Welcome to episode seven of Pinpoint's How-To Series, where we discuss how to cut the time from application to first meaningful contact
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Most candidates apply to several jobs at once. The number one reason people accept the offer they accept is simple: it was the first one. Not the best salary, not the most interesting role, not the strongest benefits package. The first.
That puts a hard constraint on the window you have to make contact. Wait until the end of the week to reach out, and you're often already too late. Great candidates expect to hear back within 24 to 48 hours. By then, somebody else is talking to them.
This article walks through the four-step workflow we covered in Episode 7 of the Pinpoint How-To Series: how to get your strongest applicants into a video interview within hours of applying, with minimal manual effort in between. We've also put together the One-Way Interview Playbook as a guide to the one-way video step, with question templates, timing frameworks, and role templates you can use straight away.
Download the One-Way Interview Playbook
Before anything else, you need to clear the volume. A Pinpoint automation that filters out candidates who don't meet your minimum criteria does this automatically, so you're not starting from a full inbox every time you check the job.
We went into this in detail in Episode 3 of the How-To Series. If you haven't set this up yet, start there. It covers how to build the automation rules, how to define your knockout criteria, and what to watch out for.
Once it's running, candidates who don't meet your non-negotiables are removed before you've looked at a single resume. In the session, that step took a pool of 300 applications down to 119 who met the baseline. That's a manageable number, but still too many to work through manually before deciding who to contact first.
Having 119 candidates who all clear your minimum bar doesn't tell you where to start. Go through each resume in sequence, and it's the end of the week before you've made first contact with anyone. By then, a lot of your strongest applicants have already heard from someone else.
AI Match Score solves this by ranking every candidate against the ideal criteria you define for the role, not just the minimum ones.
From the job in Pinpoint, click the AI Match Score option and hit "Continue setup." It asks you a short series of questions based on your job title and description:
Once you've answered, it generates a scoring framework where you can adjust the weighting. Move each criterion between must-have, should-have, and nice-to-have before the scores run. You set the standard and the score reflects your brief.
Every candidate in the stage gets a score from one to 10. In our demo, 119 candidates met the non-negotiables, but around 50 were scoring 8s and 9s. That's the list to work from.
You can drill into any individual candidate and see the reasoning: a verdict on their overall fit, their specific strengths against your criteria, any gaps worth exploring, and suggested focus areas for the live interview. When we looked at Jerry Smith (who scored nine in the demo), the breakdown explained exactly why, including what Pinpoint observed in his application and what was worth probing further in an interview.
The other thing worth knowing: the score runs the moment someone enters that stage. It doesn't wait for you to review the resume first. That matters when you're trying to move fast.
AI Match Score is an affordable, credit-based add-on. If you don't have it enabled yet, reach out to your CSM here and they'll get it turned on for you.
If you're not using stage actions in Pinpoint, you're adding hours of manual work to every hiring cycle unnecessarily.
A stage action is a trigger that fires automatically when a candidate moves to a specific stage in the hiring process. For a one-way video interview, that means the moment you move someone to your video interview stage, the invitation goes out immediately. Nobody has to press send.
Stage actions are available and included as part of your standard Pinpoint package. Go into your job and click "Edit stages." Find the stage you want, click the pencil icon, and scroll to "Add stage action." In our demo, we had a stage called "Video Interview" and set the action to send the Willo interview template the moment anyone moves there.
Once that's in place, you can select all your 8s and 9s, move them to the video interview stage in one action, and every one of them gets the invitation automatically. If you set this all up, candidates can receive that first touchpoint within minutes of applying.
Stage actions are available to everyone on Pinpoint, and they're not limited to video interviews. The same logic applies to sending emails, setting tasks, or triggering any other action when a candidate advances. If you're doing any of that manually right now, stage actions are where to start.
Once the stage action fires, each candidate gets a branded invitation to complete a short video interview on their own time. No scheduling required on your side, and no waiting on theirs.
The comparison is phone screens. If you have 50 candidates worth pursuing and you're booking 15-minute calls, that's over 12 hours of time before you've seen everyone. Most people who've done this know that within the first two or three minutes of a call, you already know whether it's worth the rest. It's not a good use of anyone's time, and in practice it means you cherry-pick who to call and never get to some of the people who might have been the best fit.
One-way video changes this. Candidates record on their own schedule. You review when it suits you. In Pinpoint, you can pull up a split view that shows the video and the resume side by side so you can cross-reference as you go. You can also see how long each answer took. If a question had a recommended answer time of two minutes and a candidate took six, that's worth paying attention to.
This isn't theoretical. When my own team was hiring last winter, one candidate made the shortlist through this process who would have been glossed over based on their resume alone. That person has been with the team for the better part of a year and is one of the best hires.
One-way video interviews is an affordable, credit-based add-on. If you don't have it enabled yet, reach out to your CSM here and they'll get it set-up for you.
The workflow above gets invitations out fast. Whether those invitations give you useful information depends on how the assessment is built. Matthew Best, Head of Revenue at Willo, joined Episode 7 to walk through this.
1. Keep it short. Three to five questions, with around 10 minutes of recorded answers in total. Every additional question reduces the completion rate. Get what you need and save the rest for the live interview.
2. One ask per question. A question that asks candidates to describe a situation, explain what they did, say where they learned it, and connect it to your company is actually four questions. Pick the one that matters most.
3. Short question, specific example. Two sentences maximum. End with something like "give us a specific example" and you get evidence instead of general claims about how good someone is under pressure.
4. Include at least one problem-solving or role-play question. These are where video interviews earn their place. You're not just reading what someone says they'd do. You're watching how they think through something unscripted. For a sales role, that might mean recording the opening minute of a cold call. For a support role, it might be walking through a customer situation where the resolution isn't straightforward.
The One-Way Interview Playbook covers everything specific to building your first one-way video assessment: the question guidelines, timing framework, pre-launch checklist, and five role templates ready to adapt.
Download the One-Way Interview Playbook
Paul is dedicated to helping our customers get the most out of Pinpoint. He leads our team of Customer Success Managers, making sure you always have the guidance, support, and insights you need to achieve your hiring goals.
