TribePad Applicant Tracking System Reviews

We used this solution for in-house recruitment for an engineering heavy lifting company. We posted vacancies and then did the applicant tracking. I'm an HR data and systems specialist and we were customers of TribePad. 

The solution enabled us to recruit for a global company in 40 different countries. The system was so straightforward, we didn't really need translations or anything like that. We were able to post jobs in different languages and my colleagues were able to understand the platform, without the need for a lot of complicated translation. It brought together recruitment across all these 40 or so companies, into one central place, enabling us to many things that had previously been impossible such as standardise our approach, reduce the administrative burden of candidate selection, monitor recruitment trends. 

The simplicity of use was absolutely incredible. Our users are primarily HR managers or advisors, i.e. generalists who don't specialize in recruitment. The Tribepad ATS is really intuitive and straightforward to use, because it helps the user to visualise the recruitment workflow and see at a glance how many jobs are open, how many candidates need attention, where candidates are in the pipeline, results of screening questionnaires for each candidate and many other things. The flexibility to restrict some user types from creating jobs or email templates from scratch (i.e. forcing them to select from a pre-defined library) was also invauable when it came to improving our employment brand.

I was a little frustrated with the screening questionnaire set up. I felt that it could be better  structured - we had thousands of questions, and this could make it difficult to find the right ones. It was very easy add a new question, but there was no way to organise or categorise the questions into groups by subject, level, country etc - so trying to monitor and maintain questions and questionnaires was a little bit tricky. At the time I also felt that the support materials could have been improved - Neither I nor the users that made up the global recruitment team had been there at the initial roll out, and so training and reference materials were invaluable. I would often create simple 'how to' videos but it would have been nice to have some more of the basics covered in the Tribepad material. Also some of the material was a little bit dated by the time I came to use it. 

We used Tribepad from 2013 - 2020.

We never had problems with stability. Tribepad send notifications via email and also in the platform itself about when there will be some downtime, and I don't recall a time when it was ever down, that I didn't know about in advance. The solution didn't really require maintenance. We just kept in regular contact with Tribepad, and they'd keep us informed of the latest add-ons and developments, and we could decide if we wanted to deploy them or not. The package we worked with didn't need a lot of maintenance at all.

Tribepad seems very scalable - it worked really well pre-acquisition for an international organisation of 2000 people, and would have continued to work well post-acquisition for the larger organization that we're now part of. It does seem to be well suited for in-house recruitment. We had five different user levels starting with super user, then below that we had two different levels of recruitment champion. This allowed us to control what the users could do and see in the system; for example whether they could create their own templates versus being restricted to pre-set ones, or seeing all vacancies/candidates worldwide versus only seeing the ones related to their own business unit. We then had two levels of hiring managers, again with differing access levels commensurate with their seniority and level of expertise with recruitment systems.

Tribepad seem reasonably fast to respond to tickets raised, of course some issues take longer than others but if there's a delay then you tend to get regular updates. The support team was originally just one person with whom we had quite a good relationship, but it has grown over the years

TribePad was the previous system we used. We were bought out by a company that already had a recruitment system, OTYS, which in my opinion is not as good as Tribepad, or at least not for our use case. OTYS appears to be designed for specialist recruiters working for a lot of external clients, and it's really customizable. Almost everything needs to be configured and set up manually before OTYS is fully ready to go live, whereas Tribepad is much more of a 'plug-and-play' type of offering in that it's virtually ready to go, out of the box. In summary, we switched due reasons beyond the control of our business' recruitment community, and personally I would have much preferred to stick with Tribepad.

Although I wasn't involved from day one, the initial setup was relatively straightforward. That's the beauty of Tribepad, it's almost off the shelf. There were the usual branding requirements, plus creation of some templates and questionnaires, but the basic workflow is pre-set. Most of this was done by a single person from our side.

We regularly tried to demonstrate the ROI, but in practice this proved very difficult - being a project-led business we found that people who didin't want to do recruitment themselves had an easy way bury the cost of using external recruitment agencies, so it was difficult to fully quantify the costs of agency recruitment. I think we worked out that the average cost of recruitment through an external agency was in the region of £4,000- £5,000, but with Tribepad we were able to show that recruitment could be done for around a quarter of that figure. On average, we processed around 150 vacancies per annum through the system so it more than paid for itself each year.

One reason we originally signed up to Tribepad was they were very competitively priced and it was a one-off set up fee followed by a rolling monthly contract with support included. Originally, it was month on month, with no annual commitment. That has changed lately, and Tribepad were keen to get us to sign up to a three year contract the last time we spoke to them. Pricing has increased over the years, but it's still very reasonable compared to some of the larger recruitment systems.

Bearing in mind my job role, a key focus for me is data quality and efficient transfer between interdependent systems. With this in mind, one thing we could have done better would have been to match up the taxonomy we used in Tribepad with other systems - namely our ERP system at the time, IFS. Having both sytems speaking the same language from the outset would have made monitoring and reporting much easier in the long run. 

I also found it helpful to have regular calls with our account manager, to get a personalised understanding of all the functionality that's available in each new release. Newsletters and marketing emails are great, but until you discuss your needs and compare them with the new system capabilities, you don't appreciate the full potential of the system. Even by the end of our relationship with Tribepad there were some options that we hadn't had chance to explore, that could have made our user experience even better. Things like video interviewing and onboarding were on our agenda and the Tribepad ATS appeared to be very capable, but sadly we never got to roll those out.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.