Greenhouse OPEN Takeover – RecruitingDaily Podcast with Allen Beers

Music: This is Recruiting Daily’s Recruiting Live Podcast, where we look at the strategies behind the world’s best talent acquisition teams. We talk recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each week we take one overcomplicated topic and break it down so that your three year old can understand it. Make sense? Are you ready to take your game to the next level? You’re at the right spot. You’re now entering the mind of a hustler. Here’s your host, William Tincup

William: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s William Tincup and you are listening to the Recruiting Daily Podcast today. We have Allen on from Greenhouse and we’ll be talking about Greenhouse Open, but really we’ll be unpacking a bunch of other stuff as well. So, Allen, would you do us the honor and introduce yourself and Greenhouse?

Allen Beers: Hey William, I am Allen Beers. I’m our VP of customer success here at Greenhouse. So I’ve been with the company forever for almost seven years now. And then before this, I was at LinkedIn for a long time doing customer success. And before that I was actually an agency recruiter. So I’ve always been connected to the HR and HR tech space in some form or fashion. And as you know Greenhouse is the best applicant tracking system out there. And a suite of products that enables our customers to make data driven decisions on their hires.

William: So the switch from recruiter to customer success, what was the transition like? Was it difficult or was it relatively easy?

Allen Beers: At the time LinkedIn was essentially sourcing their customer success team from X recruiters.

William: Oh, interesting.

Allen Beers: The theory there was you’ve been in a recruiter’s shoes, you know the challenges, you understand the workflows, you understand the industry so you would probably make a pretty good customer success manager and understand sourcing and how to send strong in mails, et cetera. So it was just lucky timing at the time that’s where they were kind of pulling their candidate pool from. And I fell into the role.

William: That’s smart. What do you see today, in terms of when you onboard a new client, the apprehension that they might have, either they’re switching from something else or you’re displacing some proprietary or Excel, or God only knows what you’re displacing or nothing, which is even worse. What’s the, some of the things that you see with clients right now and just standing them up and then getting them to use the product, adopt it, love it, all that stuff. What are some of the things that you see right now?

Allen Beers: Well, I mean, I think depending on the customer, they might have wildly different ambitions. Like you said, if they’re coming from spreadsheets, they’re just really excited to have a system where they can add candidates to and have some semblance of organization as they’re doing their hiring, but that can present its own challenges. Because I think at Greenhouse, we have a pretty strong position on the importance of structured hiring, collaboration with hiring managers, setting up interview kits, scorecards. So you have some customers literally just right off the bat in week one, they want to get off the ground and start recruiting and start hiring. And we have to slow them down a little bit and say, “Look, during the implementation phase, this is the most important time when you can build a foundation for future successes. And if you set the system up well and you can figure the system in a way that works for you strategically, it’s going to continue to pay dividends down the road.”

So you’re pumping the brakes with customers like that. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you might have an enterprise customer where they have a ton of things figured out, they’ve been successfully hiring for years and years or maybe even decades. And they’ve got this ingrained process that we have to pull them out of and say, “There’s a reason that you’re making the switch. Let’s keep the eye on the prize and the goals of why you’re making that transition from your legacy system and potentially learn some new things about recruiting or structured hiring that could help the organization out.” And then there’s a spectrum in between that.

William: So implementation. So I studied user adoption for about five years of my life and spoke on implementations. In fact, I used to have this bit where I could get in front of the audience and say, “I can make every single one of you fall down and get into the fetal position and suck on your thumb.” And all I have to do is say one word and it was a parlor trick. So then I’d say implementation. And then it was a funny bit, it was a joke because everyone’s had a bad implementation. There isn’t anybody in HR recruiting that hasn’t had something go sideways. In fact, as you study implementations, what you learn about implementations is that there’s always an, what do we call an inevitable disaster, i.e, the unforeseen. In the sales process, we talk about data, their historical data, how important it is.

And then all of a sudden we get into implementation to find out the data is horrible. Like not structured, completely just horrible. That’s not necessarily a disaster. It’s just now you have to realign expectations. And so there’s always something that comes up in implementation. So what kind of roadblocks advice that you give people during that implementation phase of like, “Hey, listen, we’re going to hit some things.” There’s going to be some systems, some process, collaboration, people, it’s just inevitable that we’re going to have these things. But we’ll react and we’ll take care of you. You don’t have to worry. We’ll make sure that things are okay.” But what do you see as some of the just naturals, the things you see recurring as not say roadblocks, but just things you need to the team to overcome?

