Putting personalities forward
Setting Out To Reinvent How Businesses Hire
Building a friendly hiring platform that goes beyond a resumé.
During my entire school life, I’d like to think that I was pretty good at finding ways to pre-occupy myself with just about anything that wasn’t school. In 2014, it was learning how to design for apps and websites, and a year later it was joining Intercom as a design intern. Yes, at age 15 — the design team at Intercom took me under their metaphorical wing and provided me with a once in a lifetime chance that every young designer dreams of. I continued to return to Intercom at every chance I got over the space of two years like a character in a sit-com that sporadically bursts through doors and inserts themselves in whatever is happening in the plotline. I was well and truly hooked and knew that product design was what I wanted to do.
In my final year of school, I told myself I’d buckle down, put design aside for the year and actually try my hand at this whole school thing everyone had told me I should be doing my entire life. Fast forward to a month or two later and I was quickly scrambling to find a way to spend time doing something even remotely creatively fulfilling other than seeing how many variations of colored highlighter I could fit on to a single page of study notes.
This is when I decided I wanted to at least apply to go to art college so I could spend my time doing a portfolio rather than studying. I don’t think I ever had any real intention of ever going but I felt that getting in was a box that needed to be ticked. I used the convenient excuse of building my portfolio to work on passion projects and the occasional client project while I was supposed to be in class or studying.
Because I felt I didn’t really need to be in every class — I spent a lot of time hanging out in a little cafe called Network. I spent hours every day sitting down the back, working on my portfolio and consuming enough caffeine to take down a small horse. Between work, I spent a lot of time chatting to the staff and the loyal band of regulars who felt the same charm about the place that I did. Throughout my many, many stays at the cafe I got to know the owner, Oliver Cruise.
Oliver is the reason Network is successful and has an impossibly loyal customer base. Not because he’s a shrewd businessman intent on squeezing every last drop of profit from an espresso shot — but because of his personality. When he was behind the bar (which was a lot, by the way, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day) he’d make time to have a conversation with just about every customer that placed an order. His staff followed suit, they were the reason people, including myself, kept coming back day in and day out.
The issue with personality-driven businesses like this is when the person who’s driving that atmosphere steps away. You can easily hire highly skilled baristas to consistently push out great coffee every day, but it’s a multitude harder to hire staff with great personalities who keep customers smilIng.
Oliver came to me with this exact problem and alongside fellow regular customer Phil Martin — they were going to set about solving it. They planned on building a product that businesses like Network could use to cut through the endless stacks of generic resumés and easily find staff with great personalities who were going to be a great fit for the team without going through hours of interviews one by one. They, somehow unphased by my age, invited me to join them to head up the product and design, instantly captured by just how big this problem was it wouldn’t have taken much for me to jump on to it.
Some of you may be drawing comparisons to Intercom’s own origin story which also began due to the personality and customer service by a Dublin café owner.
We began exploring their recruiting woes a bit deeper and started work building something that would fix them, Pineapple was born.
Turns out the service industry is served quite poorly when it comes to hiring (sorry).
Building software to solve the pain points of filtering applications and tracking candidates in a pipeline is nothing new. Tech companies and big-budget corporations have had this kind of software at their disposal for years.
The problem is that a lot of these products only focus on the problems surfaced when hiring within complex eco-systems with multiple rounds of interviews and stages in the pipeline. These complex hiring processes usually have one person, if not a team of people who’s full-time job is to manage it efficiently.
What about the busy cafe manager, like Oliver, who has to work a shift multiple days a week while also having to handle hiring? Or the franchisee who has stacks of admin work to get through and a mounting pile of resumés on their desk in the back office?
Enter Pineapple.
Pineapple is geared for busy places hiring friendly faces.
We started with the belief that the standard format of a resumé was broken (at least for customer-facing jobs). Resumés are time-consuming for candidates to create and for businesses to read. On top of this, candidates tend to use an imaginary business lingo that nobody would ever use in a real-world conversation. This combination of things often results in a document that makes it impossible to extract any sort of assumptions as to what that person is actually like without meeting them.
When we were in the early phases of developing Pineapple we wanted to find a format that could condense the information conveyed on a resumé into a format that was less taxing to read and above all puts a person’s personality front and center.
