About
Tropicâs AI-powered Intelligent Spend Management platform gives you the visibility, control, and leverage you need to simplify procurement and stop overspending.
Growth Opportunity
- Deliver employer brand content at exactly the right time to keep candidates engaged, and Tropic top-of-mind
- Give talent self-serve, just-in-time information about every stage of the interview process
- Collect candidate feedback on a stage-by-stage basis for a more granular view of the candidate experience and how to optimize it


Outcomes With candidate.fyi
- 4.69/5.00 candidate experience rating
- Cut 15 minutes off of every interview
- 10% increase in offer-accept rates
- Candidates access the portal on average 20x throughout the interview process
- 61% candidate experience survey completion rate (industry standard is 20%)

âcandidate.fyi has created undeniable customer value in a challenging market, and seeing customers buy this product despite intense budget cuts is a testament to the power of a positive candidate experience. The candidate will own the future, and this is a massive opportunity. If you work in talent, you're insane not to use this product.â
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 costsâsaving Tropicâs customers an average of 21% on software purchases.
But the team is dedicated to more than building great software. The companyâs Head of Talent, James Parker, is âbullish on delivering an excellent experience to every candidate that interviews with us,â says Dave Campbell, Tropicâs CEO. James had been manually undertaking what he calls âemployer branding content deliveryâ for as long as heâd been in talent acquisition. âNo company had tackled the automated engagement space until candidate.fyi,â he explains. âSuddenly 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.â
âWe're a tech-enabled, forward-thinking, innovative company, and one of our core values is pull-back-the-curtain transparency. What better way to exemplify this than for our recruiting experience to be an extension of our culture? If we say we're innovative and transparent, our hiring process needs to be innovative and deliver transparency. candidate.fyi confirms our commitment to our core values. And from a hiring perspective, thatâs priceless.â
James Parker, Head of Talent @ Tropic
James describes his initial conversations with candidate.fyi as âexcitingâeven the earliest iterations of the product sounded incredible. I advised Chris and Kyle [candidate.fyiâs co-founders] on which features would be game-changers, and which would be nice-to-haves in the future.
Three weeks later, they reached out to say theyâd put something together. Did I want to play around in the platform? I was shocked by the speed at which the team was working. And of course I jumped in.â
Driving Candidate Engagement With Centralized Employer Branding Content
Tropicâs talent team understands how critical it is that candidates can articulate what the company does if theyâre going to be enthusiastic enough to accept an offer. James describes this as âa kind of self-fulfulling prophecy. If, by the time the candidate gets to the final interview, they know enough that theyâve become an evangelist for the platform, theyâll sell themselves on the role. And we can equip them to do just that with employer branding contentâdelivered at the right time to keep talent engaged, and to keep us top-of-mind between touchpoints.â
When a role goes live in Tropicâs ATS, it gets pushed to candidate.fyi automatically, at which point the candidate portal goes live. The portal automates content delivery, âempowering talent leaders like myself to createâand updateâa content archive in real-time, rather than waiting on a busy developer to refresh something on the careers page,â 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 âstaleâ and onerous to change. At previous companies, James used âtemplatized 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 didnât know when to send each email. It also left too much space between touchpoints, giving talent time to become interested in another role elsewhere.â
Weâve 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. âThe way I quantify ROI is: how many people are logging in?â he explains. âIf there are over a thousand sessions happening every monthâand there areâthereâs clearly something of interest here. Just seven months into our partnership with candidate.fyi, weâve 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. Thatâs taking our brand to the next level.â

