Introduction
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Pinpoint is among the most sophisticated applicant tracking systems: it’s got a modern UI, extensive integrations, and a top-notch career site builder meant for in-house talent acquisition and HR teams at fast-growing companies.
Ratings
Ease of Use
Best For
Key Differentiator
Price
Free Trial
PROS
- Pinpoint is an agile ATS that is highly customizable and values collaborative hiring.
- It’s got a simple and transparent pricing structure.
- Pinpoint offers unlimited jobs and team members in all of its plans.
- Their customer service team is highly praised by users.
- The career site builder is very robust, allowing teams to attract and convert the right talent.
- There are over 100 HR software integrations to choose from, and Pinpoint’s team is adding 3-5 every month.
CONS
- The employee onboarding module does cost extra.
- It isn’t the best fit if you’re looking for the cheapest ATS.
- There isn’t a free trial or free version at this time.
Pinpoint was started with the goal of building a user-friendly applicant tracking system that created a strong candidate experience, as well as a robust system for recruiting teams to leverage when hiring.
The look and feel is in keeping with best in class software companies globally. So, it’s easy on the eyes. Where it stands out from the crowd is that this system was built with the user in mind - both candidates and recruiters/hiring managers/TA admin.
This manifests through one of the most powerful features: the ability for recruiting teams to build and manage beautiful career sites that are designed to attract and convert candidates. It’s easy to apply, and for those not ready they can opt into a talent community to stay in touch with your company.
In the recent past Pinpoint has also built out an employee onboarding module. The idea was to keep the positive experience going for hires as opposed to dumping them into an old school HRIS. This module is also build with simplicity, but everything you’d expect from a modern onboarding solution - from work buddies to I9s.
For recruiting teams, you can manage your multilingual career site and showcase employee testimonials, create custom user roles, manage talent pipelines, and manage the entire recruiting process with different workflows for different types of roles.
Pinpoint also stands out when it comes to power. Your team can build in automations (send candidates an email when they move to a new stage in hiring process), automate interview scheduling, or take a look at how your team is doing when it comes to equitable hiring practices.
Like all strengths, power can also be a weakness. If you’re a small company that only hires a few people per year, or has one HR person that does recruiting for 5% of their time, this system is too much for your team. You’ll be better off using an ATS that is only for posting jobs and collecting resumes.
As mentioned previously, this solution is also not for global Fortune 500 companies that need all the many bells and whistles you’ll find in a much more complex solution like WorkDay, or the ability to straight up customize your solution like you can by spending a few hundred thousand on Taleo consultants.
That said, it’s hard to encourage you enough to get a demo of this platform assuming you aren’t a Fortune 500, extremely small company, or looking for the cheapest solution around - this ATS is that good!
Pinpoint is for companies that hire a lot (at least 30/yr, the more the better), and put a focus on talent. Realistically, you get what you pay for in this solution, and so if you are optimizing around price, this isn’t the solution for you.
It’s also worth noting that companies who have bad existing systems sometimes struggle to utilize Pinpoint. If your recruiters/hiring managers/employees have been used to the brain damage of a legacy system, it will take time for them to trust and utilize the power of this ATS - don’t underestimate that.
Pinpoint is also not a good fit for companies that don’t hire much. It starts at $7,600/yr, so it is really hard to rationalize if you are hiring only a dozen or two per year. They do have smaller customers with less than 100 employees, but most of these companies are growing rapidly.
Lastly, if your team requires massive customization, this is not the ATS for you. A good way to tell if this is your company is to look at your budget. If you have >$100k/year allocated just to customizing the ATS, then stick to the legacy providers (well, actually you should re-evaluate why you need these specific customizations and if sticking with a sub par legacy ATS is worth it).
Pinpoint is closing in on 1,000 customers with current names like CoinShares, Pathways Global, and Grant Thornton.
- Career site builder: This is one of the best parts of Pinpoint. Your recruiting team now doesn’t have to rely on IT or marketing to change your career site. You can also add information about your ERGs, career paths, interview prep info, and anything else you want to showcase to candidates.
