Your hiring success ultimately depends on your team’s ability to choose the best candidates for your open roles. Making the right decision requires the right information. Interviews should be intentionally designed to deliver the most crucial data and feedback at the appropriate time. 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 for scale.
The spectrum of hiring processes at companies 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 Hiring Maturity curve, we see them start to focus on a few key behaviors and strategic conversations to consistently make quality hires with confidence.
Chaotic/inconsistent
At these stages, it’s important to lay the groundwork to make 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 conversations to enable change management:
- Review how to properly prepare for and conduct interviews, when and where to provide feedback and any other hiring process components
- Use the Greenhouse interviewer training template and/or instructional video to get started
Take action in Greenhouse with the following configuration:
Require scorecards to be submitted for every interview 
1 min
Create scorecard attributes for every job 15 mins
- 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
- See our blog post and efficient decisions course for guidance on implementing kick-off meetings
Additional actions to configure Greenhouse with your team:
- Create approval chains in Greenhouse to facilitate job and offer approvals 45 mins
- Learn how to schedule interviews in Greenhouse, integrating your Outlook 365 or Google calendar
Systematic
You’ve already built out a structured hiring process where you consistently gather feedback from interviews, but there’s room to improve. Move up the Hiring Maturity curve with a more consistent, strategic hiring process with these tips.
Key conversations to enable 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 use after each interview, focusing on the most essential skills/qualifications evaluated at each point in the process
- Check out our blog post and efficient hiring decision course for guidance on designing an effective decision making process
Additional actions to configure Greenhouse with your team:
- Configure and automate scorecard reminder notifications 15 mins
- Create and designate template jobs to streamline job creation 30 mins/job
- Enforce nuanced levels of access by creating custom permission levels Variable
Strategic
You’re using a structured process to select great candidates for almost every role, giving your company the confidence and tools to consistently hire for whatever is next. But even the best companies can continue to grow their hiring expertise. And in that spirit, here are a few tips to help you truly become a leader in the space:
Key conversations to enable 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 5 mins/job
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 video for how to win with reporting
Additional actions to configure Greenhouse with your team: