Founder Talks — Is a P2P rating system worth more than what resumes can tell us about a person?
By: Abhishek Thakur
Tags: Interview, Feedback, Entrepreneurship, Social Media

Founder Talks — Is a P2P rating system worth more than what resumes can tell us about a person? Abhishek Thakur Follow Sep 18, 2018 · 7 min read

Founder Talks is a new series where we talk to founders about their companies and the products they are building. This week we have Anamika Mahajan talking about TAP — Truth and Perception.

Tell our readers a little about yourself and your company.

Hi, I am Anamika Mahajan. A proud army daughter and army wife, mother of two beautiful children, a constant learner, experienced corporate life for almost 2 decades and now thought of trying something of my own.

So, here I am introducing TAP — Truth and Perception; the first product of TruthBeSpoken Technologies Ltd.

TAP — Truth and Perception, is a mobile app available on both iOS and Android. It is a network based reputation system that helps people rate other people they know, on Overall Personal / Overall Professional and 5 attributes in each category. It is an effective tool to give and receive feedback. You can also go to someone’s profile and see what others think of him/her based on the ratings received.

In the long run, we believe, it will help build social capital and bring down information asymmetry when people deal with each other, as this platform will provide a better idea about the person.

What prompted you to start TAP?

I was working on another idea where I had to interact with a lot of strangers in various fields. When interacting, people would make a lot of promises / claims, the veracity of which was very difficult to verify. I did have some bad experiences where people reneged on promises with no accountability.

I wondered if there were a platform where I could get to know more about a person, by seeing what others who had dealt with them, thought of them, it would help me take more informed decisions on whether to go ahead with dealing with these people.

Such a platform would also bring in more accountability when people dealt with each other, by rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad behaviour.

With this thought and vision in mind, I then started working on TAP.

Do you think a P2P rating system is worth more than what resumes can tell us about a person?

Resumes are anachronistic in today’s digital age. They severely lack in efficiency and efficacy. The future is about technology picking up behavioural traits from other places and enabling conversations between recruiters and employees.

This is where TAP comes in. A P2P rating system is more credible than a boss giving ‘his/her’ opinion in an annual appraisal. Real time feedback, through TAP, will help employees understand their strengths and weaknesses and they can very effectively exploit the former and work on the latter.

Recruiters will find it more useful to check what a large number of people think of potential hires, rather than depending on 2–3 reference checks.

TAP will democratise the appraisal process thus lowering the probability of statistical ‘Type 1’ errors while recruiting.

How can people signup and start getting rated?

TAP Truth and Perception is available on AppStore and PlayStore for FREE.

Download TAP on App Store/ Playstore:

https://tapismyapp.app.link/xneltS97BK or Search for ‘TAP Truth and Perception’ or you can go to our facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/tapismyapp/ ) and Click on the ‘Use App’ button to install directly.

The rest is actually quite simple. People can SIGN UP by ‘connecting with Facebook’ (just tap on the Facebook icon on the app) or using EMAIL.

Sign-up with Facebook is a better option, because it helps us create an ecosystem for you faster. If you connect with FB, TAP will immediately show you all your Fb friends who are on TAP, the moment you SIGN IN. And it’s completely safe.

If you sign up using EMAIL, you can always search for people you know, by using the search function in the app.

In any case, TAP will show your phone contacts if they are on TAP already [provided you have given access to contacts].

Once you sign in, you can start rating people who you know on the app. If you can’t find friends on the app, you can use the INVITE FRIENDS feature in the app, to invite your friends to TAP.

What incentive does somebody, have to create their profile on app?

The biggest incentive is to build your ‘Personal BRAND’. Often times people have a lot of good qualities but are unable to market themselves. So, if you make your profile on TAP and ask people to rate you, you will start building your reputation and reputation speaks for itself. For eg: In large companies, people can check out your profile to see what people think of you. Independent trainers, freelancers, etc can get rated by their clients and carry their feedback with them always.

It is also a very good tool to get continuous feedback from people you interact with. And also give feedback to others you deal with. Continuous feedback helps you course correct sooner (before it’s too late) in case people perceive you in a different light than you view yourself.

This is how your card will show on TAP. It gives a summary of your overall ratings and ratings against qualities and other features as you can see.

What advice will you give to people who are still unsure whether getting rated by friends / peers is a good thing? How do you ensure that the ratings are genuine?

We understand that people may have some reservations about getting feedback. My advice is that don’t be scared to get feedback. It can only help you. If you are scared of what if the feedback is not good — we understand. For that, we have provided you with the ability to keep your TapScore HIDDEN when you make your profile (you can always change it in SETTINGS later). If you keep your score hidden, people will be able to rate you, but they will not be able to see your TapScore. This way you will get feedback, but people won’t know what others think of you.

I would also like to add here that when one person says something about you, it is entirely their opinion; but when multiple opinions converge, they reflect your reputation. We should not get bothered or scared with 1 or 2 or maybe 10 ratings. We are talking about the ‘Law of Large Numbers’ here. We deal with so many people in our lives and when the number of ratings increases, a more credible picture starts to build.

There are two aspects to understanding whether ratings are genuine. The first would be that people may be wary of giving poor feedback because they may fear spoiling relations with the person and hence the app may just become a feel-good app where everyone rates each other good. To address this issue, Tap allows you to rate others ANONYMOUSLY. Should you choose to rate ANOYMOUSLY, the other person will just know that someone has rated them, but they won’t know who. This will ensure that people have the freedom to give HONEST feedback, good or bad.

In the second aspect, of people going on a positive or negative rating binge, we have introduced another feature called Ranking-As-A-Rater (RaaR). RaaR is a score given to each user based how they rate others. It is displayed on every user’s profile and is expressed as a percentile, hence higher the better. A person who rates a lot of people incorrectly will begin to show a low RaaR score.

To check credibility of any person’s TapScore, you can see the distribution of RaaR of the people who have rated this person. Higher the percentage of people in the top 2 quartiles, more credible is the score.

Follow TAP on Social channels.

https://www.facebook.com/tapismyapp/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/tapismyapp/

https://instagram.com/truthandperception