How to share candidate interviews with your hiring committee
Every video interview tool already lets you send a link. The part nobody solves is what a stranger is allowed to see once they click it, and that's the part that actually decides whether committee hiring works.
AI summary
- Sharing a video link is a solved problem. Deciding what a stranger can see once they open it is not, and that's the part that actually stalls committee hiring.
- Board members, client companies, and co-founders won't create an account to review a candidate they may never meet again, so a login screen kills more reviews than a bad video does
- Truffle's Share and export panel starts from an audience. Hiring team, External share, or Interview record each decide what the link carries, a summary states what is in and out before you create it, and your interview prep notes cannot be put on an external link at all
Most hiring software already solved the easy version of this problem. Record a candidate, generate a link, send it to whoever needs to see it. That part has worked for years.
What it doesn’t solve is the second question, the one that actually decides whether you can share candidate interviews with your hiring committee without the whole thing stalling: once someone clicks that link, what can they see, and can you take it back?
A resume with a home address on it. A phone number. A match score with no context. Most tools hand you a binary choice. Either the person gets a full account with the keys to your candidate pool, or they get nothing.
You don’t run hiring alone if you’re the owner who got stuck with hiring at a small business. A franchise owner answers to a co-founder. A superintendent search firm answers to a school board. A small staffing agency answers to the client footing the bill. None of those people work for you day to day, and none of them are going to create a password just to watch three candidates once.
The reason committee hiring feels harder than it should isn’t the video. It’s that nobody built the sharing part for a stranger who’s doing you a favor.
A shareable link was never the hard part
If your only requirement is “let someone else watch the video,” you already have options. Plenty of one-way interview tools generate a link the moment a candidate finishes recording, and most of them don’t make the viewer sign up for anything either. That part of the problem got solved a while ago.
So why does sharing candidates with a committee still feel like a project? Because the link usually opens onto everything or nothing. Either your board member sees the raw recording with no scoring, no context, and no way to compare five candidates against each other, or they get routed into a full login flow built for a hiring manager who logs in every week, not someone reviewing your finalists once a quarter.
Neither version is actually built for the person on the other end. A raw video link makes the board member do the ranking themselves, from scratch, with no evidence beyond what they can see with their own eyes. A full account makes them do setup work for a five-minute favor. Both versions solve “can they watch it” and ignore “what should they be able to do once they’re there.”
What breaks once a stranger opens the link
The failure shows up in a few specific shapes, and they’re worth naming because each one points to a different fix.
A search firm and a school board
A search firm placing a superintendent sends finalist interviews to a school board. The board members aren’t staff. They’re volunteers who show up for one vote. If the process asks them to register anywhere, some of them simply won’t, and the firm ends up chasing signatures on a decision that should have taken ten minutes.
A staffing agency and its client
A small staffing agency screens a shortlist for a client company and needs that client to see the evidence, not just names on a spreadsheet. The client wants to see the interview and the reasoning behind the ranking before they’ll sign off on an offer. But the client isn’t going to learn a new system for three candidates on one job order, and the agency doesn’t have the headcount to build them a portal.
A regulated startup and who gets to see what
A startup in a regulated industry wants a hiring manager to see a candidate’s match score and interview, but not necessarily every internal note or every score component, because different people on the review chain are cleared to see different things. That’s a real question about who should see what, and most sharing tools don’t give you a lever for it at all.
Three different situations, one shared root cause. The sharing mechanism doesn’t distinguish between giving someone a seat and giving them the evidence for one decision.
The fix is controlling what a stranger can see
Once you see the pattern, the fix stops looking like a bigger feature list and starts looking like a narrower question: not “can this person see the candidate,” but “exactly what should this person see, and for how long.”
That reframe changes what you’d actually build. You don’t need every stakeholder to have a login, a role, and a seat on your team roster. You need a way to hand someone the specific evidence behind a specific decision, with the parts that don’t belong to them left out, and a way to shut the door again once the decision is made.
A resume has a home address and a phone number on it. A match score means nothing without the criteria behind it. A full candidate profile has notes from other reviewers that were never meant for an outside client. None of that needs to travel with a share link for a one-time reviewer to do their job. What they need is the part that answers the question they were asked to answer: does this candidate look right for the role.
Why a client portal isn’t the real answer
The obvious enterprise answer to “clients need visibility” is a client portal: a permanent, branded login where a client company can see their candidates whenever they want. Some staffing software builds exactly that, and for a firm running hundreds of open orders across dozens of clients, it can be worth the investment.
It’s the wrong answer at the scale most of our customers operate at. A small owner-run agency filling a handful of roles a month for a handful of clients doesn’t have the admin time to provision an account, set permissions, and maintain access for every client relationship, especially when half of those relationships only need to see three candidates one time. Building permanent infrastructure for a one-off review is solving the wrong-sized problem. What that agency actually needs is something that works per candidate, per share, with no setup beyond clicking a button.
