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In today's episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we welcome Jon Stross, Co-Founder and President of Greenhouse, a hiring operating system for people-first companies that enables fair and equitable hiring.

Jon shares his insights on the challenges companies face in hiring today, focusing on how to manage the influx of applications and leverage AI to make fairer, data-driven hiring decisions. He also explores the evolving landscape of recruiting in an increasingly digital world.

🎓 In this episode, Jon discusses:

1. How to manage overwhelming job applications with filters and spam prevention.

2. The impact of AI in streamlining hiring tasks like scheduling and resume reviews.

3. Using structured hiring to reduce bias and make fairer decisions.

4. Why a clear skills-based rubric is key to consistently hiring top talent.

Elevate your recruiting efficiency with AI

Ethical practices, DE&I and curiosity drive our AI advances at Greenhouse. AI can enhance the recruitment process by increasing efficiency, reducing bias and making the candidate experience more transparent.

Sometimes the best candidate is hiding in your blind spot, but what if instead of missing out on them, AI could zero in on their potential?

Dive into this blog to learn the practical ways AI can work with your recruiting team to automate mundane tasks, create compelling job descriptions, manage interviews and ultimately uncover hidden talent, while ensuring your hiring process remains fair and inclusive.

Jon Stross 0:00

Fair hiring, great hiring, are kind of the same thing. And so we didn't get into it from a purely moral point of view, to say this is the right thing to do. You should be this way. We got to have said, Listen, if you're hiring and you're making decisions not based on whether somebody can do the job, but based on their identity, you're removing a whole big part of the pool, or you're giving people credit that they don't deserve. And so we've always thought, if we can reduce bias, that actually helps you make better decisions.

Chris Rainey 0:33

Joe, welcome to the show. How are you?

Jon Stross 0:35

I'm good. Thanks for having me. Nice

Chris Rainey 0:37

to see you again, obviously, like twice in two weeks now, so you're probably sick of seeing me

Jon Stross 0:46

all good before

Chris Rainey 0:47

we jump in. You know, greenhouse has been a great partner for us for many years, and we've had many of your amazing team members and clients on the show, but we finally got you. So it's great. We don't think I'm hard to get,

Jon Stross 1:00

but I'm glad we finally did it. I'm

Chris Rainey 1:02

only joking. I'm on your plane. Tell everyone a little bit more about your personal background and the journey to where we are now with greenhouse. Yeah.

Jon Stross 1:11

So personally, I have a long history in product development. The main company I worked at for a long time was company called Baby Center, so website for new and expectant parents, and so I was there back in the early internet days in the 90s, and I did a second stint there, doing the international rollout of it. And so I found myself having to hire a pregnancy editor in like China and India and Russia and Brazil and 20 other countries. And eventually created this whole system to do it, where we hired just the most wonderful people, and realized that if you could consistently, quickly hire the best people, it's kind of the best weapon in business. And so, you know, as you talk to friends who are running companies, everybody would say, oh, yeah, hiring is one of my biggest challenges. And say, Well, what are you doing about that? And they would usually say, kind of gibberish, or, like, no, like, you need to build the machine that we had a baby center, or my co founder had built at lab 49 his company. And so we realized that there's real opportunity that as a company's light bulb goes on and says hiring is not merely an administrative function that should be managed for cost. It's a strategic function that you go to win as a business. If you can win at hiring, you approach it really differently. And we said, well, if a company had that mindset, what would they want to do? How would they want to hire differently, and what tools would they need? And that was kind of the genesis of greenhouse so now it's been 12 years, and I run kind of product and engineering and customer side in you know, we've grown quite a bit from real company. What

Chris Rainey 2:40

was your background, though, at the time, in terms of the role, your skill set, like, you know, what was there before?

Jon Stross 2:44

I mean, so I was a product manager for most of my career, right at Baby Center and a couple other companies. And then when we started greenhouse, you know, as an entrepreneur, you have to do a little bit everything, yeah, and so that for years, I've done, I've done most of the jobs at the company, I'd say. But now I still kind of focus a lot on product

Chris Rainey 3:04

first love. During our last conversation, we spoke about quite a lot of things, and was talking about this podcast, and one of the things that came up as a theme, and I also keep hearing, is how companies right now are flooded with applications. And I'm hearing from all angles, because you talked a bit more about that kind of, what was the cause of that, and some of the ways helping to solve that?

Jon Stross 3:28

Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably two big trends. I think one is economic where people have realized, like, especially the tech companies professional hiring, that we're serving, the economy slowed down. There's been a lot of layoffs. And so when companies are hiring, there's just that supply and demand, there's that many more applicants, and then the ability to apply to more jobs, it's just gotten easier and easier, right? So whether that's from, you know, it used to be back in the day, right? You had to look in your local newspaper and like circle in the fine hat, right? And now you can go to like indeed, and you can see, here's every job, right? And you don't have to just apply to the jobs in your area. You can apply to any of these, any big companies also hiring remote. And now AI comes along, and it makes it that much easier to apply to jobs, even personalize your resume. And so all of these things are making it that much easier to apply. And so then I think people are feeling this anxiety, like, if I only apply to five jobs, it's probably not going to work out, so I have to apply to 100 so if everyone optimizes for themselves as a candidate, it kind of breaks the overall system of having everybody's applying to 100 jobs, and now companies are just flooded with resumes. And then there's more spam, there's more scams. Like, there's a lot of bad behavior out there on both sides, unfortunately, and so I think it's, it's all getting worse right now, is absolutely what we hear from both sides. Yeah, of Canada's end company.

