Recruiting 1 CFO or 10 accountants—ES Talent Management has it covered with Pinpoint

For ES Talent Management, speed is everything.

One way the team moves faster is by maintaining a talent pipeline of pre-screened, engaged candidates. Each candidate is tagged by location, salary, availability, and skills. So when a new project opens, it’s easy to quickly find relevant candidates and send bulk outreach to them.

ES Talent Management also rely on Pinpoint’s flexibility to save templates for common types of hiring workflows, but reconfigure them later. So when a new request comes in, they can start with the most relevant templates for hiring processes, interviews, scorecards, etc, but then work with the client to customize to their individual needs.

In spite of that need for speed, the team at ES Talent Management also takes candidate experience seriously. “We’re the guardians of our clients’ employer brands,” says Niamh.

So they use Pinpoint’s automations and templates to provide a better experience to candidates at scale. For example, the team automatically:

• Notifies talent pipeline candidates when a relevant role opens up
• Sends thank-you notes to candidates for their application
• Notifies candidates who don’t meet required qualifications for roles
• Sends interview reminders via email and SMS
• Sends interview kits and notes to hiring managers ahead of interviews

Niamh also tracks time-in-stage to ensure no one is left waiting for feedback, scheduling, or next steps. The result? Candidates regularly email to say it’s one of the best hiring experiences they’ve been through.

ES Talent Management often handles the pre-screening and first round of the hiring process. Which means it’s essential for hiring managers to trust that they’re treating candidates well and making good decisions about which candidates to put through to the later stages.

The visibility ES Talent Management can give to hiring managers through Pinpoint allows them to build that trust.

For example, for one CFO search, Niamh handled the usual first-round screening. Throughout the process, the CEO would log into Pinpoint to track candidate progress, interview notes, and scorecards.

The team uses Pinpoint’s access settings give hiring managers everything they need to know about their specific role, while hiding access to other roles. Between the candidate profile and Pinpoint’s reporting modules, ES Talent Management can show clients:

• How long candidates spend at each stage
• Where applications are coming from
• The diversity of candidates moving through the pipeline
• What communication has happened so far

Some clients that come to ES Talent Management don’t have much experience running a structured interview; they’ve always relied on informal conversations and gut instinct. Niamh is able to use the scorecards within Pinpoint to nudge hiring managers into having more consistent conversations and making more informed decisions.

When she’s speaking with a hiring manager who’s new to scorecards, here’s how she gets them on board:

• Help write the interview questions. Niamh asks the hiring manager what they’re looking for, such as management skills or budgeting experience, and helps them translate those into interview questions.
• Show how a consistent process makes comparing candidates easier. Niamh sometimes finds that hiring managers assume a candidate is strong in an area based on their CV—until they see the scorecard results. The structured questions encourage interviewers to drill in better to key criteria, so they get better information to compare candidates side-by-side.
• Let hiring managers know they can still have some flexibility. Pinpoint’s scorecards keep interviews consistent and fair, but also allow hiring teams to adapt when needed. For example, some hiring managers might decide that certain experience matters more and increase the weighting of that in the scorecards. Or interviews might want ask a few questions on the fly alongside the repeated questions they ask all candidates.

ES Talent Management started using Pinpoint in 2019, when they were a one-person team. Today, that team has grown to 6 permanent staff and 40+ contractors—and Pinpoint has kept up every step of the way.

One of the things Niamh loves most is the level of responsiveness and support. From the beginning, she’s used the chat support to ask detailed questions about functionality, so she can continuously automate, streamline, and optimize their process over time.

And when Niamh gets internal questions about Pinpoint, she often directs people to the chat support because she knows they can get a quick answer.

The other reason ES Talent Management has stayed with Pinpoint is the ease of use for every user, from candidates to recruiters to hiring managers. Niamh says she’s tried applying to their own roles to check the candidate experience, and has also been the hiring manager in roles as well. And in all situations, she was blown away by the ease of use.