What controlled sharing looks like in practice
This is where Truffle’s Candidate Sharing feature earns its place. Truffle is an AI screening platform that combines resume screening, one-way video interviews, and talent assessments, and Candidate Sharing is the layer that lets you hand that evidence to someone outside your account without giving them an account at all.
How the link works
Sharing starts with who the link is for, not with the link. You pick an audience: Hiring team, External share, or Interview record. Each one sets what the link carries across eight groups of content, and a plain-English summary underneath tells you what it includes and what it leaves out before you create anything. The summary is generated from the same contract the link is built from, so it can’t tell you one thing while the link does another.
Hiring team is the full picture for the people deciding with you: your scoring, the summary, the interview responses, the career profile, assessments, and your own interview prep notes. External share is the one you send a client. Same candidate, same interview, minus your scoring and minus your prep. Interview record is narrower still, just the responses and the career profile.
If a preset is close but not right, adjust any group by hand. One won’t move: interview prep notes are marked internal only, and on an external or record link the switch is disabled rather than merely off. The panel refuses it, and so does the server.
Contact details and the resume file are off unless you deliberately turn them on. A few things are never on any link, and the panel lists them rather than leaving you to guess.
You can add a password. You can set the link to expire in 7, 30, 75 or 180 days, defaulting to 75 for a hiring-team link and 30 for an external one. And you can revoke any link the moment the decision is made.
What it looks like for each scenario
The superintendent search firm sends the school board three Interview record links, one per finalist. Each board member watches the interview and reads the career profile, without an account, a password reset, or a call to IT.
The small staffing agency sends its client an External share link instead of a spreadsheet with names on it. The client sees the candidate and the interview. They don’t see how the agency grades, which is the agency’s method and not the client’s business.
The startup with a regulated review chain gives different reviewers different links on the same candidate, because one candidate can hold several live links at once. Each is listed with its audience, its expiry and its password state, and each has its own revoke. Cutting off the client tomorrow leaves the hiring panel’s link working.
When they want a file, not a link
Some reviewers won’t click anything. A board that meets in a room, a client who forwards everything to their own legal team, a record you need to keep after the search closes.
From the same panel you can export the candidate as a PDF carrying the whole screening record: the full transcripts, QR codes back to the live responses, and footers saying what the document is and where it came from. It renders on Truffle’s side rather than in your browser, so the file is identical wherever it’s opened. On annual plans you can select several candidates and get one zip.
The one real limit
A read-only link lets someone see the evidence. It doesn’t let them leave a rating inside Truffle the way a teammate with a Job Role can, because that requires an actual account. If your hiring committee is a standing group that reviews every search you run, not just this one, it’s worth inviting them as a Reviewer instead of sending a fresh link every time.
The share link is for the favor. The account is for the ongoing seat. Knowing which one you’re dealing with is most of the decision.
The bigger shift this points to
Committee hiring was never really about getting more eyes on a candidate. It was about getting the right eyes on the right evidence without turning every stakeholder relationship into an IT request. A resume, an interview, and an assessment only compound into confidence if the people who need to weigh in can actually see them. That’s the same logic behind good candidate engagement more broadly: the process only works if the person on the other end doesn’t have to fight it to take part.
The owner who inherited hiring didn’t sign up to be their board’s IT department either. The fewer accounts standing between “I need your read on this candidate” and someone actually giving it, the faster committee hiring starts looking less like a bottleneck and more like what it should have been from the start: a second opinion you can get in one afternoon instead of a week.
Frequently asked questions about sharing candidate interviews with a hiring committee
Do the people I share candidates with need a Truffle account?
No. A share link is read-only and works for anyone with the URL. They don’t sign up, log in, or install anything. If you want someone to leave ratings or notes inside Truffle rather than just view the evidence, that does require inviting them as a team member with a Job Role.
What can someone see through a shared candidate link that they can’t see on the resume itself?
That depends on the audience you pick, which is the point. A Hiring team link carries your scoring, the summary, the interview responses, the career profile, assessments and your interview prep notes. An External share link carries the same candidate without your scoring or your prep. An Interview record link is just the responses and the career profile. Contact details and the resume file are off unless you turn them on, and the panel tells you exactly what’s in and out before you create the link.
Can I stop someone from viewing a candidate after I’ve shared the link?
Yes. Every live link for a candidate is listed in the share panel with its own revoke, so you can cut off one reader without touching anyone else’s link. If you don’t revoke it manually it expires on its own, after whichever window you chose when you created it: 7, 30, 75 or 180 days.
Is a shared link secure enough for a client or a school board to review sensitive candidates?
You can add optional password protection to any link. Beyond that, the stronger control is the audience: an External share link never carries your scoring or your interview prep, and the server strips them even if something tried to ask for them. Contact details and the resume file stay off unless you turn them on deliberately.
What’s the difference between sharing a link and inviting someone as a team member?
A share link is for a one-time or occasional reviewer who needs to see the evidence and nothing more, like a client company or a board reviewing finalists. Inviting someone as a team member with a Job Role makes sense when they’re a recurring part of your hiring process and need to leave their own ratings and notes directly in the platform.