Chris Rainey 4:49

And also, like, you don't even have to write a CV anymore, right? Because, you know, things like LinkedIn will take your profile, turn it into a CV. You press a button, you're applied right? Or now people using AI. Me to write their CVs absolutely as well. So it's just gone everything, because it's exponentially gotten easier, absolutely, to be able to do that. So what are some of the ways that that you're you're helping companies then, yeah, I mean,

Jon Stross 5:15

so on the company side, I think there's a couple of different tools we've rolled out just recently, and we're seeing really aggressive adoption. Usually drill out a new feature, and it takes a while for people to adopt it. The things we've rolled out recently, it's like whoa. As the charts are just like off the charts. So there's some very kind of straightforward things around duplicate applications and spam. So duplicate applications, we're seeing some companies, especially popular companies. 50% of the applicants, applications they're getting are duplicates, meaning the same candidates applying over and over again, whether it's for the same job, they're supplying to different jobs. And so we put in more rules where the company can say, Listen, I'm only going to take a certain amount of applications

Chris Rainey 5:56

per month from a candidate. Is that common? So it's common for people to apply for multiple different jobs in the same company,

Jon Stross 6:03

yeah. And then every

Chris Rainey 6:05

day, interesting.

Jon Stross 6:06

And so just by saying, Listen, you can apply twice a month. Okay, we're seeing hundreds of 1000s of job applications actually being deferred. And so they're not being fully rejected, because they still got those two applications in. The other thing is just spam, right? Where there's more and more bots out there who are just like spamming. And so we put in more, like kasha, and we try to make it really easy for actual people and really hard for the machines. And we're seeing hundreds of 1000s in the last 30 days of applications that would have come in that didn't. And so that actually what's

Chris Rainey 6:33

the, what's the motivation behind the bots? So the bots are implying on people's behalf. So there's companies creating a service whether you pay them and they their bot sent it everywhere. What is the reason behind that? Just random question, but

Jon Stross 6:45

probably, probably some version of all of those things, okay,

Chris Rainey 6:50

all right, I've never heard that. Okay.

Jon Stross 6:52

We've always seen things in the past where somebody will get mad at one company and they're like, I'm gonna stand with 100,000 in a minute, right? So there's like, all sorts of different reasons that people are using bots out there, and so we're just trying to separate the bots from the humans a bit. And then the main thing is just adding more filtering to our application review process. So when somebody applies, historically, we've always had we call app review, where you have a pile of resumes, and you go through and it's like Tinder, right? It's essentially one click, advance this person, reject the person, and send them an email. And folks are saying, you know, if it was one thing to go do that when I had 100 applications, but if I get 1000 applications, I don't want to go through and do that for all of them. And so we're now servicing here's every piece of information you know about that candidate, from their source to any of the custom questions you asked on the job application to we can pluck things off of the job descriptions. I hear as much of the key things on the job description that you want to filter on. And the key thing that people are saying is everyone's very nervous. If we just use AI and did it for them, if we just said, listen, we're just going to run a matching algorithm between the job description and the resume and decide who to bring to the top. There's a legal things coming that people, that makes people really nervous. There's a lot of folks are like, I couldn't buy a slip in there. And so we've tried to do, or what we've done is made it so that companies can, like, you're in control. You're saying, here are the filters I want to use. It's very clear. I use these five filters to go from 800 applicants to 50. And now I'm going to actually hand go through each of those 50, and then we'll store all that. So if you ever get audited, you have all that. And so that's where we're trying to kind of thread this needle, where people are saying, I need to sort through these applications quickly, but it also has to be fairly and it can't be

Chris Rainey 8:30

opaque. Yeah, do you think we'll get to the point where we trust the AI algorithm to do that?

Jon Stross 8:37

I think that. I think there's some folks who've probably trusted already. I think that there will be legal challenges to it. Yeah, right. I think that is, I think it's analogous in the US, we have the thing called the Fair Credit Reporting Act, where they said, you know, for your credit score, which determines whether you can buy a house or a car, can't be opaque, and so they said it has to be clear what your credit score is and why. And I think there will be kind of similar stuff in the US where, and even the EU AI act that's coming to you where, like, you're gonna have to be transparent about how you're making decisions, both internally and externally, and so fully outsourcing into the AI is probably not, even though I'm sure it'll get better and better. I'm not sure that's the path that everybody comfortable with.

Chris Rainey 9:22

Yeah, is a challenging one, though, right? Because we, we know that it can reduce bias. Because if you give, you know, a human being a bunch of filters, they're going to filter it with bias. No, we all have bias,

Jon Stross 9:36

that's right. And so, like, a human's about bias, if you're, if you're doing machines trained on the historical human decisions, and you're just amplifying that bias. That's right? And so, so, you know, we actually just as part of the app review, we now have anonymized app review where we can actually go and parse the resume, and we can hide various fields. So we're doing things to try to combat the bias there. But I think the. Where it's totally out of your control. It gets people

Chris Rainey 10:02

nervous, yeah, as we talk about AI, we can't, you know, we can't, not talk about this topic right now. What are biggest ways you mentioned a few that you feel that AI is going to impact candidate experience? What some of the other things that you're seeing?