Increasing Recruiter Efficiency and Shortening Hiring Team Interviews with Just-in-time Information
James describes candidate.fyiâs platform as having âtwo functions: servicing the candidates, and serving the talent acquisition team.â Both functions result from the information candidates have access to concerning each stage of the interview processâwho theyâll be meeting with, what date and time, and how to prepare. James admits that initially he saw the advantages for talent, but couldnât foresee how the platform would benefit his team. But âin hindsight,â he says, âI see the impact of that readily-available information on the team. Thereâs a lot less manual back-and-forth because a candidate forgot what time their interview is at, or what time zone itâs 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. Itâs improved the candidate experience exponentially, and saved our recruiters a ton of time.â
Matt Papa, Talent Partner, echoes Jamesâ sentimentsâadding that the portal has allowed for more animated and engaging conversations with candidates. âI 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.â
Weâve shortened our interviews from 45 to 30 minutes. Managers are doing their jobs more because theyâre interviewing less.
Tropicâs talent team has been able to shorten its recruiter and hiring manager screens âfrom 45 minutes to 30 minutes,â James says. âThat means managers are doing their jobs more because theyâre 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, thatâs 15,000 minutes that translate directly into dollars.â James says thatâs where candidate.fyiâs value is most easily quantifiedââbecause weâre delivering answers to questions in a more efficient format than each team member explaining it to every candidate. It also respects talentâs time. They have perpetual access. Why not jump into the platform when youâre free and see for yourself?â
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Optimizing the Hiring Process On the Fly With Real-time Candidate Feedback
Prior to candidate.fyi, Tropicâs talent team collected candidate feedback through their ATS. But there were a handful of problems with that method, James explains. âWhen candidate sentiment isnât collected until the process is over, that invites recency bias: Candidates who are extended offers are much more likely to give positive reviews, which doesnât support overall process improvement. It also fails to tell you which stages of the candidate experience need the most tending to. The ATS questions werenât great,â James remembers. âWe had response rates between 10 and 20%âif we were lucky.â
With candidate.fyiâs Pulse Checks, Tropic collects candidate sentiment on a stage-by-stage basisââsomething no tool I know does,â James says. 60% of Tropicâs candidates have given the team feedback so far. âThat sounds outrageous,â he admits, âbut itâs true. And the ability to deep-dive into every stage means I can deliver more precise feedback and truly hone in on my hiring managersâ growth areas. Maybe four candidates have mentioned that a certain manager showed up late to their interview. Thatâs hard data I have to tailor a coaching journey.â Conversely, James uses candidate feedback for positive reinforcement. âThis happened just yesterday,â he says. âA 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 âKeep it up!â When other interviewers see that, theyâre motivated to do the same. So weâre literally optimizing the hiring process on the flyâfinding areas for both opportunity and celebration.â
Weâve gotten only rave reviews from the platform's primary userâour candidates. It doesn't get any more validating than that.
â Dave Campbell, CEO @ Tropic
Tropicâs team measures candidate experience and reports out anecdotally about the positive interactions candidates have had with the company. âI care a lot about delivering a premium interview experience,â Dave says. âIn fact, I obsess over this kind of data.â Thatâs why Tropicâs CEO is not only a candidate.fyi customer, but has become an advisor and an investor. âWhen the team asked if I would advise,â he recalls, âit was a no-brainer. Because weâve only gotten rave reviews from the platformâs primary userâour candidates. It doesnât get more validating than that.â
âOur candidates do continually rave about the platform,â James adds. âFor the first time ever, they have a central hub with everything they need. Itâs 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.â James says that candidates constantly ask how Tropic built such a great portal. âPeople assume we built it in-house; they want to hear how we did it. And I have to tell them, âActually, itâs a pretty turnkey solution; it took almost no work on our part to implement, and itâs taken very little to maintain.â 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, itâs very easy to duplicate and replicate and customize and change.â
Looking to the future: Tropicâs partnership with candidate.fyi
James says heâs been continually impressed with the teamâs speed time each time he makes a feature request. âWe 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 rolesâand we get to maintain brand consistency.â
âcandiate.fyi has taken my capacity as a recruiter to a whole new level,â Matt chimes in. âThe 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.â James adds that the candidate portal is eventually âgoing to become table stakes. The more candidates have a taste of this experience, the more theyâll be asking other companies, âHey, whatâs the login to your platform?â Candidates are demanding incredible experiences, and if a company canât deliver, theyâll be considered irrelevant. The team at candidate.fyi has created an incredible experience, and Iâm so excited to see whatâs to come in this partnership.â