Allen Beers: I mean, I wanted to touch on this topic a little bit if we have time, but I think sometimes there’s an overreliance that the recruiters or the recruiting team are going to be able to do everything and lead those implementations with one or two people. So to me it’s like [inaudible 00:06:20].

William: Good luck.

Allen Beers: My advice is like, if you’re going out and you’re going to RFP and you know that you’re going to change systems or again, if you’re coming from spreadsheets and you’re going to buy a real system at this point, understand what it takes to stand up a system of that magnitude, especially when you’re thinking about Greenhouse. And you’ve probably bought on because you want the whole organization to be focused on hiring and diversity and inclusion, and it takes a change management plan to be able to implement that well. Not just from a systems and technology perspective, but from an overall adoption perspective for hiring managers, interviewers, even people who might just be referring folks through Greenhouse. So that’s my advice is if you’re going to stand up a new system be realistic about what the resources are that you need and if you don’t have them make a case to go out and hire them.

Because again, 2, 3, 4 years down the road, you’re going to be thanking yourself. I think the other thing that we’ve tried to do to help with that is our implementation team breaks it down up pretty clearly between things that are essential and things that you can focus on down the road with your customer success manager. And there’s a really strong handover process there. So there’s like, 10 or 15 things that are absolutely essential that our customer should do when they’re implementing. And then there’s all this other stuff that can become noise. And it’s nice to have, if you get to those other 70 things and you’ve got a strong implementation team on your side then sure go for it. But I think lasering in on the things that are essential that are going to get you stood up and get a strong foundation that’s what we tend to recommend through our project plans.

William: So I’ve been on record, Allen is saying, you can put a inferior product on a superior products process, but you can’t put a superior product on an inferior process. Meaning-

Allen Beers: I like that.

William: … if your process is broken, it doesn’t matter what technology you use. First of all, you’re a technology company. So I get that and I’m not talking about you. I’m just saying that if someone’s got a really, really good hiring process then they can have some inferior product. But if it’s broken, fundamentally between sourcing, hiring managers, recruiters, employer, branding, all the folks that have their hands in the till, if it’s broken, it doesn’t matter what technology that they buy. It’s my experience at least. And they think it’s a magic bullet, which is worse. They think, “We’ll bring in this technology and it’ll fix all of this fundamental brokenness that we have.” It’s like, “Eh, ish.” A, you used to do the process. So you’re steeped in the process, both at LinkedIn, before LinkedIn, and at Greenhouse, how do you talk to them about process?

Allen Beers: I think that really happens often when an organization buys a piece of technology as a, as a quick fix.

William: The silver bullet.

Allen Beers: Exactly. And I think that it’s about being honest and upfront with the customer that there’s actually change management to do within the organization if you want to get the outcomes that you desire with this. And sometimes from a vendor perspective or a partner perspective that takes guts. Because you don’t want to call a customer out and say, “Look, your recruiting processes aren’t working for you.” And that’s actually why you purchased a new system, but you-

William: See, Allen that’s where we diverge. I actually do want to call them out.

Allen Beers: You want to-

William: I actually do want to tell them, “Listen… I mean, I’m not in the same position so it would make sense for that, but I would actually want to have a frank discussion about response times and things like that where you can highlight where the process is broken. “Listen, let’s go through an audit and I’ll give you a health check.” It is in Betty’s process. It isn’t Jimmy’s process, doesn’t matter who’s process it, does it work or does it not work. And it’s pretty objective if it’s working or if it’s not. So I would rather personally, but that’s me as an outsider, I would rather have a frank discussion about the brokenness, because change management is, as you, it’s like double standards. Who owns change management, do they own change management, does the vendor partner, do they own change management, how does change management actually happen?