Jon Stross 10:15

There's some, like, obvious things that have they really like, you know, use chatgpt And you're like, all right, it can write things so it can write your resume. Can write the job description. Job Description. They can write all those outbound emails. And so those are all like, fairly or you can write interview questions. Those are pretty straightforward use cases that I think are here or coming. And then there's the decision making thing, which case everybody really nervous, but I think there's a bunch of other use cases that are more subtle that may end up being as profound or better. So I just mentioned, like, anonymized resume review, the thing where, like, you can now parse resumes really accurately using the LLM. We had, like a commercial parser we used for years and years. That was okay. We rolled our own off an LLM, and, like, it's way more accurate. And so we can now do anonymized resume review. We have, like, a job similarity model, where we can say, hey, this job at this company is very similar based on the title and job description to these jobs at 1000 other companies. So you provide benchmarks, right? There's a whole summarization use case where you know you can summarize, here's everything we know about this candidate, why we want to make the offer, and it writes the three paragraph email that you send out for approval. There's all these automation use cases around say, scheduling is the obvious one, where scheduling interviews is a whole big pain, and it's not merely a math problem of Tetris putting people kind of in open slots. There's also some like trying to figure out, what are you allowed to schedule over? What are you not allowed to schedule over? That's a little bit fuzzier, and that's where it's actually really helpful. And so I think that you know, generally, the model of assuming that people will go to chatgpt and type stuff in and that'll change their job. Most people aren't doing that. I think what we're seeing is that the way AI is actually going to get used in the near term, at least, is people using the same tools they were already using, doing the same functions they were already doing, but now it's just made better with AI. So yeah, it's just yeah, to be like, the comical example is Google, right? Like, we all Google search for 20 years, and then one day it just started doing auto complete. Like, oh, that's pretty helpful. And we didn't do it. We didn't, we didn't get trained on it, right? It was just there. Like, it, you didn't use it, you know? And so I think that's what's happening, is every SAS tool is just integrating AI in ways that are obvious or not obvious, and that's how people are actually gonna adopt AI in the near term. More than convincing people to go to chatgpt and type stuff in and copy and paste it back into their world.

Chris Rainey 12:35

Random question. But what some of the ways that you use chatgpt as a co founder to pay the CEO, etc. Yes,

Jon Stross 12:45

I'm, like, fascinated with the question I ask people all the time. For me, I would say the most meaningful things is brainstorming. Like, it's sometimes hard to start from blank sheet paper. Or what I find is I'll start from a blank sheet of paper, and then I'll validate it by going and typing in chat GBT and say, Hey, what did I miss? Oh, well, I did. I

Chris Rainey 13:04

love the what did I miss part, yeah. And

Jon Stross 13:06

so, like, Yeah, I did. Yesterday I was, I was writing a presentation on, like, a very specific vertical of, like, here's how they hire, and here's all the ways, and the greenhouse helps them hire. And I used to say, is there anything I'm missing about how they hire? And out of the 12 things that said one, I was like, Oh, that's a good one. I'm gonna add that, you know,

Chris Rainey 13:24

yeah, it's so cool. Yeah, I'm similar to you. I use it because, as you said, sometimes the hardest thing is, like, to when you get started with a blank sheet of paper, to prefer an idea in there, an idea in there, to give you, like, a first draft, yeah? And you kind of make it your own. It's like, oh, that saves me hours, yeah, why? When I was

Jon Stross 13:43

hiring, I was hiring executive, and I was like, I know, I think there's a couple different versions of how this role could be okay. And so I asked that, like, what are different types of, you know, this role? And it gave me, like, here's five different personas that you could hire. And so that was out doing, like, informational interviews with people, and they're like, Wow, yeah, you seem to have a good model of how this role could go. Like, it just kind of accelerated my learning about that role. Yeah, questions I found, you know, if I know, like, on this interview, I want to test for this one specific attribute or this skill, give me five ways to ask for that. Like, it's better than a blank sheet of paper, right?

Chris Rainey 14:19

So funny. I literally did that this morning. So we had this morning, and I was stuck in traffic, and I sent Shane. He was like, Oh, can you send me some interview questions? And I did exactly what you just said. These are amazing. And I was like, yeah, yeah, amazing we're adding

Jon Stross 14:38

into our product. Because it's like, it's such a blank sheet of paper problem, they're still human in the loop. So if it generates five questions, you're like, that one's dumb. It's like, then don't use it like, we're just giving it to you. Like, these are options of which question for you to ask. And so I think it's like a really good use of

Chris Rainey 14:53

AI, yeah. What your thoughts on I see a lot of companies introducing now the sort of AI for using AI's to do. First Stage interviews, whether it's whereas, you know, where it's just a bot itself, or it's sort of an augmented person, yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

