Article is Growing at Hyperspeed Without Sacrificing Candidate Experience

Article sells midcentury modern furniture that ships directly to consumers—but culturally, they’re more akin to a tech startup than a furniture company. The company was founded by engineers, and when you browse their furniture using their sleek UI, it shows. 

Article’s employer brand ethos reflects the clean simplicity of its products. Their topmost goal is to keep the hiring process simple for candidates, hiring managers, and the TA team. “Simple is scalable,” Brad told us. The teams own and drive the hiring process, which works from the bottom up rather than the other way around, so “Particles” (the people at Article) are intimately involved in the hiring process.

Before Talent Gleam, Article used another applicant tracking system (ATS). It worked fine, but the team had outgrown its capabilities. “It was the wrong size tool for our needs,” Brad told us. 

Armed with a shortlist of about 20 options, they started to shop. With the team, Brad created a scorecard to compare the different features of each tool and determine which one they liked best. “At the end of the day, it was about our priorities, because no tool is perfect,” he said.

Of course, you wouldn’t be reading this if they’d decided on anything other than Talent Gleam as the perfect applicant tracking system for their startup. 

Article regularly hires delivery drivers and tech employees, both hyper-competitive asks in a candidate-driven market. So creating a seamless candidate experience was Article’s top priority, and Pinpoint outshone the competition. Also, Brad says, “We wanted to work with a tool that was ascending. There’s always some risk involved in working with another startup, but the reward was definitely there for that little bit of risk.” 

Some tools, by contrast, have been on the market long enough that their look and feel hasn’t changed much over time. We saw a lot of legacy and extra clicks in those tools. “They aren’t evolving quickly because they don’t need to,” Brad shared. “We wanted to partner with someone who would continue evolving and improving.”

Talent Gleam has since exceeded those expectations. All 20 Talent Acquisition professionals at Article use Talent Gleam “all day, every day,” and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. 

“The evolution of the tool has been really key in how we mature and how we make the process easier for everyone,” says Brad. His 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.

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been growing pains. Article was just diving into hypergrowth mode when they onboarded Talent Gleam, so they were changing both their system and building their processes at the same time. “There was a lot going on, to say the least,” Brad told us. That said, the team found Talent Gleam so intuitive to use that it wasn’t a big lift to get everybody trained and using the new platform. 

As another tech company dedicated to the idea of constant improvement, Article has been one of Talent Gleam’s most engaged partners. They’ve been active participants in several integrations, including job boards like Indeed Apply and Certn for background checks.

They’ve even inspired some new features. For instance, when Article decided to focus on inclusion as the first step to increasing diversity, they wanted to provide a way for candidates to specify their pronouns when applying. So they looped us in, and we made it happen—together.

“Talent Gleam 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.

Article’s approach to Talent Acquisition can be summarized as “candidate-first,” so their favorite features in Talent Gleam support that mission. 

Candidate experience surveys have been a helpful ongoing feedback tool, arming Article with data about what’s working and what isn’t. According to the surveys, says Brad, “The candidate experience is really strong. Talent Gleam is easy to use—we’ve heard that quite often. There’s no friction up front.” The team also enjoys the self-scheduling interviews, which make the whole process seamless for candidates and hiring managers alike. 

When we asked Brad to compare Talent Gleam to his previous ATS, he said, “We could do everything we needed to before; we just couldn’t do it as well. We do a lot of things a lot better now.”

One of those things is as simple as speedy communication between our team and Article’s. “I have been so surprised and impressed at the customer support,” he said.

Brad also shared his best buying advice for anyone currently searching for an ATS. “No ATS is going to tick every box, so prioritize what matters to you. For us, it was candidate experience and making the process as easy as possible.”