And no one’s got that figured out. There isn’t a company. Although I have to say outside of recruiting, I worked for Bombardier for a while as a consultant and they were rolling out success factors. So they purchased it and for a year, a whole year, calendar year, they worked on exactly what they wanted to do when they rolled it out. So for a year they planned the messaging, they planned how they wanted to do the role. And now they have 80,000 employees. So it made sense, but they took change management to a level that I’ve never seen. Because they brought-

Allen Beers: What’s the one thing they did differently that stood out to you.

William: Well planning. I mean, most, most folks it’s reactive as change management as a concept, it’s like, oh yeah, change management. Change management means that something broke and we have to change it. And so it’s reactive. Especially in that particular launch, they viewed change management as proactive not reactive. So they got in front of everything before anyone even saw success factors. They were cooking everything, all the reviews, everything that was happened, how they would roll it out, how they would get people to adopt more than adopt, how they would get people to love success factors. Because what I learned in that process is user adoption for them wasn’t the goal, the goal was user satisfaction. How do we get to the other side of user adoption? So they adopted, they’re using it. That’s great. That’s cute. However, we want them to actually be satisfied in their usage of software, which is-

Allen Beers: That’s why-

William: Well [inaudible 00:13:25].

Allen Beers: That’s why I love the topic of your workshop at Open. So talking about the collaboration between the recruiting team and hiring managers. Like hiring managers are a major focus of our business because of what you just described, often they’re the biggest key to success of this whole thing working you get what I’m talking about?

William: Or failure.

Allen Beers: Or failure. Well, you can get a recruiting team bought in to Greenhouse pretty quickly. It’s a great system.

William: Agreed.

Allen Beers: It does what it is needed to do. But if you can get a hiring manager to believe in the value of things like preparation, building strong alliances with recruiting, understanding their hiring needs, then they’re going to do the impactful things like fill out scorecards and start making data driven decisions like this is how the whole structured hiring thing really comes together. And change management during implementation and then in perpetuity starts to build a culture in that organization that says, “Hiring is a main part of your job and actually of your performance. It’s your success or failure in your role, depending on how well you hire and how much focus you’re putting on building strong teams.” And I think the same goes for people who interview often and contribute to hiring decisions. So that’s what we try to work on with our customers is, it’s about getting the recruitment teams brought in of course, but then getting beyond that to the folks who are also going to be using the system to do the hiring.

William: I love that. And what’s funny is you hit on something that’s an irritant of mine, but in a good way. And it’s the phrase go live. I mock that phrase in the sense of, there’s just no such thing. It’s an illusion because it’s relentless change management because you’re always going to have people leaving your attrition. You’re a new hiring managers, new recruiters, candidates are always coming and going and all that stuff. And there’s this arbitrary time when you turn things on, et cetera, and you train people, but that doesn’t stop. I think that’s one of the things that practitioners don’t fully understand is, again, it gets back to that concept. They buy technology to fix some other things and they think that, “Once it’s live, it’ll fix all my problems and I don’t have to do anything else.” It was like, “No, that’s when the work starts.”

Allen Beers: And it’s only going to get worse. I think with the way that we’re going and how things are progressing in the workforce. And actually, I don’t mean to say worse. I actually think better in the long run, but business and work and roles become a little bit more fluid and transient. So you’re going to have people coming in and out of your workforce and to your point that phrase go live tends to mean a lot less time.

William: And it should. It’s like, “We’re going to start, but this is when the work begins.” You had mentioned the bit I’m going to do at Open. It’s a fun bit. It’s basically role playing. So we’re going to have a recruiter and a hiring manager on stage and they’re going to sit back to back and they’re going to have to sell each other on the job and talk to each other. It’s interesting and they don’t pull people on stage and we’ll do the same thing. And it’s just going to be fun. It’s a fun bit. It’s a great learning exercise to see how people think. See the exact same thing, but see it so differently.

Allen Beers: I love that.

William: Which is the real world for everyone in recruiting and hiring. I’ve said, that hiring managers need to be just as adept inside technology like Greenhouse as recruiters are. And even though it’s not their full time job and they got to tell things pulling at them, if they want the hires and they want them in the timely manner that they want them, they’ve got to be just as good in the technology, which means that they’ve got to be trained and they fully understand it. And I’ve also said you’ve got to be into trouble, but I’ve also said that there needs to be death clocks on things. So bear with me. So if we’re passing over a slate of five candidates to a hiring manager, that’s milk, that has an expiration date. If they don’t do something with the milk, the milk expires. I mean, that’s obtuse.