Jon Stross 15:09

I personally haven't experimented with it. I'm all into innovation, so I'm like, I think people should try it. Let's see. You know, I don't, I don't personally have a strong opinion yet that it's a good or bad idea. I think there's something to be said that, like, I think early phase that where it may in some ways be better actually, even from the candidate perspective. But I can also imagine a candidate not liking it. I hear a lot of candidate complaints about the video interviewing. They don't like that because of some agency to actually chat and ask questions, like, maybe that's helpful? Yeah. So

Chris Rainey 15:44

I think where I see tutorials I speak to that's that love it are the ones typically in companies that have a large workforce of frontline workers, and they're hiring scale, so they want to use something like that to say, you know, do you have a driver license? Because, by the way, it's a driving role, just

Jon Stross 16:02

like, what? Just what shifts Can you work, right? When they 100% Yeah, qualifications are really objective, right? And they're just, like, structured data, then, like that. Can work really fast and be really efficient. You don't have to read scheduling with humans. You can just get through it. I think if you're like the knowledge worker, where you're like, want to be hired for your creativity, you're like, hey, this bot can't do that, so that makes it worse. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 16:24

what some of the challenges you're hearing from customers right now?

Jon Stross 16:29

I mean, I think that besides the like influx of applicants, I think generally people are saying, we're hiring less, we have smaller teams, but more applicants, we can handle the complexity of a lot of the two of a lot of tools, and so they're being asked to do more with less, and that's really challenging. Folks.

Chris Rainey 16:51

Yeah, you know,

Jon Stross 16:52

I think that's a very common thing that we're hearing. I think a common is sort of counterintuitive, but a common thing that happens, like when there is an influx of candidates, is that hiring managers actually make decisions slower because you can, you're like, Oh, I'll wait for the next person. Maybe that would get somebody better. So sometimes roles and so it's a very everybody I've talked to who's been in recruiting for 30 years, it's like, oh, this happens every time is that job market slows down, there's way more applicants. And you'd be like, Oh, it's so much easier to hire because there's so many candidates we could move candidates, we could move really fast. And it's like, no, you move slower. And there's this frustration that, like hiring managers move slower because they want to see more people.

Chris Rainey 17:29

Well, what I'm seeing happening in a lot of teams, I'm not sure if you're seeing this is, as they invest in technology in this space, there's an assumption for the business that they now can cut head head count in those functions. So they're saying, you know, and there is some, you know, obviously truth to that, but I'm saying, you go a bit too far. And I mean, and in private, I'm having conversations with many of these leaders who are super frustrated, and saying, hey, you know, invested in this tool now. I'm like, you know, my budget's been halved, and my team's been halved, and I'm expecting to do more with less, and it's a bit

Jon Stross 18:00

more. The goals have changed, right? So if you were in, you know, most of the history of our company, or especially 2021 like, kind of, in the run up after covid, hiring was so competitive, and companies were like, Hey, we gotta win at hiring, yeah. And so it's not about so, like, the goal, if you ask the CEO, like, what would be the best thing that could happen? They wouldn't say, I wish my hiring budget was 20% lower. They'd say, I wish we could hire faster. I wish we hired more predictably. I wish we could get the best people. It would all be about quality, right? And say, like, oh my gosh, we can do really well. That's super valuable. Yeah? In this moment where people are like, Oh, we're hiring a lot less. They're like, yeah, cut budget. And so that's a painful moment, right? As a recruiter, where you're like, hey, wait, why are we not as valued as we were a year or two ago? And so that's very painful. Yeah, how

Chris Rainey 18:54

do you think this is going to shape the skills that companies require in the talent function? Because you know, as we moved more and more away from the traditional recruiting skills, it's

Jon Stross 19:06

a good question. I think that like, fundamentally, the ability to like, connect with a candidate and learn who they are and convince them take the job, is probably at the root of the job and isn't going anywhere, right? I think that all the organizational stuff from, like, say, you know, administrative stuff, scheduling, like, all of that, is gonna soon get better and better, yeah, but the ability to, like, build your relationship with with your hiring managers, and really, truly understand what would succeed in this role, and then the ability to understand that from a candidate, I think that's still a real thing their careers have to do.

Chris Rainey 19:50

Well, you know, one of the great things that I've seen, even my own team, is these tools are freeing them up to have more meaningful conversations, to spend more time with. Our clients to be more productive, and removing a lot of that. We were, yeah, we was talking about the same thing HR, and moving the administrative burden that they have to be more strategic. But then we had a panel the other day, and they were like, but you then need to train and upskill your team to be more strategic. Like, it's not just going to happen

Jon Stross 20:20

making a living doing like, running around, doing business. Doing administrative work and just keeping the trains on the tracks right. And like, yeah, like, that may be valued less, but I don't know, for me, like, I we've been doing much executive hiring recently, and I'm always struck by, you know, we have a recruiter in house who manages those roles and like, she's a competitive advantage for our company. Like all the candidates say it right and as such, trust that, like, she's finding the right people and convincing them, I'm like that, like she's worth her weight in gold, you know? Like, I don't think that's anytime soon. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 20:50

one of the other big things, he keeps coming home Sure. You know, many companies are working with moving towards being skills based organizations. Love to hear your thoughts and perspectives. I'm sort of deeply rooted in some of the What are you doing? And I'm sure

