Tapcart’s People-First Culture Starts With the Candidate Experience

When it comes to bridging the gap between customer obsession and job candidate success, Tapcart is putting its money where its mouth is.

The company’s leadership makes it a point to understand the continuity between the success of its people, the success of its customers, and the success of those outside looking in: job candidates. 

In an effort to make that connection explicit, former Head of Customer Success Bobby Cooper was recently promoted to the dual role of SVP of customer success and people success. “Both employees and customers deserve to have an amazing experience with Tapcart. They also deserve tangible outcomes. For customers, those outcomes are realized through their business growth, and for the employees, it is their career growth,” Cooper said. 

“We recognized that there was a correlation between making customers happy and making people at Tapcart happy; happy employees equals happy customers,” Senior Talent Partner Julia Frers-Karno said. 

And just as that commitment to customer success extends throughout the customer lifecycle, it also extends throughout the career of team members at Tapcart — from recruitment through retirement. 

Frers-Karno oversees Tapcart’s recruitment process. It’s a point where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, in terms of servicing people inside and outside the organization. As such, it’s a great place to emphasize the company’s commitments by highlighting the importance of Tapcart’s candidate experience.

“Cooper and I meet quite frequently to talk about how we can make our recruitment process better,” said Frers-Karno. “The only way we can scale effectively is if we have an effective and seamless recruitment process. It’s one of the best ways to keep our reputation as an employer of choice and a principled company.”

“Empathy Expressed in the Recruitment Process”

“When you think about interviewing in today’s climate, it can be the scariest thing in the world for a candidate,” Senior Account Executive Neal Goyal said. “We’re in an environment where software companies have laid off many people and the candidate pool is very large.”

Goyal has a front-row seat to Tapcart’s hiring process, serving as a panelist in interviews with candidates for the company’s sales, growth, product marketing and partnership teams. 

“When you ask yourself what the most important thing to the candidate is, it’s transparency and clarity. It’s seeing actual empathy expressed in the recruitment process itself,” Goyal said. “And Julia has really dialed in this amazing process that takes into account the really vulnerable position many candidates in today’s climate feel.”

“When you think of a candidate that’s interviewing and ask yourself what is the most important thing to them, it’s things like transparency and clarity.”

Tapcart’s recruiting and hiring process aims to be as straightforward as possible for both the company and its candidates. All candidates apply online, answering pre-screening questions. Those submissions are reviewed closely by Fres-Karno in partnership with each hiring manager, and the most qualified applicants advance to the next stages of the process. After candidates are selected, they take part in a three-part interview process.

The candidate first meets with Frers-Karno then with the hiring manager to whom they will be reporting. Finally, they move on to a virtual on-site with a final panel selected on grounds that will ensure a diversity of voices and concerns are expressed.  

It’s a process that privileges brevity and aims at returning feedback as quickly as possible — particularly as time may be of the essence for job seekers juggling a number of interviews and potential offers. 

“Making the best use of everyone’s time and being able to create a fair and consistent process across all roles and all candidates is important to us — as is creating an unbiased interview process,” Frers-Karno said.

“They Really Want to Bring You Through” 

Olivia Spearman worked in recruiting before applying to an enterprise business development representative role at Tapcart. She understood firsthand the potential pain points that could impede an interview process. What she found at Tapcart was a remarkably smooth and thoughtful process — along with future colleagues who wanted her to succeed.  

“The process was so much more organized due to the software and the communication lines that we have at Tapcart,” Spearman, who has since been promoted to Senior Business Development Representative, said. 

Spearman’s interview offered her first insights into Tapcart’s supportive people-first culture. “You could really tell that Neal wants to see people succeed, and I think Tapcart really wants to see people succeed. If you’ve made it to the final interview round for a role here, they really want to bring you through.”