Allen Beers: I mean, theoretically, they could make cheese.

William: You’re an optimist. I like that.

Allen Beers: [inaudible 00:18:29].

William: Yes, they could. However, most of the discourse that you have between recruiters and rub is, it’s a hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry and then wait. And that slate a candidates, especially in today’s market, that slate a candidates is gone. And so now you have to start over.

Allen Beers: It all goes back to what we said about change management though. Is if you have a group of hiring managers that are bought in and understand the process then those collaborative intake meetings they’ll push forward an expectation that when a slate of candidates come through, the expectation is that it’s reviewed in a timely manner. And that can be part of the process that you build as a recruitment team with your most frequent hiring managers. So I think all roads lead back to some of those early moments where you set expectations as a collaborative team.

William: I like that. And I like using the technology and the intake process because it’s a collaboration software at that point. We’ve actually, moved out of the ATS or even recruitment in some ways. We’re going to see, let’s see how we see the world the same way. And let’s make sure you’ve got 40 things on your list. That’s okay, let’s go through those and let’s make sure and delineate between the things that are nice to have, the things that are need to haves. And if we do that together, in fact, I got into trouble for this, but it was probably two years ago. But basically I was in front of an audience. It was before COVID. So it had to be more than two years. I got in front of an audience and I said, “Here’s how you work with hiring managers.” I said, “Who here has received the email with a job description attached and they ask you, go out and find these people?” And everyone’s raised there hand. And I said, “Here’s what you do with that email, delete it.”

Then email them, call them, Slack them, whatever, get in technology like Greenhouse and do an intake and build it together. Just literally take whatever they had delete it because it doesn’t matter, start over with something fresh with no scrape stuff from Career Builder or Indeed or whatever or any old failed job descriptions that were just laying around and just collaborate together. And-

Allen Beers: That’s right.

William: … if you do that then they’ll feel better about what you’re going out to search for and recruit for. And you’ll feel better about the things that you pass over to them.

Allen Beers: And we try to live a lot of those principles internally at Greenhouse as well. I think unless you’re doing that and drinking your own champagne, it’s hard to go and convince customers to do it. So-

William: Absolutely.

Allen Beers: … I mean, I’ve over the past year, I mean we’ve hired like 40, 50 people both externally, internally into CS. We’re growing like crazy. And one of my favorite moments is that intake meeting. It clears my mind. It lets me know that I have a partner in this journey and somebody that’s going to not only inform the process, but also challenge me. If you have a good recruitment team, they’re also going to challenge some of your assumptions about roles. They’re going to understand your attributes and the custom questions you typically ask that do or don’t get you the outcomes that you’re looking for.

So I look forward to those moments and each time building plans that are a little bit better incrementally. And then, at the end, when you’re doing a roundup and you’re trying to make some decisions, you know that you had that moment where everybody agreed that this is the criteria that’s going to get a strong hire.

William: That’s right.

Allen Beers: And when you start doubting yourself-

William: That’s right.

Allen Beers: … you can harken back to that intake meeting and say, “Look, we all agreed, we spent a lot of time on this and let’s give this person a shot and hire them.”

William: It’s funny because you’re teasing out the, “Listen, you go slow to go fast.” Let’s get this part right and we all see the world the same way. The world’s flat. Fantastic. We all see the same thing. Fantastic. Let’s do this. I think it enables confidence for everybody, sourcers, recruiters, hiring managers, like everyone understands exactly what the goal is. And I think that’s where we get sideways oftentimes is when we’re not on the same page. And so using Greenhouse and the intake function to then be able to say, “Let’s literally collaborate here. And everyone agree.” Like we won’t leave the meeting, we won’t leave the call until everyone is 100% on board and then done. Now everyone feels emboldened and confident to go out and do what they need to do in whatever roles that they are. I think that’s genius. You had mentioned structured interviews before. I believe even you said like, “You all have a strong stance, it’s really important to you, et cetera.” Take us into the world of structured interviews. What do you see these days?

