Tempo Talent: Delivering the platform NZ's skilled workforce has been waiting for

Tom Trolove, Founder and Managing Director of Tempo Talent, came to Voyage with a problem he knew intimately. Trolove had managed temporary staffing throughout his career, most recently as a general manager in Marlborough's wine industry. In addition, his wife ran her own recruitment business, offering an unvetted view into the reality of recruitment in Aotearoa. In particular, Trolove had seen firsthand how difficult the hiring process was for short-term, skilled roles.

The options available to a business owner were limited and often arduous: post on TradeMe or Seek, wade through hundreds of CVs, or hand it off to a recruiter and pay for the promise of peace of mind. None of these options put the talent front and centre, and none made it easy to find the right person fast.

Meanwhile, New Zealand's economic landscape was leaving a growing number of highly skilled professionals without consistent work - people with decades of experience who simply didn't have a good place to be discovered. Platforms like Fiverr and Upwork exist, but they’re global, generalist, and increasingly funnelling work offshore. There was no Kiwi-focused platform built specifically for skilled office professionals. Enter, Tempo Talent.

Trolove needed more than a developer, he needed a strategic-minded partner. Voyage came in not to take a brief and execute it, but to work through the business logic alongside him. This included stress-testing the model, challenging assumptions, and figuring out what the product actually needed to be before anyone started building.

"The idea is never the end product. That first conversation is about understanding what you're actually trying to achieve, and that's what resonated." – Ryan O'Hara, Voyage Founder

The core insight that shaped the final website was the need to flip the script on traditional job boards. Instead of leading with each potential employee and allowing them to make the first move, Tempo Talent leads with the skill and expertise and puts the first move in the hands of the employer.

For example, if a business needs a CFO fast, they can visit Tempo Talent, quickly find a highly endorsed CFO available for work right now, reach out anonymously, and confirm availability and interest. It's a model that removes the noise for employers and gives skilled professionals a merit-first way to be found.

Rather than moving straight into full development, Voyage used AI-assisted prototyping to get a working prototype in front of Trolove quickly. The goal was to test assumptions, surface friction points, and validate that the platform actually did what it was supposed to do for both sides of the equation.

That process surfaced meaningful questions early: How many steps should the matching process have? At what point does an employer get access to contact details? How do you handle a professional who has multiple valuable skills? Should there be a job board component, or does that pull the platform back toward exactly what it's trying not to be?

Working through these questions collaboratively, with Voyage bringing product expertise and Trolove bringing real-world knowledge of the hiring problem, ensured that by the time full development began, the model was well-tested and the key decisions had already been made.

"With AI we managed to build the prototype and test our assumptions, and iterate through that quickly. It allowed us to challenge the thinking and go: does this actually do what we think it should do?" – Ryan O'Hara, Voyage Founder

The platform is live and the early feedback from employers has been consistently positive - this is something that New Zealand has needed for a long time, and the model makes intuitive sense to the people it's designed for. As Trolove works to bring in the critical mass of skilled professionals needed to gain momentum, Voyage is engaged in continued strategy and growth support.

What made the difference

• Voyage led with business strategy, not just development, helping shape the model before building anything
• AI-assisted prototyping compressed months of assumption-testing into weeks, with something real to react to from the start
• A clear, distinctive product concept: skill-first, not person-first, ensuring a genuine departure from every existing job board
• A New Zealand-specific focus that addresses a real gap left by global platforms pushing work offshore
• An ongoing partnership model, with Voyage continuing to support strategy and growth beyond the initial build