How Article strengthened its candidate experience through a period of hypergrowth

Brad and his team had to start from scratch with processes and systems, and top of the list was a new ATS. The team needed a more powerful ATS that could support them and scale with them.

Article was founded by four software engineers who are driven to find meaningful problems to solve; not what you’d expect for a direct-to-consumer furniture company.

As Article’s website proudly states:

“we have been reinventing the furniture industry one sofa at a time, it’s not easy — it requires solving challenging, meaningful problems. This is where you come in…”

Being a consumer brand, everyone who applies potentially could be a customer. As a result, Brad has stressed that candidate experience had to be a part of Article’s employer brand.

Armed with a shortlist of 20 ATS options, the TA Team created a scorecard to compare the different features of each tool. Pinpoint came out as the top applicant tracking system for their e-commerce and retail business:

“The candidate experience is really strong.”

During this hyperscaling, Article was aggressively hiring delivery drivers and tech employees. While very different types of hiring, both were hyper-competitive asks in a candidate-driven market. So, creating a simple application process to start and a seamless candidate experience was critical.

Pinpoint’s candidate experience surveys have been a helpful ongoing feedback tool, arming Article with data about what’s working and what isn’t.

According to these surveys, says Brad, “Pinpoint is easy to use—we’ve heard that quite often. There’s no friction up front.”

“Simple is scalable.”

While the TA team owns and drives the hiring processes at Article, “Particles” (the people at Article) are intimately involved in hiring. This runs from interviewers to the hiring managers who ultimately make the final decision. As a result, the ATS had to be easy to use.

Despite launching a new tool while moving into a phase of hypergrowth, the team found Pinpoint so intuitive to use that it wasn’t a big lift to get everybody trained and using the new platform.

The TA team particularly enjoy Pinpoint’s self-scheduling interviews, which make the whole process seamless for candidates and hiring managers and reduce the previous back-and-forth admin work of trying to schedule interviews.

“I have been so surprised and impressed at the customer support.”

Pinpoint’s speedy communication and responsive support really stood out for Article. All Pinpoint customers get unlimited access to support (from a real person) and get responses to inquiries in under two minutes.

“Myself, my team, or even hiring managers can go in, send a quick chat, and get an instant reply back. It’s just delightful, to be honest. That two-way communication has been great,” says Brad.

“We wanted to work with a tool that was ascending.”

Scalability wasn’t only about ease of rollout for Brad; he also wanted a tool that would scale and keep pace with the changes of a dynamic labor market and the company’s hiring needs.

In researching the market, he saw some long-established tools whose look and feel hadn’t changed much over time. Brad saw a lot of legacy and extra clicks in those tools. “They aren’t evolving quickly because they don’t need to,” says Brad. “We wanted to partner with someone who would continue evolving and improving.”

When Article started working with Pinpoint, that’s the partner it got.

Article’s desire to evolve has stayed strong and the company has turned out to be one of Pinpoint’s most engaged partners. It has been an active participant in several integrations, including job boards like Indeed Apply and Certn for background checks.

Brad and his team have even inspired some new features. For instance, when Article decided to focus on inclusion in the hiring process, it wanted to provide a way for candidates to specify their pronouns when applying. So the team looped Pinpoint in, and together, they made it happen.

“Pinpoint took that rough idea and made it go live incredibly quickly,” Brad said. Now, candidates have the opportunity to share that detail up front if they choose, so they feel welcome from their earliest interactions with Article.

The TA team loves seeing the number of new features that get released and the speed at which they go live. As early adopters, they try to weave new features into their workflow as soon as they see them. As Brad says,