Allen Beers: I mean, we talked about that intake meeting and setting up an interview plan that everybody believes in. One of the things that we’re doing actually internally right now with our CS team is we revamped a bunch of our core competencies. Over time a team evolves, the value of a team evolves, the type of person that you need in seat to be successful changes. And so we went through internally and we did a whole exercise where we looked at our current competencies and goals, we looked at how that related to questions that we asked as part of the interview plan, we looked at the attributes that we were rating candidates against both internally and externally. And we’re right in the middle of a process of making some pretty big changes to those interview kits.

I think you need to have an ongoing practice, organizations evolve rapidly, especially if you’re fast growth and the types of employees or the types of skill sets those employees might have, oftentimes change or evolve. So I think it’s really important to revisit your structured hiring process and your plan and the things embedded within it, because it might not be serving the new needs of the organization.

William: I love that. And what I love. First of all, I love that you all are evolving, because it just shows that you don’t rest like on what you did last year, what you did in the last position. You’re always trying to move the ball forward, which I just love. And it just shows how innovative you all are as a team, but also as a company. That you’re going to take mediocrity. You’re going to always going to try to improve the process and improve the position, et cetera.

Allen Beers: Well, it gives you an opportunity to call yourself out on your diversity as well. As you go through and you start evaluating those attributes and the questions you’re asking you start to say to yourself, “Does this serve our diversity goals or were we interviewing for homogeny?” And then you have to be honest with yourself. So I mean, we have a lot of customers that are going through that process now and you’ll probably hear a bunch of the anecdotes at Greenhouse open, but there’s some pretty cool examples of stuff customers are doing as they go through those self-reflection processes

William: While we talk about DEI, where do they struggle the most, in genera. So they know it’s important, we all know it’s important and maybe they woke up and they just haven’t done it and they haven’t done it well. What’s the biggest struggle for them to then get over the hump of actually really doing and really, really implementing a great DEI strategy.

Allen Beers: I mean, to start out on the positive, if you look at the data about half of our customers with access to demographic reports and Greenhouse recruiting have looked at them and leveraged them in the past 90 days and having worked with Greenhouse customers for almost seven years now, that’s really inspiring to me. You’re talking about thousands of customers and tens of thousands of employees out there in the workforce who want to know and prove that they’re making an impact. But I think, back to your analogy about the silver bullets, I think a lot of people they’re looking for like, what’s that killer feature that’s going to get the job done. And that doesn’t exist.

It’s an amalgamation of a bunch of different features and things and processes and mentalities that are going to get you the outcomes that you’re looking for with your diversity goals. But I think that that’s often the biggest downfall is you have some folks in the market who are looking at technology to fix some of those internal challenges. While it can help you enable and accelerate change, it really comes down to getting the buy in of your organization and really just putting the hard work in.

William: So what was that report called? What’s that feature?

Allen Beers: The demographic reports.

William: Demographic reports. So, Allen, I want to give you some advice, unsolicited, of course you can absolutely dismiss it as you probably should and will. So talk to your product person, your product lead, and put a reminder or an alert on that report in so far as if they haven’t looked at it in 20 days, they get an email or they get a text or whatever the bid is a reminder to look at the report.

Allen Beers: I won’t get too deep into product usage stuff. Because I’ll say things that are true and then my customer success can [inaudible 00:29:07].

William: Fair enough.

Allen Beers: You can set up reports to run automatically as well.

William: It’s like, you just basically make sure that those that aren’t looking at it or don’t set up the alerts, don’t set up those things. You almost force it in a sense of, “You should probably look at this. Here’s the report.”

Allen Beers: No, agreed. And I think if I’m channeling the product team, which they wouldn’t appreciate, there’s always a balance between nudging-

William: Yes.

Allen Beers: … and leaving people alone. But I agree. I think the more that you can shine a light on the results-

William: That’s right.

Allen Beers: … the more that you have a case internally to continue to focus on those programs. We have a customer, they’re an enterprise customer that we’re working with heavily. They’ll be at Open. They went from an 85 to 15 top of funnel split male versus female to like 60, 40, or somewhere around that. So there’s proof that the organization-

William: That’s nice.

