A former corporate recruiter is aiming to alter the way employers engage with candidates via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) talent pooling platform, Talentfizz, as well as bring wider change to the recruitment industry.

Significantly, talent pools created on the platform can be optimised for search, which potentially brings a radical shift in how candidates find jobs.

Daniel Padbury, founder and chief executive of Talentfizz, told Recruiter that many in the sector are too focused on maintaining the “status quo” of an industry driven by response-based advertising.

“There is a lot of vested interest in maintaining the nature of the way job boards and recruitment agencies work together because they feed into each other,” he said. “In my world in the future, all companies will have talent pools that will be searchable via the search engines, so a jobseeker could go to Google and key in ’IT asset management jobs’ and get a list of talent pools from relevant companies.”
Padbury worked in talent acquisition for such companies as JP Morgan, GE, Barclays and UBS. He said Talentfizz fulfils a need he had as a corporate recruiter to provide a way of accessing candidate data more efficiently and give a candidate experience that sets a company apart.

Talentfizz typically sits alongside an organisation’s corporate website and also its applicant tracking system (ATS). Those visiting a company careers site but who don’t find a job that suits them can click a button which allows them to browse various talent pools and create a profile to join one or more.

Employers can invite existing candidates held in their recruitment systems to join and also capitalise on referrals from those in the pools. There are also links to a number of social networks. Employers can communicate with talent via the pools, and profiling technology, including psychometrics, can be used to assess where a candidate might best fit into the company.

Padbury described it as a ’white label’ solution for companies who want a more effective way of connecting with candidates and said the company was not aiming to compete with ATSs but rather complement them. Talent would move from the pool into an ATS once a person has been matched with a role.

That said, he does feel there has been a lack of invention around new technology in the recruitment sector. “We have ATSs that reflect an HR process but the nature of good technology design these days is to have an experience that focuses on the user experience and then work backwards,” he said. “What some ATS providers are doing as they seek to develop their service and make it more social in orientation is to bolt on social features but they are not looking at it from the user’s experience.”

Initially, Padbury believed the system would “knock out” the recruitment company from the process but said since launch he has found Talentfizz could also be used by agencies to boost their talent pools and has already been in discussion with RPO companies. “I think recruitment companies have an appetite for engaging with candidates in a different way,” he said.

Talentfizz has just signed its first client, a global media company.

www.talentfizz.com