Your hiring success ultimately depends on your team’s ability to choose the best candidates for your open roles. Making the right decisions requires the right information. Interviews should be intentionally designed to gather the most crucial data and feedback at the appropriate times. This not only makes it easier to use these insights when making hiring decisions, it gives your hiring team a clear set of standards for feedback and discussion. That’s how you build a hiring process at scale.
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 see them start to focus on key behaviors and strategies that help them consistently make quality hires with confidence.
Chaotic and inconsistent stages
At these stages, it’s important to lay the groundwork to make more effective hiring decisions. Strengthen your hiring team’s relationships by aligning on role requirements and feedback expectations before meeting with any candidates. Empower team members with clear processes and training to increase consistency in your interviews.
Key actions for enabling change management
- Establish and review how to properly prepare for and conduct interviews, when and where to provide feedback and other components of your hiring process
- Use the Greenhouse interviewer training template and our instructional video to get started
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Require scorecards to be submitted for every interview
Learn how to create scorecard attributes for every job in this Designing Scorecards Webinar
- Unconscious bias training transcends the recruiting process and can apply to all areas of your business, but is particularly important when it comes to making data-driven hiring decisions
- For ideas on how to reduce bias and train interviewers accordingly, check out our blog post
- Establish and maintain best practices for your structured hiring process
- Collect all the information you need to align on expectations about process goals and methods
- Familiarize yourself with the job kickoff form and use it to streamline inputs
- See our blog post and efficient decisions course for guidance on implementing kickoff meetings
Additional configurations to make in Greenhouse with your team
- Create approval chains in Greenhouse to facilitate job and offer approvals – Job approval articles, Offer approval article and Learn Greenhouse course: Offer approvals
- Learn how to schedule interviews in Greenhouse with Google Calendar or Outlook 365 – Scheduling course menu, Google Calendar support articles, and Outlook 365 support articles
Systematic stage
You’ve already built out a structured hiring process where you consistently gather feedback from interviews, but there’s still room to improve. Use these tips to move up the Hiring Maturity curve with a more consistent, strategic hiring process.
Key actions for enabling change management:
- Develop a consistent set of questions for each interview and interviewer
- Make sure these questions directly evaluate each attribute the interviewer is meant to be rating in their feedback
- Check out our blog post for inspiration and guidance on crafting your own strategic interview questions
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Mitigate bias and gain clarity on interview feedback by requiring notes from interviewers DE&I 
5 mins
Evaluate candidate attributes more thoroughly by adding custom questions to interview kits 15 mins
- Build out a standardized review process to follow after each interview that focuses on the most essential skills and qualifications evaluated at each point in the process
- Check out our blog post and efficient hiring decision course for guidance on designing a more effective decision-making process
Additional configurations to make in Greenhouse with your team
- Configure and automate scorecard reminder notifications support article
- Create and designate template jobs to streamline job creation support article
- Establish nuanced levels of access by creating custom permission levels Learn Greenhouse course
Strategic stage
You’re using a structured process to select great candidates for almost every role, giving your company the confidence and tools it needs to consistently hire for whatever is next. But even the best companies can continue to grow their hiring expertise. In that spirit, here are a few tips to help you truly become a leader in the space:
Key actions for enabling change management:
- Align your team on what to consider when making final decisions and who will be responsible for each part of the process
- Check out our blog post and efficient hiring decision course for additional guidance on improving late-stage decision-making
Follow this up with further action:
Streamline final candidate evaluations by defining the most important attributes for candidate roundups
Conduct final roundup meetings with the hiring team prior to making hiring decisions
- Improve and iterate on your hiring plan based on feedback
- Update the scorecard, interview questions and anything else based on discussions with your hiring team
- Look at data from your recent hiring process to help identify opportunities for improvement
- Watch this webinar on maximizing advanced reporting tools
- Register for one of our live training events on reporting
Additional configurations to make in Greenhouse with your team
- Guide interviewers to target specific feedback by assigning focus attributes in interview kits support article
- Assess candidate skills with take home test assignments support article
- Mitigate bias by anonymizing take-home test grading DE&I support article