Allen Beers: And that’s all top of funnel work. And there’s proof that if an organization does the hard work and puts the time in to make changes, the data will follow. And I think some other thing that people are doing, a lot of our customers are starting to lean into remote work as a way to accelerate their diversity goals. So you’re no longer bound to certain geographies that create-

William: Good point.

Allen Beers: … a homogenous as workforce. One of our customers had like 70% of all their roles hired to one office, their Redwood city office. And now it’s less than 20%. And that created really unique opportunities for revamping and executing on their DENI goals and what was even possible compared to the old paradigm. So DENI looks different depending on geography. So they have the opportunity to pull candidates now from places like North Carolina and Florida and Atlanta, which are becoming big pools of really strong talent for them. So it’s capitalizing on some of the changes that are going on societally that enable you to bolster these programs.

William: I love that. I think people just get busy, so I don’t think it’s ill or people have bad intentions. There’s evil people. Check. Got it. But I think sometimes people just get overwhelmed and they get busy and so they know it’s an important initiative. Then all of a sudden life happens. So you’re all doing just wonderful work and I can’t wait to hear some of the customer stories. Two questions left. One is I know you all do a lot of work and help people with hiring maturity, where they are in their process or their journey and what you see in industries or companies of their size and people that are scaling in the way that they scale. Take the audience into a little bit of what hiring maturity looks like these days.

Allen Beers: If you look at it through the lens of Greenhouse, there’s a bunch of things you can do in the app or a bunch of features that create outcomes. What we’ve tried to do is take that down from a list of 500 down to about 70 and say, “Look, if you’re doing these things on a regular basis and if you’ve configured the app in such a way, the likelihood that you have a more mature hiring organization is higher.” That’s essentially the crux of the maturity curve. So if you look at the range, it goes from chaotic to inconsistent and then systematic and then strategic. The vast majority of our customers are in the middle of the curve. They’re vacillating between inconsistent and systematic and actually a little bit higher on the systematic side, which is really encouraging.

But again, going back to what we talked about earlier, it starts in implementation and building that strong foundation, focusing on the right behaviors, focusing on the right types of usage. Then that has to perpetuate throughout the entirety of the relationship. To your earlier point you can’t stop at implementation and go live and say, “We’re good forever now.” As new people come into the organization, you have to continue to hammer on those principles and on those best practices so that, that flywheel effect continues to happen. So this is a concept that we’re starting to introduce to our customers slowly. We really wanted to make sure that we’re working with our data science team and saying things that are true. As you start to build models like this, there’s always the fear that you don’t want to give people that advice, but we’ve been working really hard for about two years now on looking at all these in-app behaviors and tying it back to what some of our most successful organizations are doing.

So our customer success team now, they’ll have a call with a customer and they’ll actually show them some of those behaviors and those adoption patterns. And they’ll say, “Look, you’re a strategic hiring organization. It’s something to be proud of and continue to accelerate on these things.” Or actually giving some data to be able to talk to a customer in a real way and say, “I think you might be on the chaotic side and here’s a couple of low hanging fruit changes you can make to become a more mature hiring organization.’ So it’s unlocked a license to be able to have those more real conversations with customers, which is pretty cool.

William: I love that. I love, love, love. Our last question. What are you looking forward to at Open? Because last time I guess we had one in person was ’19. So what are you looking forward to?

Allen Beers: I love the vibe. Like this time around I don’t have anything specific to do except meet with customers, which I love. So I’m going to be meandering around and talking to people, getting to digest a bunch of the sessions, the customer success team is running a ton of workshops and trainings during that time. So I’m just really looking forward to seeing my team do their thing. And then we’re going to be rolling out badging. So I think really, really strong organizations eventually build great L&D functions for their customers within the organization. And we’re starting to create the makings of that through a badging program. So you can take courses, mini quizzes, get badges on different types of skills and behaviors within Greenhouse and within hiring. Then down the road, who knows, maybe we try to do a certification at some point.

William: That is so awesome. Well, listen, Allenn, thank you so much for the time today through wisdom and I can’t wait to see you at Open and it’s just been wonderful. Thank you so much.

Allen Beers: This was so fun. Thanks, William. I’ll see you in a couple weeks.

William: Absolutely. And thanks everyone for listening to the Recruiting Daily Podcast until next time.