Recruiting software is built for companies. Recruiters are people.
Almost every hiring tool is made for the organization doing the hiring. The individual recruiter, the one who actually knows the people, gets almost nothing of their own. Tedge is what I'm building for them.
Hiring tools
The recruiter
I needed it myself.
Now and then I recruit developers, for freelance projects and for companies. It isn't a big part of my life. But each time, I had nowhere to keep the people I'd found: who they were, what they were good at, what we'd talked about, which project they'd fit. I wanted a talent hub of my own. And I saw the same problem, much worse, in everyone who recruits for a living.
One person, five places
- A message thread
- A spreadsheet
- An email
- A note
- A social profile
Three things recruiters don't have.
First, one place to organize, track, and manage all of their work.
Second, an agent in their workflow, something that can take the repetitive parts: searching, sorting, reminding, following up.
Third, data. A recruiter who is starting out, or looking beyond their own circle, has nobody to call. Tedge can connect to data providers that already hold huge numbers of professional profiles, and bring the right people in.
Built around the person, not the job.
Hiring software is organized around a job: a posting, the applications, a hire, and then the candidate disappears from the system. For a recruiter, that's backwards. The relationship is the asset. The developer you couldn't place this year may be the perfect fit next year, if you still know who they are.
Built around the job
A job
Built around the person
Profiles, pools, projects.
Every person gets a full profile, written from a recruiter's point of view: skills, experience, availability, the kind of work they want, and every conversation you've had. You group people into pools you can come back to, and some pools fill themselves from a rule, like five years of Python and available now. Each client or project has its own space, where you assign people and see where each one stands, from first contact to hired, or not this time.
Pool: fills itself
The relationship outlives the hire.
When someone isn't the right fit, they don't vanish. They stay in your pools, with everything you learned about them. The next time a project needs them, you already know who to call, and they already know you.
- Met on a freelance project
- Not the right time
- Back for a second project
- Hired
Recruiters are stronger together.
Recruiters can share pools with each other, and choose whether each person can view, edit, or assign. And someone with no data of their own yet can pay to use a large shared pool, so they don't have to start from nothing. That was part of the very first idea I wrote down.
Your own people
From the shared pool
- View
- Edit
- Assign
Starting out: mostly borrowed, and growing
A recruiter's network is their work. It should belong to them.
It started as TalentEdge. I shortened it to Tedge.
Shape the whole product, and the company around it, before anyone builds it.
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