Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Jon Stross, the president of Greenhouse Software. They make hiring software and maintain a full portal of tool and services to improve hiring processes. We’re going to talk about how the talent market’s changed over the last few years, how they’re approaching diversity, and the joys of product integration, all on this edition of People Tech. Hi Jon, welcome. Greenhouse Software is obviously involved in talent acquisition, and do you think the behavior of employers has changed or are they approaching hiring as they did before the pandemic and the Great Resignation?
Jon:
The way I think about it is that there’s been this multi-decade trend that I think has been accelerated during the pandemic. And so the overall trend, if you step back in the biggest sense, is that more and more companies are recognizing that talent acquisition or recruiting is this strategic imperative. It’s where you win as a company, is you have to win at talent acquisition.
"More and more companies are recognizing that talent acquisition or recruiting is this strategic imperative." @Greenhouse CEO Jon Stross. Listen to our podcast. #HR #HRTech Click To TweetJon:
And I think it used to be people thought of it as this administrative function. And you say, oh well, people are kind of a commodity, and we just want to make sure we do it in a way that’s cheap and compliant. And more and more companies are realizing, oh no, it’s much more competitive than that. The difference between being good and great at hiring is gigantic for our business. And so I think that’s been happening for 20 years as more and more companies are recognizing that.
Jon:
I think what’s happened with the pandemic is just putting even a finer spotlight on that. And more and more companies, beyond just Silicon Valley where we started are realizing that this is a critical thing that they need to get into and think about recruiting in a very different way than they used to.
Mark:
What about candidates? The Great Resignation and such, you’d think that they’re behaving differently and making different assumptions. Is that all true?
Jon:
I think it’s tough to generalize all candidates as if we say like all employees in the world that it’s pretty rough to generalize. I do think that there’s maybe generally a trend of more people are recognizing like, hey, I can work from home. I’m not limited to just companies within a 30 minute commute of where I live. I’m actually can work anywhere. Maybe people are realizing like, hey, instead of going into an office and meeting all these people and making all these friends, my entire experience with the company is through a Zoom and you’re less tied to it, maybe less loyal to it, that there are people who are looking around and saying, oh, I’m going to jump around a little bit more and find something else. I’m not happy. That’s it. I think people are going through such wildly different experiences where some people are affected in much more profound ways than others and that impacts how they think about their job or how they think about what their next job might be.
Mark:
I talk to a lot of employers and it feels like they talk on the one hand about having trouble finding candidates. And then a few minutes later, they’ll start to talk about how they’re still conducting eight interviews for every position or just making people really run the gamut. Do you see that happening? And why is there a disconnect between what companies are saying and what they’re doing?
Jon:
I mean, I think there’s a disconnect between what people say and what they do for all sorts of different reasons. That is a general thing and it happens in businesses. I think there’s a couple different dynamics going on there. I think on the one hand, you see companies where they’ve made a hiring mistake and they say, oh geez, we made this hire, didn’t work out. What happens? Well, we didn’t ask them these questions, we should ask them those questions next time. And you do that for two years and you get to the point where it takes eight interviews to actually make a hiring decision. And so I think that’s like one independent thing that happens is that, and it’s happened with us at our company where you get to more and more questions and then you step back and somebody else is saying, hey, why is it taking so long to make hires?
Jon:
Why does it take so many candidates to get one person do the funnel as a hire? And so I think sometimes it’s just you have different people designing different parts of the product or parts of that process, they’re not quite talking to each other. But I think generally people are having to reexamine that and saying, well, it’s not just that it takes so many interviews, but they’re saying, geez, do we really have to require all the things in our job description that we’re requiring? Are those things really critical. And if we were to remove things like say college degree, does that open up the funnel of who could possibly apply and maybe solve some of our top of funnel problems. And so I think generally this moment is forcing people to be more intentional about who they’re looking for and how they interview and saying, are these things really necessary because it’s harder right now to find as many people as they want.
Mark:
We’re talking about pretty big changes in the dynamics of job hunting and hiring, however you want to look at it. How has all of this affected your approach, your roadmap?
Jon:
In terms of our approach with our product, yes?
Mark:
Yeah.
Jon:
Couple things. I think one is what we’re seeing is it used to be a lot of companies could kind of get away with just doing inbound, meaning post the job in your website, buy some advertising, people will come to you and apply. And the companies who are in really difficult areas to hire, okay, they were hiring data scientists, would say, no, no, that’s not good enough. We got to be proactive and go out and find people ourselves. Well, given the current, all the macro environment, things happening, more and more companies are in that latter category where they’re saying, more and more companies are saying, we got to go out and do all this outbound sourcing, which means it’s a whole thing you’re taking on. If I got to go find people, whether it’s on LinkedIn or elsewhere on the internet, I’ve got to figure out their email address or their phone number.
