If you’ve visited the inploi site lately you’ll have noticed it looks a little different. Over the past ~12 months we’ve been working on some major updates, and have quietly started to release these to the world. They represent an exciting evolution of our approach to bringing job seekers and employers together, and the basis for our accelerating expansion from here. Now seems a good point to reflect on where we’ve come from, and to bring you up to speed with where we’re going.

We founded inploi in 2016 out of a shared frustration with the horrible experience of using the internet to find and apply for job opportunities. The system was broken: fraught with obstacles and inefficiency, rather than improving things technology frequently got in the way of people finding jobs and frustrated companies’ searches for the talent they needed to operate. Often it wasn’t online at all (it still isn’t), with ‘staff needed’ signs in storefront windows and printed CVs handed around the high street. This inefficiency pervaded the world of ‘talent attraction technology’, but disproportionately affected people in industries typically least prepared to absorb the cost of an extended job search. The majority of the world’s workforce makes a living in these sectors, and we decided to build a product that would improve things for them.

We’ve been working tirelessly on that problem ever since. And what fertile ground for improvement and innovation it turned out to be! Hiring is one of the most important parts of the life of any organisation, with thousands of talent attraction/ HR technologies, marketing tools, and related services developed to serve it. Far too many are no longer fit for purpose or have business models built on the exploitation of candidate data with little to no added value. For the benefit of all participants in the labour market, this needs to change.

Whilst we’ve been through a few iterations of inploi, for most of our lifetime we’ve been building a ‘marketplace’ - a platform that connects people looking for work on the one side, and companies looking to hire people on the other. We imagined a closed ecosystem, efficiently bringing supply and demand together and giving market participants the tools they needed to easily find, connect, and communicate with each other. We focussed on the UK hospitality sector to start with: a major employer, it has a pretty fluid labour force with people moving around a lot, and a lot of the technology its recruitment processes and marketing are built on suffer from the issues identified above. Good conditions for a disruptive marketplace business.

Building a marketplace is really, really hard. A quick Google search will return pages of content on the subject and we’ve written on it before so I’ll skip the recap, but tl;dr marketplaces are some of the toughest things to get right, especially in a competitive market without venture capital money slushing about. Nevertheless, we made a lot of progress and achieved enough traction to keep the fires burning. We developed some awesome tech, won awards, agreed powerful partnerships, onboarded some major companies and over 100,000 job seekers signed up to use our platform. All the while we were developing a much deeper understanding of the landscape we were working in, the tech our customers (and prospects) were using, and the way they thought about talent attraction. In constant communication with our candidate community, we were also learning from thousands of job seekers as we tried to smooth their way into employment. There were a lot of encouraging signals, with a number of metrics - both qualitative and quantitative - pointing in the right direction as we worked to transform the candidate journey.

2020 dawned with great excitement. We’d soon close a round of investment, we had a healthy sales pipeline, and our technology was better than ever. This was the year we’d go for scale! And then the Covid-19 pandemic arrived and those plans evaporated, alongside those of so many around the world. Nevertheless, we were fortunate to have some funds in the bank, to be working with a team who believed deeply in our mission, and to have the furlough scheme to help keep the lights on. We scaled back and tried to help where we could, making access to the platform free at a time when many industries already suffering a Brexit-induced contraction of the workforce needed extra help, and many were out of work. This was the era of the ‘essential worker’, where people realised that many previously labelled ‘low-skilled’ were crucial to the functioning of society, whilst so many feared for their health, and their jobs.

Once we’d activated crisis mode and had some hard conversations, stretched out our runway as far as possible, and reassured investors, it was time to take a step back and reconsider our strategy. Much of the hospitality sector was likely to be in the doldrums for as long as the pandemic persisted, and it looked like it would be with us for a while. What is more, it was being experienced in different ways around the world, with national responses ranging from indifference to draconian. We needed to be more nimble. It was time to adapt. We got to work developing inploi to service any industry, in any geography. This had been part of the plan/roadmap for some time - to be tackled once we’d won UK hospitality -  now we accelerated in this direction. Transforming the candidate journey remained our North Star, its light would just shine more widely. 

