Your company’s hiring process do more than dictate your hiring teams’ effectiveness – it helps define your employer brand to candidates.
Thoughtful, strategic and transparent processes make your candidates feel comfortable, informed and valued. And they empower your hiring teams to work more efficiently and better communicate with hiring managers and executives.
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, we start to see similarities among the behaviors and strategies they use to help to deliver a great hiring experience.
Chaotic/inconsistent stages
At these stages, it’s important to lay the groundwork to deliver great experiences for both candidates and your internal teams. Start building a better hiring culture by engaging employees from all levels of the organization, especially those who will interview future candidates. The strategic tips and action items below will help you to implement repeatable processes within your Greenhouse account – and at every hiring touchpoint (we’ve included some helpful resources too).
Key actions for enabling change management:
- Great hiring experiences start with a strong recruiter and hiring manager partnerships
- For best practices on strengthening these relationships, check out this webinar and our structured hiring course
- Outline your expectations for how company interviews are prepared for and conducted, when feedback is received and any other unique or role-specific aspects of your process
- Use the Greenhouse interviewer training template and our instructional video for guidance
- Ensure every employee at your company is a part of the recruiting process
- Devote time in the onboarding process to introduce every new hire to recruiting basics, and get them excited about referring people for your open roles
- Check out the Greenhouse basic user training template, all-in-one video course and additional support resources for referrals, social media posts and internal job boards
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Additional configurations to make in Greenhouse with your team
- Enable the candidate survey
- Verify your email domain (your IT team will usually complete this step)
- Disposition candidates when closing a job: mark candidates as hired and bulk reject
Systematic stage
When it comes to the hiring experience, you have the right foundation but there’s room to improve. Strengthen your employer brand by taking charge of strategic communication with candidates and future applicants. Ensure consistency throughout your hiring process with clear guidelines and task assignments.
Key actions for enabling change management:
- Create an excellent candidate experience that communicates clear expectations around how long each part of the process should take
- Develop written agreements about expectations and responsibilities between members of your hiring team
- Think through where you can set SLAs for your internal processes (consider things like how long until you get feedback from an interview, turnaround times for hiring manager reviews, scheduling SLAs once a candidate moves into a new stage, etc.)
- Learn how to remove common roadblocks and streamline key steps of your hiring process in this webinar
- Set Greenhouse Goals to measure, iterate and improve every step of your hiring process
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Automate task reminders in Greenhouse by assigning hiring team roles on every job
- Get a strategy in place for popular company/interview review sites like Glassdoor, such as responding to every review and encouraging current employees to leave their own reviews
- Read our blog post to understand what to you need to keep in mind in your employer brand’s narrative
- Dedicate time to train your hiring managers on the recruiting process and the expectations of them so your team can have a smoother process and make better-quality decisions
- Check out this Learn Greenhouse course to ensure you always assign the correct hiring team
- Leverage the resources and templates in our Greenhouse rollout toolkit
Additional configurations to make in Greenhouse with your team
- Create custom, branded email templates for all candidate-facing communication – support article and Learn Greenhouse course: Create and manage email templates
- Track offer acceptance and processing rates by sending offers to candidates through Greenhouse – Support articles and Learn Greenhouse course
Strategic stage
The experience you provide to your candidates, new hires and hiring managers is a competitive advantage – and it benefits your entire organization in both the short and long term. You have the confidence to compete for and win top talent. To keep your hiring experience top notch, here are actions we see the most strategic companies taking as they continue to iterate and improve their processes:
Key actions for enabling change management:
- Map out each part of your candidate journey, from initial application through to hire, systemizing the actions your team takes at every step to ensure a positive experience
- Check out our candidate experience webinar and course to learn how to zero in on specific ideas and actions to pursue with your team
- Give new hires a more positive experience by creating opportunities to build relationships and make connections within your organization
- Read this blog post for tips on fostering an inclusive experience from day one
- Invest in positive experiences for recent hires during this stage to prevent them from backing out, such as getting hiring managers to check in and organizing an event for them to meet the team
- Check out this article for additional ideas and inspiration
- Recognize all your Talent Makers who are making referrals, talent partners who are devoting extra time to give detailed interview feedback and talent leaders who are helping the entire organization value recruiting
- Incentivize others to help with recruiting by giving out awards
- Check out our resources for inspiring, supporting and recognizing your organization’s Talent Makers
Smart configurations to make in Greenhouse with your team
- Enhance the candidate experience by collecting candidate name pronunciations
- Better manage an upcoming career fair/sourcing event with the events app
- Streamline the offer creation process and add branding via offer templates
- Automate the processing of inbound applications with application rules