Jon Stross 21:05

I'll admit I was frequently, like, flummoxed by that. I was like, well, right? What's the alternative? The thing we talking about for a long time of structured hiring is, like, you should have a really clear rubric of what you're looking for, right? Whether it's experiences or skills or personality traits, and then you should run an interview process that explicitly tests for those things. And so I think in one way, in one sense, the notion of skills based hiring is, if you have all that rubric, you should tilt it towards more skills and less credentials. Which is it? That's great. I think that's fine. I think we, you know, we've done a bunch of that. I do think that there's some companies who have taken skills based hiring and just used it as a shortcut to say, let's remove the college requirement. And it becomes just kind of the virtue signaling of, like, we'll remove that college requirement. Are we doing skills based hiring and are like, no, like, you actually have to do, like, follow through and do the whole work of, like, really being clear about what skills does it take to succeed in this role, and how do we assess if, if a candidate actually has those skills, which I think is a great thing, which we've been trying to get people to do for the last 12 years. You know, I'm just saying,

Chris Rainey 22:13

like, there's so many different approaches to this, though, the different organizations taken, and it's bit of a that's, that's one of the big challenges I'm hearing from CHROs, they don't know what is the right approach to take. I mean, yeah, I mean,

Jon Stross 22:24

I think there's some high profile companies I've heard of who are really advanced, and they're like, Oh, we've, like, we've mapped all of our current employee skills. We're able to do all of our internal hiring. We're able to match it to projects so that we can look at our sales pipeline, understand all the projects we're about to sell, and what skills we need, and do we have those skills? And they've integrated the whole company around it like that is really impressive. Most companies I talk to are a million miles from that. And so we talked to most companies, and we're like, why don't you start with a clear rubric of what skills you think you need in this job, and how would you assess for those skills the interview process? And then can you make decisions based on those? If you have that, why don't you move it forward and then go into performance management and say, Are you still are you assessing whether somebody's succeeding the role based on those same skills? Yeah, I'll say it's it's always shocking to me how frequently I talk to companies and say, what's the overlap between the rubric you use to hire someone in the rubric you use to measure their performance in the job? I never thought about that way? Yeah, there's no overlap. Really. That's crazy. How is that like, come on, like, those things should be pretty related to each other, right? Yeah.

Chris Rainey 23:29

And I think that what I'm seeing is, by the time some of these companies and this somebody come up recently, doing one of our podcasts, they've gone through that skills mapping process. It's taken so long that the requirements, the skills have changed. Process, yeah. So if you do the whole like,

Jon Stross 23:44

Hey, we're gonna bring in consultants and do a whole exactly competency model of all these roles, like, if you're writing the same role over and over again at high volume for a long time, like, that's great, right? I think the thing that we you know, ethically, we have within our product is very much like, this can't be, like, just a serial thing where, like, you figure it out once, and then you execute the interviews, and then you're done. It's like, this is an iterative thing you're gonna do over and over again. So don't let the perfect be the enemy. That good, like, start somewhere and then learn over time and realize, ooh, you know what we were testing for, things that weren't, weren't relevant, ultimately, and we can go back and change that interview process for the next time. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 24:23

how do you we're seeing a lot more companies look to, sort of the gig economy and outsourcing, and it's becoming more and more common now. I'd love to hear kind of your thoughts on that and how that the future of your product and greenhouse, perhaps, maybe we could integrate in different platforms and tools like that. Yeah,

Jon Stross 24:44

yeah. It's really It's interesting. We're seeing folks changing the makeup of between full time and part time contractor and numbers in front of me. But it's real that said, like it's still. Ends up being a structured process and maybe shorter or more abbreviated, right? And so people, we still see people, are still using greenhouse for the same things. They're just saying, Hey, this is going to be a contract or a part time role. It creates complexity, and like when you push it over into the downstream system, whether it's workday or whoever, there's much more complexity in that integration, because it may be not just they're classified differently, but a lot of people are doing rehires, where you hire the same person over and over again, and so we're seeing all this complexity around that. But I don't, I don't have a strong, like, economic thing. I was like, here's where we're going with, like,

Chris Rainey 25:38

yeah, contract work. I'm

Jon Stross 25:40

like, I don't know, like, I read all the same articles. I'm curious as to where it's gonna go. And those

Chris Rainey 25:46

worlds ever collide, where you have, like, some type of integration we have, like an Upwork, or, like a fiver, and it brings that talent pool into your system somehow, probably just makes no sense at all. But I just Yeah,

Jon Stross 26:01

no, I think I don't know off the top of my head, I'm probably somebody's gonna say, Yeah, John, we have integrations with all of those folks. I mean, typically they're people, how cool. And we have like, 100 integrations for just for sourcing alone, where companies are finding candidates in various different places, or talent pools then bring them into greenhouse to do the evaluation process. So I'm guessing those folks are in there. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 26:27

what we one of the things that taking, obviously a bit of a, you know, there's a lot of di backlash right now. I know that something was core and privilege with a product, something that actually one of the reasons I first came across your platform with Donald, your former CPO, who was a great advocate, and you're very well known for the incredible work in dei space. How do you see that evolving?