The obvious answer was video, but video resumés had been done before and we felt that a long rambling 2-minute video of someone talking directly to a camera trying to sum up their life’s achievements to date came off scripted and was an uncomfortable end-user experience.
The wider vision of what we wanted Pineapple to be was a platform that felt friendlier and more accessible than the old school job searching mega giants that dominated the space.
What if instead of a resumé or one long selfie video we could just have candidates create an Instagramesque story? I see stories as potentially having a lot of applications outside of updating your followers as to your latest taco experience (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They’re a visual format ideal for conveying short pieces of information. I see stories as the Gen-Z version of a powerpoint presentation. Being able to use short and snappy photo and video clips annotated with text means that you can convey information in a fun and visual format that still has a clear narrative structure. That meant for us that candidates could condense the information they’d normally put into a word document and print out to hand around to businesses into one interactive medium. This medium is not only much easier and more enjoyable for candidates to create but because it is so familiar it comes off much more candid and expressive.
Here’s how a candidate’s story looks on Pineapple:
We’ve seen that stories typically allow businesses to dedicate more attention to candidates than traditional application routes. Tapping through 100 15-second stories is a lot quicker than reading 100 2-page resumés. Pineapple really shines with businesses who receive a high volume of applications and are hiring for a person’s qualities rather than purely their hard skills.
We’ve designed the story format in a way that gives candidates cues as to what to include in their story without being prescriptive. Given that the majority of Pineapple’s target candidates are already acutely familiar with how a story model works we didn’t need to educate them on the fundamentals but rather communicate the key differences of what the content should be in the context of applying for jobs.
Pineapple stories are broken down into “Chapters” similar to how a resumé would have different sections focused on different relevant areas. All Pineapple stories start with an “Introduction” and an “Experience” Chapter, after that it’s up to the candidate what else they want to add.
Giving stories a clearer structure than how they’ve been implemented on social media platforms helps give a business a more relevant look at a candidate and makes it easier for them to parse information and make decisions based on an application.
Stories aren’t just on the candidate side, however. Most products out there only let businesses post text-based job posts — for the kind of business Pineapple is built for this usually results in a generic and vague post that most candidates don’t even read. Job Posts on Pineapple are also formatted as stories, because we think that businesses should try to appeal to candidates just as much as candidates try to appeal to businesses — a sentiment largely ignored by the service industry.
We’ve made it easy for businesses to then share their job posts through their social media channels or anywhere they can paste a link to attract candidates who are already engaged with their brand. Businesses are already recruiting through social channels — specifically Instagram. Pineapple now gives them a way to drive candidates through a dedicated platform rather than just have candidates email them resumés.
By offering richer and more engaging job posts we’ve seen that candidate applications are more tailored to the business they’re applying to. Also when a candidate applies for a business they actually want to work for them rather than just bulk applying to every business to see who bites.
The story model is great, but hiring issues go deeper than just the format in which a business receives applications. There’s also the administrative side to look at too. We’ve built Pineapple to be a complete solution from posting your job, receiving applications to eventually filling the position. Pineapple gives businesses and candidates a space to talk to each other that doesn’t require dealing with the clutter of your email inbox. For businesses this is crucial, having one centralized place to manage their hiring means that they don’t have to sift through their inbox to find candidate communication or deal with a portion of candidates contacting them through other platforms. By keeping everything in the one place it’s easy to keep tabs of what stage each candidate is at.
While we’ve focused on nailing the fundamentals in this early stage we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do on the administrative side to make business user’s lives easier. Already though we’ve seen that the Conversations feature provides huge value to both businesses and candidates.
So Where Are We Now?
As you might have grasped at this point, I turned down my offer to go to Art College and I’m now working full time on Pineapple alongside our team of 5 lovely individuals who were crazy enough to join us for the ride.
We’ve been in public beta on iOS only in Dublin since January this year, so far we’ve seen an overwhelmingly positive response from both businesses and candidates. While we’re in this phase we’re working closely with a tight-knit group of pilot businesses so we can learn about every area in which we can improve the product.
We’re in the process of building our Android app so that even more people can use Pineapple so we can get out of public beta and start welcoming Pineapple users from around the world.
If you know any businesses who you think would benefit from Pineapple outside of Dublin for when we expand next year I’d love to hear from you.
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