Candidates size up job opportunities from the moment they land on your career page. How your company communicates your brand, culture and available opportunities impacts your organization’s reach and the quality of your candidate pool. Creating a seamless application process and following that up with a well-structured hiring flow helps ensure that quality candidates develop a good first impression of your company and can easily apply.
The effectiveness spectrum of companies' hiring processes is what we call the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity™ curve, which we break down into four stages: chaotic, inconsistent, systematic and, finally, strategic.
As companies climb the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity curve, they start to focus on key behaviors and strategic conversations to improve how they identify and attract top talent.
Chaotic and inconsistent stages
At these stages, it’s important to lay the groundwork for a stronger candidate pipeline. Take a comprehensive look at your entire sourcing effort. Identify what’s working and what needs improvement. Read the following strategic tips and action items to help get you started (we’ve included some helpful resources too).
Key actions for enabling change management :
- Referrals are the #1 source of new hire quality, with high retention rates, engagement and performance
- Incentives and a structured referral process are powerful ways to boost engagement – check out this eBook to learn more about building a strong employee referral program
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Post your referral program in Greenhouse
- Make employee participation easy and rewarding to maximize engagement and results
- Use the Greenhouse basic user training template to introduce everyone on your team to recruiting fundamentals for using the system
- Check out this 15-minute all-in-one course for everyone at your company
Follow this up with further action:
Encourage employees to post open roles to their social accounts
- Clearly outline your values, mission, culture and anything else that makes your company a great place to work
- Read our employer brand eBook for guidance on how to draft and share your company’s story
- Give candidates a great first impression with a career page that helps them understand your culture and workplace
- Get inspired with these Greenhouse customer career page examples that vary in approach and content
Develop your DE&I strategy and start evolving your hiring practices
- Align with leadership on your organization's vision and strategy around building a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace
- Improve employee satisfaction and your ability to attract top talent by fostering a fair culture and a sense of belonging for all
- Identify an internal sponsor to help map out your overall DE&I strategy and lead sessions for collaborating on how to implement initiatives, get company-wide buy-in and evaluate what’s working and what still needs to be done
- Read our guide on how to get started with DE&I and watch our webinar for in-depth DE&I strategy guidance
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Publish your organization's commitment to DE&I in Greenhouse
Additional actions to configure Greenhouse with your team:
Publish job posts to free job boards
Add potential candidates as prospects in Greenhouse to build a talent database
Systematic stage
Your company has the right foundation to find and engage top talent, but there’s room to improve. Encourage your recruiting teams to reach out to past applicants and prospects to get a more objective view of your hiring process. Work on turning your company's vision for DE&I into reality by drafting concrete goals and systematizing behaviors that support those outcomes.
Key actions for enabling change management :
- Work on your strategy to build up your pipeline, consistently nurture talent and be ready to make hires on a rolling basis for the roles you have a recurring need for, especially as you grow
- Learn best practices to leverage your existing talent base and maintain continuously open positions
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Publish jobs available to internal employees to the internal job board
Add structure to your talent database by adding prospect pools
Collect general interest applications by adding a prospect post to your careers page
- Set out the steps to take for specific DE&I goals and align your team on new sourcing and interviewing practices
- Identify and support an internal DE&I sponsor to engage management across departments for organizational change
- Read this blog post for guidance on embodying DE&I leadership at your company
- Check out examples of companies that are putting their DE&I visions into action
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Mitigate bias at key points in the recruiting process by turning on Greenhouse inclusion nudges
Strategic stage
It’s clear that attracting talent is your competitive advantage. Your sourcing tactics and hiring approach draw in great candidates. Your whole company is invested in recruiting and helping identify great candidates. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we see the most strategic companies continuing to invest in key initiatives and actions to stay on top.
Key actions for enabling change management :
- Improve focus on your ERGs to help foster a robust pipeline with increased diversity
- Support your people team to empower your ERGs
- Check out this resource to see how Greenhouse customers are establishing ERGs and empowering their employees
- Encourage “talent magnet” behavior by prompting individuals to actively promote your hiring brand’s story in their networks and help create a workplace that attracts top talent
- Learn more about talent magnets and the Talent Maker™ mindset in our guide
- Read our e-book to discover how to best support your company’s own talent magnets
- Ensure you’re scooping up passive talent and bringing in a diverse candidate pool by referring back to specific sourcing plans
- Read this customer case study to learn how you can optimize your sourcing strategy
Follow this up with further action:
Diversify your sourcing and hiring efforts through your career page, third-party job boards, prospecting and more, and use the candidate quality by source report for insights on where you should be focusing.
Additional actions to configure Greenhouse with your team:
Measure progress and identify areas for improvement on your DE&I goals with custom demographic or standard demographic questions.
Learn Greenhouse course: Collect candidate demographic information. This resource will help you determine which option is best for your organization.