Pinterest was growing out of its method of reimbursing expenses for candidates interviewing with the company. It was 2014, and the Pinterest team hadn’t yet onboarded to an expense management software for candidate reimbursements.
This was especially becoming a pain point when interviewing job candidates. Staying on top of spreadsheets and receipts from job candidates was a challenge. As a result, reimbursements were taking an average of 40 days.
Pinterest needed a modern recruiting experience that reflected their brand. Improving the process of reimbursing candidates needed to be smoother, easier, and faster.
“When you’re recruiting world class candidates, you want to present them with your brand from top to bottom,” said Scott Clark, Controller at Pinterest.
Here’s more on how Pinterest improved their process of reimbursing interview expenses.
But First… Why Reimburse Candidates’ Interview Expenses?
Candidates may pay a variety of reimbursable expenses when interviewing for a job. Flights, hotels, lunch or coffee outings — candidates may pay for these items and more, to interview at your company. Reimbursing their costs goes a long way to building a great candidate experience.
A few best practices that improve your candidate reimbursement experience:
- Reimburse via ACH direct deposit. Every candidate should be able to receive their reimbursement via ACH’s timely, universal, and convenient method of payment.
- Find software that automates as much as possible. As Pinterest well knew, spreadsheets are all-too-common in managing expenses. They can get unwieldy quickly. Automated expense approval rules implement your expense policy as the expense is being submitted — without manual oversight on your end.
- Make Finance comfortable. Your expense management software should be simple enough for interview candidates to use and safe enough for Finance to trust. Expense policy automation, data portability, hierarchical approval routing — these controls help the accounting team feel safe entrusting non-finance teams with the ability to submit reimbursements.
Pinterest Needed to Reimburse Interview Expenses Quickly and Easily
When relying on spreadsheets and receipts from candidates, Pinterest found it challenging to gather all the information needed to reimburse interview expenses. This was a frustrating process for the candidate, as well as Pinterest’s Human Resources and Finance teams.
Implementing Expense Reimbursement Software
Pinterest wanted to create a first impression for candidates that reflected the experience of working at a world-class technology company.
The right expense management software can help here. A solution should speed up the submission and reimbursement of expenses. This requires a good user experience for creating and approving expenses. Look for features and automations like:
- Real time expense reporting that removes the need for manual expense reports
- Android and iOS mobile apps for submitting and approving expenses
- Automated expense creation
- Tagging expenses with custom fields, such as those related to job candidates
- Simplified travel expenses and booking experiences
Pinterest’s search for a modern expense management solution ended with Abacus. The Pinterest team switched to Abacus in 2014.
Since then, more than 3,000 candidates have submitted their expenses through Abacus’s modern, easy-to-use (but with all the controls) technology. Pinterest is able to review and approve expenses in real time, helping candidates receive their reimbursements in an average of 2 business days. As Controller Scott Clark raved, “replacing old school Excel reports with a solution like Abacus helps our brand come through in the candidate experience.”
Want to learn more about Abacus? Schedule a demo with our team.