Jon Stross 26:55

Yes, I think that our point from the beginning, we've been doing this for many, many years now, long before it was cool or something. And our point was that fair hiring and great hiring are kind of the same thing, and so we didn't get into it from a purely moral point of view, to say, this is the right thing to do. You should be this way. We got to have said, Listen, if you're hiring and you're making decisions not based on whether somebody knew the job, but based on their identity, you're like, you know, you're removing a whole big part of the pool, or you're giving people credit that they don't deserve. And so we've always thought, if we can reduce bias, that actually helps you make better decisions. Now the political winds have gone, you know, back and forth, but I think we look and say that actually still true. I don't, I don't think any of that has changed. And interestingly, what we see is there are people on alternate sides of that perspective who all use greenhouse because they say, yeah, it helps me make fair decisions. And we're all for that. And so it has turned into this whole political mess, but generally I don't. We don't engage with that so much. We're saying, Hey, do you want to be more fair? And most people say, Yeah, I'd like to be more fair. We say, great. So here's a whole bunch of really tactical things you can do to have a more structured process to make a more database decision.

Chris Rainey 28:16

I think, to your point, now you have the data before we didn't have the data to be able to do that, we looked at, kind of, everyone looked at Dei. It's a very fluffy topic. Now they're becoming very much data driven, yeah, or people looked at it as a

Jon Stross 28:34

Can we check the box, right? Can we just like, Yeah, you know, can we just check the box or do the virtual signaling thing, right? And now I think people are realizing it's like, oh, it's not about that. Like, that didn't solve any of the problems, and it just upset people. Why don't we start with, like, how do you actually structure a process to ensure that you're making decisions based on whether somebody can do the job, and not purely on their identity? And a lot of people from both sides can get behind that. And so that's really where we're engaged. And then we're seeing things like they're exposing on the candidate side. There's features we did around when a candidate goes to apply, or even after the application, when they're going to, like, provide their availability. We'll ask for the candidates pronouns and

Chris Rainey 29:18

pronunciation. Oh, pronunciation. Interesting? Yeah,

Jon Stross 29:21

they record the pronunciation of their name and the stories we hear from candidates who are like, Oh, it's such a signal that you're going to treat me with consider, you know, considerately. And it's not politically correct, like, it's not a controversial thing. It's just a really easy way to signal it. Like, yeah, we're going to treat you with some consideration. And candidates really appreciate, and changes who applies or changes who stays in the in the role. And so I think that process change like that, where we can just make it really easy for our customers to be more considerate. I think is, is a really powerful thing that people really appreciate. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 29:55

what would you say is, like, common misconception? I. Uh, people have about around platforms like your own, an organization, because that, like every day, there seems to be a new company popping up, which is why, again, one of the challenges for the leaders that we serve and to come on the show, yeah, what was some of the misconceptions that you, that you come across? Um, that's

Jon Stross 30:18

a good question, misconceptions about the category or about greenhouse I think that, like, I

Chris Rainey 30:24

mean the Calgary, I mean category overall, yeah. I mean overall, yeah.

Jon Stross 30:28

I think the biggest one is that it's is the most important thing to find, is the one that's cheapest. I think that. I think what people, the misconception people have, is they look and say, Oh, wow. It's like, you know, it's a bunch of money to buy this tool, and it's like, whoa, what's the value of what you're about to go do with it? What's the value of hiring? Like, how much money you're about to spend on these new employees, and what's the value of getting it right or wrong? Yeah, and so I always think is that the ROI is, like, fuzzy. It's hard to know quality of hire. It's hard to know, you know, like, it can be really tricky to have a really crisp ROI calculation. That doesn't mean the ROA is small. It's actually giant. And so I think that's the big misconception. Is people underestimate how valuable it is to get good at hiring and how disaster it is to be bad at hiring. And when you look at all the money you spend on your recruiting team, your LinkedIn licenses, indeed, all these different things your agency spend. The cost ATS is actually a tiny, tiny percentage of that overall thing. And so whenever people come in, they're like, price shopping or, what do you think you're doing? Like, how much better would we have to help you for to extra $4,000 for your ATS? Oh, my god, yeah, you know it means, I think that's the thing that people, people miss, especially recruits. They don't know how to quantify the value of great hiring for their CFOs. Yeah.

Chris Rainey 31:49

Is there also a fear for them? Is there a fear related for their, like, their role being replaced, or, like, a fear of bringing in the technology into the business?

Jon Stross 32:00

Probably now with the AI, means that's, like, the popular like thing that's out, like, oh, I use AI. Is that going to cost you my job? And, like, has that happened? Yeah, you know, like, you see

Chris Rainey 32:12

all these LinkedIn articles about recruiters being replaced by AI. It's kind of pop, you know, I think every day. Yeah,

Jon Stross 32:22

sure. But like, let's say that's on the continuum of, like, technology, right? Like recruiters used to have just working in pen and paper. Then they had spreadsheets and they had basic ATS, is now they have better ATS, like, so yes, you're going to get more efficient, and that probably does change the workforce, but evolve. But yeah, to your earlier point, like, that's how you got involved and like, be valuable. I still think the difference in a good and a great recruiter is getting bigger, not smaller. What would