At the same time we were working closely with a couple of big employers to modernise the way they used digital channels for talent attraction. They hired thousands of people every year, but a rapidly changing labour market coupled with a poor user experience (outdated technology) and limited reach had created a perfect storm that meant they couldn’t get enough hires through the door. To make matters worse, limited tracking and analytics meant they were flying blindly into a tempest. We had already solved most of these problems ourselves, but the solutions had only been implemented in our closed system. What if we opened it up, applying our knowledge, experience and technology to solve these issues for big enterprises; augmenting/working with their existing systems to deliver candidate journey transformation? 

And so the next iteration of inploi was born: an enterprise software provider delivering candidate journey transformation as a service, as a stepping stone to (re)building the infrastructure of candidate-facing talent attraction globally. 

This breaks down into three key modules: Attract, Convert, and Analyse that seamlessly integrate with existing HR systems to help companies reach, engage, and convert the future of their workforce. 

Attract 

Way too many companies rely on legacy channels (job/classifieds boards, for the most part) to reach job seekers, in an outdated world of duration based credits, limited visibility of performance (“post and pray”, goes the mantra), and inflexible systems. 

Smart fishermen don’t look for salmon in the Thames. inploi’s Attract module is our answer to this problem, encompassing our job distribution engine, data-driven advertising tools, and recruitment marketing campaigns: helping companies to access new channels and increasing the diversity of their talent pools. With one connection an employer gains immediate exposure to multiple audiences and millions of potential job seekers. Perfect data markup, direct integrations, and powerful partnerships mean jobs get listed quickly, indexed properly, and reach relevant candidates.

Convert

Reaching and engaging relevant audiences to effectively attract job seekers is one thing; converting them into completed/successful applicants and hires is another. An astonishing number of companies have careers pages, job search functionality and application processes that are crushingly difficult to navigate, if they work at all, leading to major drop-off that decimates conversion rates.   

inploi Convert gives companies a completely bespoke careers hub, complete with employer branding space, powerful job search, and customisable conversational UI/’chatbot’ application flows, optimised for all devices. Convert syncs seamlessly with existing systems, keeping job content current and delivering candidate applications straight into an existing applicant tracking system (ATS), improving conversion rates, increasing return on advertising spend, and  filling more vacancies more quickly. 

Analyse 

You can’t optimise what you don’t measure, and most companies measure far too little about their talent attraction, spending budget blindly with diminishing returns. 

The Analyse module provides companies end-to-end candidate journey tracking with actionable data insights and aggregated analytics. They get full visibility of the impact of talent attraction efforts, return on investment, and channel success. This coupled with an understanding of how candidates move along the attraction journey - from first contact with a brand all the way through the application process and into an ATS - is transformational.  Easily accesible data on key metrics like conversion rates, cost per application, cost per hire, and others - all stratified by channel - is essential to developing a winning strategy. 

inploi’s three modules work independently of each other, each contributing in specific ways to developing a competitive hiring advantage. They are most powerful however when they come together to completely transform a companies candidate-facing talent attraction. As we scale this model and partner with more companies we are also scaling our impact, with thousands of people travelling through our technology and into work. 

If you’ve created an inploi profile in the past you can still access it and manage your preferences by logging in from the home page. For the moment however we’re pausing development on this part of the product, in favour of some really exciting updates that are yet to come. Finding and applying for a job (whilst having absolute control of your data) is going to get even easier. That’s all we’ll say for now!

What a journey we’re on, and what a privilege it is to be doing impactful work.  

If you’ve got this far - thanks for reading! Give us a shout if you’d like to chat about any of what we’re up to.

Matt, Alex, and all the team @inploi

March 2022