Tribepad is a founding member of the Association of RecTech Providers (ARTP), a new industry body working to shape the future of recruitment technology. At a time when hiring decisions carry greater responsibility and scrutiny than ever, ARTP aims to set clearer standards, influence policy, and create trusted markets for recruitment tech solutions.
Recruitment is changing fast – not just in the tools we use but in what’s expected of hiring itself. Decisions carry more scrutiny, more responsibility, and greater consequences than ever before.
In that context, progress needs shared direction, collective responsibility, and a clearer sense of what ‘good’ actually looks like.
That’s why Tribepad is a founding member of the Association of RecTech Providers (ARTP): an industry-wide effort to shape the future of recruitment technology, influence policy, and help create a market that rewards quality, fairness and trust.
It’s a vehicle for collective action across the recruitment tech sector, to the benefit of organisations, jobseekers, and hiring teams alike.
Anyone involved with recruitment knows how challenging the industry is at the moment. The experience for job seekers can be demoralising, and the outcomes for employers can be expensive. The ARTP is a fantastic initiative which will help standardise and improve the recruitment process for all. Tribepad is proud to be a founding member.
An expanding universe of overhyped vendor claims
The sheer volume of recruitment tech tools competing for attention now is near-impossible to navigate.
If you’ve been researching HR software recently, you’ll have felt it. Hundreds of vendors, all making “astonishingly vague and non-specific” claims with “outsized hype”, as one commentator recently slated vendors at last year’s HR Tech Expo.
Talent Tech Labs reports that by its eighth TA Ecosystem more than 2,000 vendors reached out to be included, for example, with 370+ highlighted. And by Ecosystem 10, 550+ companies were included after vetting thousands.
Talent acquisition leaders are bombarded with new tech solutions doing every imaginable thing, yet often lack clarity on which providers are credible, ethical, and valuable.
And the cost of making a wrong call is rising, as software increasingly touches the most sensitive parts of hiring. Recruitment tech used to be mostly about workflow efficiency but today it increasingly influences who’s surfaced, filtered, assessed, prioritised and ultimately hired.
So now we’re not only talking about recruiters’ workload but about people’s lives and livelihoods.
That’s one major problem ARTP is designed to solve. ARTP is an industry body uniting UK hiring tech providers “to engage with government policy and set industry standards”, and to “pioneer the benchmarks and assurances… including the UK’s first accreditation for RecTech providers.”
Tribepad couldn’t be prouder to be a founding member, to continue our mission to inspire and empower collective action that makes recruitment fairer, faster, and better for everyone.
Addressing the paradox of choice
More is less, is the subtitle of psychologist Barry Schwartz’s 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice. That’s exactly the issue with today’s recruitment tech landscape.
More choice means, theoretically, more freedom and autonomy to solve problems in better ways. But the huge array of solutions is now itself the problem.
Talent acquisition leaders are under more pressure than ever, facing a hiring landscape that keeps getting tougher with shrinking budgets and change accelerating beyond anything we’ve seen before.
In theory, the proliferation of recruitment software tools and technologies are designed to address that issue. But this noisy, hype-driven market has become another burden leaders must carry, exacerbating the issue it’s designed to solve.
And the impact shows up in many ways:
- Decision paralysis. Teams hesitate longer, run more demos, and ask for more opinions. Not because you’re indecisive but because the market makes it hard to feel sure. Momentum is lost before implementation starts and problems gain a stranglehold.
- Lower quality decisions. In a noisy market, decisions are more likely to be driven by time constraints, internal politics, brand familiarity, personal preferences and surface-level differentiation rather than deep confidence in a tool’s long-term impact. “Good enough” and “we like them” replaces “right”, because the market lacks strong, shared reference points.
- Harder stakeholder conversations. Boards and exec teams need to know not just what do you want to buy? but why do you trust it? In a market full of vague claims and inconsistent evidence, articulating a clear, defensible rationale becomes harder than it should be. And getting budget gets harder with it.
- Higher personal exposure for decision-makers. Without shared standards, decisions are inherently subjective – and so personally owned. If a tool underdelivers or creates unintended consequences, it’s more likely a hill you’ll die on.
- Caution creeping into leadership behaviour. When trust is difficult to establish, leaders naturally become more conservative. Promising innovation gets parked. Transformational ideas get watered down. Leaders default to incremental upgrades or “safe” renewals, even when they know something more transformative is needed.
- The compounding costs of getting it wrong. The consequences to poor tech decision-making stack fast. Hiring decisions suffer. Bias is reinforced. Regulatory scrutiny becomes harder to navigate. Employer brand and candidate trust erode. Recruitment delivery falters. And because these effects are more like wading into the sea than jumping off a cliff edge, they’re often difficult, expensive, and disruptive to unwind.
ARTP aims to address this challenge directly by helping leaders can make better choices, faster, with more confidence. And fewer sleepless nights. Beyond standards: a new bar for recruitment transformation
ARTP isn’t just a standards body: it’s a catalyst for market change.
Hiring today is more complex, more scrutinised and more pressured than it’s ever been. Talent is harder to find. Candidate expectations are higher. Regulation and scrutiny are increasing. Budgets are tighter.
Against that backdrop, the recruitment technology market has expanded rapidly. Innovation is moving fast, with new tools promising to solve real, urgent problems – but it’s hard for teams to see the wood for the trees.
ARTP’s ambition is to make that environment easier to navigate, to support innovation that genuinely translates into better outcomes.
It does that through:
- RecTech standards to unlock innovation
ARTP’s Standards Committee is developing RecTech standards to set clearer expectations of what good, responsible practice looks like. These will enable organisations to assess providers more confidently, while encouraging the market to compete on quality, fairness and transparency – not just speed and hype.
These standards will be launched in Parliament later this year, signalling serious engagement with the policy environment.
- A forward-looking blueprint for better hiring
Beyond standards, ARTP is looking ahead to what recruitment could look like if innovation were guided more deliberately. That includes exploring how market mechanisms can shape candidate behaviour, how hiring could be digitised end to end, and how emerging ideas like digital wallets could enable faster, safer, and more consistent applications.
- Employer-led momentum
ARTP is building this vision collaboratively with its growing membership, developing practical resources to guide recruitment transformation. In November 2025, it shared early thinking with more than 100 employers, marking an important step towards a shared, practical framework for fairer, faster, better recruitment that benefits everyone.
For Tribepad, becoming a founding member of ARTP reflects our long-standing commitment to fairer, more transparent and more effective hiring. It’s a statement of intent – that we’re invested in working collaboratively to define what good looks like; not just shipping features faster.
As recruitment – and recruitment technology – continues to evolve, this industry collaboration is essential to ensure innovation serves everyone and doesn’t create more problems than it solves.
Because we know we all want the same things: fairer, faster recruitment that works better for everyone.
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, assessment, video screening, compliance, onboarding, analytics and a fully-integrated AI assistant, our B-Corp certified talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.
B-Corp certified and multiple-award-winning (like Best ATS for Enterprises and Tech Company of the Year), Tribepad is trusted by organisations like Hotel Chocolat, cardfactory, Greggs, Tesco, Subway, DFS, Met Office, and Home Bargains.