Chris Rainey 32:49

really help? I know you wasn't playing lasting answering this question, but I think what would really help our audience is if, when they're considering an ATS and they're looking at the different platforms out there, yeah, what are some questions they should ask? What are some really important questions they should because they're like, Oh, you you've all got similar, you know, features and benefits, and the price isn't, you know, too far apart. And then they're like, how do I choose? Yeah, what are some in your you know, you know, all of these platforms. So no questions if he was, if you was a CPO CHRO, and he was considering new Ts, what are the main questions that

Jon Stross 33:24

you think, right? So I think, well, a couple things. I say. One is, I wouldn't really start from, like, what's the best tool I would start from, what am I trying to accomplish? Great, fantastic. What's the vision in my head that I'm trying like, What would success look like? Which isn't about the tool, it's like, you know what would get me promoted in here myself? Yeah, and so is it that I'm trying to have a great candidate experience? Is I'm trying to create more fairness? Is it that I want to have better data and reporting and be more accountable to the business? Is it that I want to save money in sourcing? Like, there's lots of different things. And so I think that you got to start from the perspective of, like, what's your vision of where you're trying to get to, and then say, well, what would it take to get there, right? What would it what would I need to get there? That's ideal. That's how I think people should start. Many people don't, right? They just go and they take five demos from five different companies, and they have a big feature matrix, they try to work out who have features, and it gets really confusing and overwhelming, right? So people, when they ask me, and they say, Well, John Green has been a big leader, a lot of people use greenhouse or whatever. Like, why? Like, what is it? And what I typically say is that the the feature made, like, yeah, we have lots of great features. And I'm sure if you do the feature matrix, you'll find lots of stuff that we have. Lots of stuff that we have that other people don't. And that's not the story. Actually, the actual thing that we see, of the reason that you see people buy greenhouse over and over again, like a recruiter, go job to job and just buy us at each one, is they say, once we got people up on this tool, and they realize. Is how to play their role, meaning hiring managers, interviewers, approvers, instead of every happening, everything happening offline, and the recruiter logs into the ATS. Suddenly, everyone's doing their job in the ATS. Everybody's saying, like, it's easier for me as an interviewer to get an interview kit in greenhouse and felt a scorecard there than not doing the offline thing. Where we do it by email is actually worse. And then you get down to that decision making process, and all the data is there, and you sit together and you make that decision, you realize, wow, we're making a decision based on a shared understanding of what the role was. And so usually takes, like, one or two loops through that, and people go, Oh, this has changed the culture of how we hire like and I'm never going back to the old world where I have to go nag everyone to do everything, and yeah, that's never on anybody's RFP. It's everybody's feature matrix. The like is there no nagging? It's like, no, no. But this, this is the actual thing of why I think we've been very successful in the market, is companies say it's ultimately changed our culture of how we actually work together around hiring. And I didn't think that would have been possible, and I wouldn't have believed you if you told me that at the beginning, but now I've seen it. I totally believe it.

Chris Rainey 36:07

Yeah, that's the hard that's the hardest part, absolutely

Jon Stross 36:11

right. But, like, but once you get there, you realize, like, oh, okay, if everybody understands their role, understands how to play their part, now we can do this whole structure and everything we can say. So what is so skills based hiring like, what? Let's think really hard at the beginning and actually get the hiring manager to engage and say, what would it take to succeed in this role? Because usually they just blow it off, right? And they're like, I don't know. Go to indeed, and copy it from our competitors and put that in there. I get some candidates right, and they skip that whole process, yeah, once they actually understand, like, Oh, if I invest an hour at the beginning using my brain parts to think really hard about what was exceeding this role that dictates all those interviews from everybody is now going to do much better interviews. And we get down to decision making, we'll make much better decisions. And like, people don't realize you can get that out of your ATS, like, that's actually what you get when you buy us

Chris Rainey 37:04

and in the data, and they're the ones that are going to end up with the great talent on their team. They're like, I need to do that again. That really worked.

Jon Stross 37:13

And, like, and then the candidates notice it too, right? Is, like, how many candidates will go through a process? And they're like, Yeah, they've asked me a bunch of irrelevant, illegal, duplicative questions, and Lord knows how they made that decision, versus a company, and it's like, oh, they had a very clear idea of what they're looking for, and they had a really strategic process, but what they were asking, and it was challenging, but it was fair. As a candidate, you're like, that's where I want to work. And so you interview one of those companies. You're like, oh, my god, that's amazing. Like, I want to work at a company that's that thoughtful. And you go to one of normal companies who treats you terribly, and you're like, if that's how they treat me when they're trying to sell me, how do you think they're going to treat me when I'm an employee? And this is the thing that we're seeing. This is a big thing that we're working on now, is we're seeing the candidates are noticing the candidates. It's, you know, used to just Glassdoor. Now candidates are looking and they're saying, we see how you treat us in the interview process. We see how you treat us in the job application. So we get so much stuff on LinkedIn from candidates saying, Oh, I so appreciate it when companies use greenhouse, because you make it really easy to apply. And I really don't appreciate it when they use that other tool name, who? Who makes you write your whole resume over and over again. You have to retype everything. They're just like, I don't want to work at a company that cares about me that little if they force me to do that. And so that's where I think that the candidate there's going to be more and more accountability. So some of the stuff we're working on is around exposing more to the candidates because they really care. It's

Chris Rainey 38:37

so interesting because I think most companies don't think, or maybe they don't consider the impact of their ATS on as a reflection of their culture.