- Employee Onboarding: Pinpoint customers can use the system to onboarding new employees (as a note, this module is extra outside of the core ATS) - it covers the warm and fuzzy stuff like who your work mentor will be and what to expect culturally, as well as the typical employee paperwork, handbooks, etc.
- Job Board Distribution: You can easily distribute jobs to publishers like Google, LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.
- Automations: The point of an ATS is to automate in order to help your recruiters save time. Their automations allow you to simple setup if this then that type workflows to save you time (and sanity). For example, you may want to automatically send an email linking candidates to relevant employee profiles, and a scheduling link, when they are moved to a certain stage in the recruiting process.
- DEI: Equality reporting is a big part of their product strategy. You can take a look at how candidates of various demographics do in the process, and what touch points they have. You can also do blind recruiting so that gender/race doesn’t influence your colleagues.
- Candidate Feedback: This system also has a built in candidate survey to collect standardized (eNPS) and unstructured feedback on your candidate journey.
- Custom Report Builder: You can build your own custom reports based on any data available in Pinpoint. Maybe I want to build a report showing me the pipeline for Java engineers in Boston, or a report that shows me the time to hire for remote customer service agents. The world is your oyster. You can also schedule reports to be sent out whenever you want (maybe certain reports go off quarterly to c-suite before board meetings so they know what’s going on in TA).
Like most top ATS’s Pinpoint has invested in their integrations so that if you love your video interview platform, you don’t have to give it up to use their system.
They have integrations with:
- Assessment tools like Vervoe and Coderbyte
- HRIS’s like Bob and Bamboo
- Job boards like LinkedIn and talent.com
- Lots of other tools from background checks to SSO
They add 3-5 new integrations each month, many of which you can activate in minutes when you use Pinpoint.
In general, Pinpoint’s pricing is based on how large your company is. Their pricing starts at $600/mo (when billed annually).
For companies that want enterprise features (multi page career sites, multi lingual support, custom integrations, help on data migrations, etc) will start at $1,200/mo (also billed annually).
We think this pricing is fairly comparable with other truly best in class ATS’s. This product becomes valuable to companies when they start hiring more than a dozen people per year, otherwise you may be better off using simpler solutions.
We also appreciate they have a lot more transparency on pricing versus many other players in the space.
Pinpoint is a wonderful ATS for companies that value their candidate experience, and have the need for a tool that will help increase the productivity of their recruiting team through a better career site, talent CRM, and integrations with your favorite HR Tech.
The current record for go live at Pinpoint is 3 days. However, the average timeline is more like 4-12 weeks, depending on how complex your organization is (large enterprise customers are looking at 3-6 months). Companies that are more organized and execution oriented will see drastically lower implementation times.
Any size company gets a dedicated account manager to walk them through the entire implementation process.
Recently, they’ve added a self-serve onboarding process. There are 2 hours of explainer videos that help you navigate through each step of the process. This is great for companies that don’t want to wait to schedule time with their account rep and want to just get going.
Each customer gets a dedicated rep that looks after you throughout implementation. Afterwards, you have access to the customer success team. Most interactions start with chat where the average time to speak to a human (not a bot!) is 2 minutes.
Pinpoint was started by Tom Hacquoil. Tom was running a cloud computing company previously where M&A was a big part of their growth strategy. He realized very quickly that talent was the most essential aspect of growing this company. So, he started a bootcamp to train new employees.
Tom didn’t think any of the existing options met his bar for a quality candidate experience, so he built his own tool to manage applicants for the bootcamp. This was the first version of Pinpoint.,
From there, the product grew with recruiting and candidates in mind, while translating the best ideas from sales/marketing/product/customer service to recruiting.
Company HQ
Jersey, UK
Number of Employees
25
Year Founded
2017
Amount Raised
Pinpoint has very impressively bootstrapped their business. It is really hard to get a complex product like an ATS to this point without raising tons of venture capital money - but they’ve done it!
