What it does
One roster, six things, and the sixth can see the other five
Most of this list exists somewhere in most organisations. The difference is that here it is all attached to the speaker, so the question you ask in three years’ time has something to answer it.
Shortlist
Start from the roster instead of a blank page. Filter to a topic and you get the people who have spoken on it, with their score, their confidence level and how many times they have presented.
The candidates you are considering for a session stay together as a list, so the shortlist itself is a thing that exists rather than a conversation somebody has to remember having.
Invite
Record the invitation when you send it — who asked, when, for what session. This is the least interesting feature on the page and the one that saves the most embarrassment: it is how a second planner avoids approaching someone who has already declined, or asking a person to speak twice in the same programme.
Track submissions
Follow what comes back. Accepted, declined, awaiting materials, bio and headshot outstanding — visible as a state on the record rather than as the absence of a reply in one person’s inbox.
This is the part commercial speaker platforms do well, and it is genuinely the bulk of the work in the weeks before an event. It is here because a roster that cannot see the current cycle is a roster nobody opens.
Log correspondence
Notes and exchanges attach to the speaker. When the person who dealt with them last time has moved on, what they knew has not moved on with them.
Rate afterwards
Staff who were in the room record what they saw, on a fixed scale, against the appearance rather than against the person in general. Ratings accumulate across events, which is the entire premise: the fourth data point about somebody is worth more than the first.
- Attributed, deliberately. Whoever enters a rating does so under their own name, and the record says so. Anonymous ratings of named colleagues are a different and much worse product.
- Entered on a phone. Rating happens at a conference, not back at a desk a fortnight later, which is why every target you have to hit is a real, thumb-sized one.
- A scale, not stars. Rating entry is a labelled set of options — the value you picked is announced, readable and reachable by keyboard. A star widget is prettier and tells a screen-reader user nothing.
Search by topic
The question the product exists to answer: we need someone on this subject — who have we had, and were they any good?
You get the roster filtered to the topic, ranked, with the confidence in each ranking visible next to it. Which is the point at which the previous five steps stop being administration and start being an asset.
Scoring
Why a 4.9 can rank below a 4.6
Because one person said the 4.9 and seven people said the 4.6.
A plain average treats those as the same kind of fact, and they are not. Resource Hub IQ shows the raw average and a confidence-adjusted ranking score, side by side, with the reasoning available in place — never the adjusted number on its own.
That pairing is deliberate and it came out of getting it wrong first. An adjusted score shown alone reads as a judgement: it looks like the system marked someone down. Shown next to the raw average and a rating count, the same number reads as what it is — a statement about how much evidence there is, not about the speaker.
- Established
- Enough independent ratings across enough appearances to be worth acting on. Shown in green, and also in the word.
- Provisional
- A score exists but rests on very little. High or low, treat it as a starting point. Shown in amber, and also in the word.
- Unrated
- No ratings yet. Not a zero, not an empty cell, not the bottom of a sort — the word “Unrated”.
The bars and the colours are decoration. Every one of them repeats something that is already written next to it in text, so a screen-reader user and a colour-blind user get exactly what everyone else gets. That rule is not a preference; it is why the product can be held to WCAG 2.1 AA honestly.
Who rates, on what, and how scores are governed
This is the hard part, and it is not a technical question. Whether attendees rate or only staff do; whether scores are visible to everyone internally or to a programming committee; how an unfair rating gets challenged — those are policy decisions, they belong to your organisation, and they will shape this system more than any feature will.
We have opinions, formed by having built it. We would rather have that conversation before you buy anything than after.
Build or buy
When you should not use this
If what you actually need is full speaker-lifecycle management across a whole organisation — a public call for speakers at scale, abstract review committees, session scheduling, CE credit tracking — the established platforms are the honest answer, and we will say so.
Resource Hub IQ is narrow on purpose. It is for the organisation whose real problem is that nobody can remember, three years on, whether the speaker they are about to book was good. That problem is small enough to build exactly and specific enough that buying an event platform to solve it means paying for a great deal you did not want.
It is also worth checking what you already own before you talk to anyone, including us. If your association management system or your conference app is already collecting session evaluations, the raw material for a roster may exist inside software you are already paying for. Finding that out is the first move, and it changes the whole picture. Re-collecting data you already hold is the expensive mistake here.
Worth a conversation?
Tell us how speakers get chosen at your organisation today, and what goes wrong when they do. That is enough for us to tell you whether this fits.
Get in touch sales@resourcehubiq.com