Greenhouse.io as recruitment software; how does it go for you?
August 29, 2015 1:38 AM   Subscribe

I'm looking for Mefi users opinions on Greenhouse.io as Recruitment software. The good, the bad, the meh. If you have used it as either employer, 'employment broker' or employee, please tell me what you think. (The .io is this)

I work for a little company 'on the grow' and our Recruitment platform sucks. Need help to make everything sparkly and minty fresh. Please.
posted by esto-again to Work & Money (10 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Are you a recruiter or is this for in-house search and database?
posted by parmanparman at 2:49 AM on August 29, 2015


Bullhorn is also good and easily accessible.
posted by parmanparman at 2:49 AM on August 29, 2015


Response by poster: :) I don't work for commission. Inhouse HR recruiter here.

'Bullhorn' was my fave but then when
I tried it and it failed
"friends I know I use it" test.
It was a great demo and sucked in reality.
*With 20K records in it.
posted by esto-again at 3:40 AM on August 29, 2015


I used it as an interviewer/employee for a bit. For me I liked that it gave me a clear idea of what I needed to assess each candidate on, and I appreciated having a structured way to give feedback through a survey instead of having to write my own freeform opinion of someone.

It was also nice to have the person's resume, job history, and in some cases what other interviewers wanted more information about in one centralized location so I didn't have to reference various emails about it.
posted by thirdletter at 4:44 AM on August 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love it. I have dealt with over 1200 applicants for a single position and found it to be extremely solid. I've spent hours in Greenhouse and adore it. It works best if you take a little time to really set up the job properly, and to build out the screening stages. But I loved how easy it was to reject candidates and make them feel they got a personal note.
posted by amoeba at 8:19 AM on August 29, 2015


Recruiter and daily Greenhouse user here. At any given time I have ~30 open jobs in the system, so it's where I spend a lot of my day.

Pros: If you use it as designed and follow the candidate flow that Greenhouse is set up to handle, it makes life much easier. If your interviewers and hiring managers and execs are all on board with submitting feedback and reviewing candidates in Greenhouse, congratulations: your life will be relatively painless and all applicant information can be stored tidily in a single system! Simply having the ability to tie all emails about and to a candidate to one lockable record in Greenhouse was a huge step forward for us, and then we started using features like uploading email templates/written projects/candidate files. It's also great for being able to pull metrics about interviewers ("Huh, Dave says no 75% of the time, while the average interviewer only says no 30% of the time—let's find out why!), candidates, time to hire, etc.

Cons: They're getting better about this, but there is a lack of customization that's been difficult for my company. As snickerdoodle mentioned, the actual work of making Greenhouse useful comes before you integrate—everyone has to be on board with using it as the recruiting tool, or else you're still stuck tracking down stray emails and interviewer feedback. The system can be a bit buggy (It will sometimes hang on an email template page, and email sent from Greenhouse will sometimes fall into a recipient's spam folder—really, really not good), but the company is responsive to feedback and if you get a great account manager they'll work with you to push requested features. Some of the design is juuust shy of being helpful in a way that's frustrating ("Ok, Dave days no 75% of the time, but I wonder which interviews he says yes for! Oh. Oh I can't click in for more detail? I have to manually look up Dave's interviewing history to see which interviews he conducted on each candidate's page? Never mind.")

I'd be happy to memail more specifically if you have questions!
posted by ausdemfenster at 10:19 AM on August 29, 2015


Hiring manager here, recently moved from Jobvite to Greenhouse. Love it so far. Our (internal) recruiting team also loves it. (Jobvite was... not loved.)

Keeping track of where things are at, and filing feedback separately after an interview and then talking about it later, have been great. I hear it's been working well to track referrals too, although I haven't referred anyone.

We had a bunch of training for hiring managers here, which I managed to completely forget about attending, and I still find my way around it just fine, which is a good sign too.
posted by mendel at 5:23 PM on August 29, 2015


As just an employee who does interviews and puts my feedback in greenhouse, I'd say that it does the job pretty well. It does often feel like the most intuitive path towards, say, reviewing a scorecard I submitted for a candidate isn't the way Greenhouse lets you do it, but that's a minor complaint and largely comes to personal idiosyncrasies.
posted by invitapriore at 8:39 PM on August 29, 2015


I like it a lot, the only thing where it could be better is if it had more sophisticated ATS search (like so I could search for candidates by different fields rather than just keywords and date applied.) But overall it's probably the best I've used.
posted by fingersandtoes at 12:22 AM on August 30, 2015


My old company used it while scaling like crazy. The recruiting team like the recruit management bits but the ops team hated the lack of data available on what recruitment streams were working and other variables. I liked it fine as an interviewer.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:37 PM on August 30, 2015


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