Jon Stross 38:49

I would have never imagined that something 10 years ago or whatever like, I don't think that was a thing. Yeah. I think absolutely a thing right now. Yeah. So

Chris Rainey 38:56

first night, you're interacting with this, this disorganization, that you potentially gonna make one of the biggest life decisions ever. And decisions ever, and that directly impacts your impression on that organization. I think they're reading into it and saying, Well, you know, this

Jon Stross 39:11

is the moment where you're trying to sell me as a candidate, yeah.

Chris Rainey 39:14

So how do you do it?

Jon Stross 39:15

And if you don't bother to do it now, like, Oh my God, how bad's it gonna be when I actually get there as an employee? So there's actually a feature, can I pitch on? A feature we're launching right now. You can see it on our website already, is we're calling greenhouse verified, where we noticed was, even within our customers, there's a huge difference in how they're hiring. Yeah, and there's some companies who are just awesome. They never ghost anybody, right? They're super considerate. They are prepared for every interview, they do all the fairness stuff and anonymize resumes, all that. And so why don't we expose that? And so we're putting like, verification badges on people's career sites so you can see like, yes, they're going to be considerate and fair and prepared and communicative. And we feel like, let's set up a new bar for the industry. Let's get candidates to expect to see that have companies competing to get those badges. That's amazing. So probably just start rolling out to a couple companies and they're like, it's a great way to drive internal usage to get make sure nobody's ghosting, because we really don't want that. Yeah, right, but it's also a great way to show off that, like we're trying really hard. This is one of the companies you want to

Chris Rainey 40:18

work at. Yeah, it's been a few times where I've been checking out a few different of those pages and not knowing they were yours, because they're really well co branded. And, you know, yeah,

Jon Stross 40:28

we've always been several not to put our brand on it. And we're like, you know, what? Enough people know our brand that we're like, actually, why don't we create the option of having a having these badges, because it creates a little bit of credibility. And so we're trying to try to get a whole bunch of people to turn it on over the next couple of months. It on over the next

Chris Rainey 40:43

couple months. Amazing. Listen, before you go, is there anything that we haven't discussed you think is really important? Do you want to share our

Jon Stross 40:49

audience? I promise I'll think of it the minute we hang up.

Chris Rainey 40:53

That's why I asked the question. Because normally when people hang up, they're like, I wish I said that on the show. Chris, so no added the act of hanging up, though, jarring memories, though, right? No worries. Oh, okay, let's just say this. Then, before I let you go, what will be your we shared a lot, right? Spoke about a lot during the show. What would be your parting? Piece of advice for all the leaders out there, and then we'll say goodbye,

Jon Stross 41:16

let's see. Ah, I think this is a moment given like, how badly candidates are being treated all the AI stuff. This is still a moment like this is actually a great moment that you can differentiate yourself, if you like, lean in this moment say, I know we're gonna be making less hires, but that means that the hires we are making are that much more valuable if you differentiate yourself, whether it's the candidate experience or through how you're how you're interviewing, like, this is a moment to lean into it and not to walk away from it. Yeah, I think the companies are walking away who are like, ah, we'll come back to it and start over in a couple years. When we when we're hiring more, it's like, I think this is a time to, like, you only get a couple hires. Like, if you're making less hires than you were before, like, lean into that more. This is the time to walk away from it and be bad at hiring. It's interesting.

Chris Rainey 42:10

It's during those times you really see the companies that are really living up to their values. And,

Jon Stross 42:16

oh yeah. I mean, you see a total cleaving right? There's some bunch of companies who are like, we're gonna be awesome at this, and we're gonna make less hires to marry great at them. And you see other companies who are like, we're gonna lay off most of the team. We're gonna get rid of most of our tools and all the things that we've built. We're gonna, like, let go and maybe we'll come back to it later. Like, oh, it's brutal.

Chris Rainey 42:40

Yeah, you saying you're seeing the exact same thing happen in a DI space right now? Sure, yeah, in organizations, and then you really see the difference between the ones that were just ticking the box and the ones that are actually trying to make a meaningful difference. That's right. That's right. Well, listen, I appreciate you coming on the show for everyone watching as always, the links are below. Go check out greenhouse. There's the links below. There's also some content and some great research we've got from the team. Check out the links below. Apart from that, I'm glad we finally got you on the show. It's great to meet the person demanding fresh and I look forward to seeing you at the upcoming global di Summit. Ideas together in a couple of weeks. So there'll also be a link below to that everyone to check that out. We'll be bringing together the world's top dei executives and over 3000 dei leaders from all over the world to join us live for the summit. We the world's largest gathering of dei executives. So it's free. Come and join us. It's online. It's in partnership with our friends at Greenhouse. I'm super excited for that. Apart from that, John, enjoy the rest of your day, and I'll see you again soon. All right. Thanks so much. Thanks so

Jon Stross 43:47

much. Thanks everybody for your time. Bye.

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