Jon:
I have to try multiple times to get contact with them, see if they’re interested, figure out what can I say that might get them interested and engaged in a conversation and then move them through a funnel and see if we can hire them. And that turns out to be a very heavy process. And so we looked at it and said, that’s a thing that we could make way better with software. We could automate a bunch of those different steps. And so make it much easier to discover emails those email addresses, get emails actually into somebody’s inbox, automate all of the different steps of that process. And so we’re launching a product imminently called Greenhouse Sourcing Automation. There’s directly as a result of this of more and more companies saying this is becoming not something that we outsource to agencies, we’re doing it ourselves. We’re doing all this outbound sourcing ourselves. We need tools for it.
Mark:
Are there any similar changes in attitude going on about diversity and DEI?
Jon:
Absolutely. So I think starting, I mean, we first launched our original Greenhouse Inclusion product I think in 2016 or ’17, as we recognize that more and more companies were seeing the DNI was this priority. And largely also it’s not just in response to a political thing of like, oh, I think we’re… it’s a politically correct thing, we’re supposed to do it, but more and more people are realizing, the bias that’s showing up in our process, it’s determining who’s actually getting hired, is not just bad for the world, it’s actually it’s bad for us as a company. We’re making worse decisions. Because it turns out we’re making decisions impacted by an identity when we really just want to hire who can do the job. And so that’s become a bigger and bigger priority for more and more customers saying, can you help us figure out how to mitigate bias throughout our process?
Jon:
Can you help us like interrogate our process and say, where’s something going wrong here. How come at this one stage, men are getting through it twice the rate as women. That doesn’t sound right. And so that’s been a huge priority of ours for many years now is how do we build data into the system? So you can try to understand and diagnose what’s going on and then interventions into the system to be able to say, hey, well, this part here, grading a take home test, let’s let you do that anonymously or adding various nudges throughout the product to help people be more intentional and thoughtful about how they’re doing these really critical things in those key moments where bias tends to creep in.
Mark:
Now, another thing I’m wondering about closer to home to closer to Greenhouse is the role of integrations, partnerships. What’s your philosophy about that? Is it a big part of your business, big part of your assumptions?
Jon:
It is. It was one of our core assumptions at the very beginning as we saw, wow, there’s a lot of investment flowing into recruiting technology. There was tons of innovation happening and you could see it happening in all these different categories, whether it’s assessment tests or sourcing tools or background checks or scheduling tools. It was like two dozen different categories. So you could see each one had 10 different players. And we recognized, we’re not going to be able to build all that stuff ourselves. And if we can actually make it super easy for all those folks to integrate with us, it’ll end up being a huge win for both for our customers and those partners and us. And so from day one, we said we’re going to have nice open APIs. We’re going to have good documentation. We’re going to make it really easy with no friction that you can just get going and integrate, which may sound obvious, but I think it was actually a unique thing in the market at the time.
Jon:
And so we’ve always heard from a lot of the integration partners. They’re like, yeah, we’d love to work with Greenhouse’s customers and you guys are by far the easiest one to work with. And so we’ve now gotten to where we have hundreds and hundreds, or I think we’re over 400 integration partners. And we talk to them, they largely say, yeah, you guys are the easiest ones to work with. We started with you. And so now we talk to our customers. They say, yeah, the average customer’s using over 10 integrations. They’re saying we’re building this TA Tech Stack. And the fact that we know that whatever gets invented will seamlessly integrate the Greenhouse makes it really easy to experiment and see what’s working for us, what’s not. And so it’s become a big winner for our customers where they say, yeah, TA is bigger than just one system. You are going to use these best in class systems. And the fact that they know it’s going to work with Greenhouse is a huge win.
Mark:
My last question is about next week. It’s your conference, I believe in New York.
Jon:
Yeah.
Mark:
What’s going on with that? I mean, what’s the highlight, do you think and-
Jon:
Yeah. So Greenhouse Open is next week in New York City. And we’ve been running this conference every couple of years since the beginning. And I think it’s always been one of the great moments for our company of getting the whole community together to learn. So on the one hand, there’s lots of great content. We have all these great speakers and thought leaders that we had, who I think people always come and they learn lots from the speakers. We’re also running these two tracks of workshops. And so a lot of people come and it’s like, no, no, you get your keyboard out and start typing to work along in these workshops and learn a lot. And so our hope is that people will leave the conference and go back and change how they do their job the next day.
Jon:
But the truth is we’ve now done this conference many, many times. The truth is that the best thing is all the people you meet, is that you come to the conference, you’re surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of other people who essentially have a very similar job to you and you’re all wrestling with the same issues and trying to figure out how do we transform how our company recruits. And whether that’s around technology or process or best practices. The fact that you get to meet all these other people like you, people always say, oh, that’s the best part and they always make these great connections. So we’ll put on all this content, we’ll put on a great party, but mostly we’re just hoping to get everybody in the same room and to bounce off each other because they’ll get a lot out of it.
Jon:
I think also, especially because none of us have been like left our house in the last three years. Just being surrounded by those people, I think it’s… I know it’s hard to go do it and everybody’s nervous to travel, but for the folks who come, I think it’s going to be a really good time and they’ll get a lot out of it.
Mark:
Well Jon, thanks very much for stopping by and talking today.
Jon:
Thanks so much for having me.
Mark:
My guest today has been Jon Stross, the president of Greenhouse Software, and this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report everyday. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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