘Keep it up!’ When other interviewers see that, they’re motivated to do the same. So we’re literally optimizing the hiring process on the fly—finding areas for both opportunity and celebration.”
“We’ve gotten only rave reviews from the platform's primary user—our candidates. It doesn't get any more validating than that.” - Dave Campbell, CEO @ Tropic
Tropic’s team measures candidate experience and reports out anecdotally about the positive interactions candidates have had with the company. “I care a lot about delivering a premium interview experience,” Dave says. “In fact, I obsess over this kind of data.” That’s why Tropic’s CEO is not only a candidate.fyi customer, but has become an advisor and an investor. “When the team asked if I would advise,” he recalls, “it was a no-brainer. Because we’ve only gotten rave reviews from the platform’s primary user—our candidates. It doesn’t get more validating than that.”
“Our candidates do continually rave about the platform,” James adds. “For the first time ever, they have a central hub with everything they need. It’s been an incredible differentiator for us. Within hours of enabling candidate.fyi, we received dozens of unsolicited emails from candidates telling us how excited they were to have a candidate experience portal and how surprising it was to have never experienced anything like this. It instantly elevated the talent team, and our ability to attract the best talent.” James says that candidates constantly ask how Tropic built such a great portal. “People assume we built it in-house; they want to hear how we did it. And I have to tell them, ‘Actually, it’s a pretty turnkey solution; it took almost no work on our part to implement, and it’s taken very little to maintain.’ The team at candidate.fyi was so great about getting it up-and-running and helping us feel empowered. And once the content is in, it’s very easy to duplicate and replicate and customize and change.”
James says he’s been continually impressed with the team’s speed time each time he makes a feature request. “We asked for an aggregated view in the insights dashboard, and it was shipped within two weeks. Then I wanted a content library in the platform itself rather than having to store all our content in a shared Google Drive. Turnaround time was less than a month for that. We now have a content library in the product; recruiters can drag-and-drop the content they want into the templates for their roles—and we get to maintain brand consistency.”
“candiate.fyi has taken my capacity as a recruiter to a whole new level,” Matt chimes in. “The platform is already so strong, and the team is diligent about collecting feedback and innovating on their product. I know this product is going to be the next big thing in the recruiting space.” James adds that the candidate portal is eventually “going to become table stakes. The more candidates have a taste of this experience, the more they’ll be asking other companies, ‘Hey, what’s the login to your platform?’ Candidates are demanding incredible experiences, and if a company can’t deliver, they’ll be considered irrelevant. The team at candidate.fyi has created an incredible experience, and I’m so excited to see what’s to come in this partnership.”
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- Dave Campbell, CEO @ Tropic