Pinpointing talent

Selling the job to attract the best

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) were one of the first pieces of technology to land on recruiters’ desks back in the 1990s. As advanced as they were at the time, many systems subsequently took a while to catch up with the changes that were taking place in the recruitment process brought about by the advent of social media and professional networks – and more recently, technologies such as artificial intelligence. Now a new generation of systems has emerged that aim to align themselves more closely with how recruiters work. One such product is Pinpoint.

Driving forces

Pinpoint CEO Tom Hacquoil is a former programmer who, when building and growing companies, found he was good at finding lots of people “much smarter than him”. He found himself sitting through meetings with recruitment and HR teams who were spending hundreds of thousands on recruitment agencies but still only getting “ok” candidates. He says he consistently sees global organisations struggle to attract top talent but being unable to identify what they need to do to fix this. He puts the problem down to: not getting the right roles in front of candidates in the right way; offering an outdated candidate experience; and having an “allergy” to change.

Selling not buying

Hacquoil believes recruitment is not about buying talent but rather selling opportunities to work at your organisation – this ethos underpins the Pinpoint platform. “This means you need to treat jobs like products,” he writes in his blog. “The better you sell them, the better the candidates you’ll get.” Hence Pinpoint has a number of built-in tools that help clients evolve and communicate their employer brand. This includes an employee value proposition template. Hacquoil asks: “Would you buy something from a company that talked more about what they wanted from you than what you were going to get from them?”

Holistic approach

Pinpoint takes a holistic approach to the recruitment process and packs a raft of features into one system, all of which are aligned to modern recruitment methods. Hacquoil stresses that every element of a candidate experience is part of the sales process and should be “quick and easy”. Features include candidate sourcing, branded career pages, automated social recruiting, intelligent filtering, candidate scorecards, blind recruitment intended to remove the bias and building talent pipelines alongside more expected functionality such as CRM, recruitment workflows and interview-scheduling.

Early adopters

Among the early users is Jersey-based healthcare start-up Care Connect, which aims to provide health practitioners to cover last-minute as well as planned staffing gaps. As a start-up, its main challenges were hiring enough people to cover requirements and getting enough clients to keep staff busy. It set a goal to make at least 10 hires in 10 weeks leading up to launch. Using Pinpoint, it doubled its target, filling 20 vacancies with an average cost-per- hire of £23.30. The company used the software to create targeted recruitment adverts in what Pinpoint claims can be just “a few clicks”. Across the 10 weeks, Care Connect engaged with 440 potential candidates through social media via the system.

Beyond the ATS

Pinpoint is part of a growing breed of software that is evolving to better serve recruiters in the future. Last year, Beamery launched what it claimed was the first “talent operating system” (TOS), which is custom-built for new recruiting work practices, while modern-thinking developers such as TribePad have continued to evolve their functionality to better align with the recruiter’s needs and aspirations. “Unless you have the budget for a vast in-house recruitment marketing and talent acquisition team, you need to be able to find a way to automate as much of the recruitment process as possible,” says Hacquoil. “But done in the right way, automation doesn’t mean losing the human element.” 


Next-gen applicant tracking

If buying a new or upgrading an ATS, it is important to check out the extent of its functionality in key areas such as talent pooling, candidate screening and filtering, data analytics/reporting and automated search. Also, can it be customised to suit the way your recruiters work? 

Image credit | Shutterstock

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