I’ve always admired the thoughtful way Greenhouse developed their applicant-tracking and recruitment software, especially the structured interviewing kits which enable organizations to make evidence-based hiring decisions.
This approach now extends to a new solution they launched at their Open 18 Conference: Greenhouse Inclusion, in partnership with Paradigm. This solution, paired with Greenhouse Recruiting, has several unique features to help organizations scale inclusive hiring practices:
- In-the-moment interventions, which are prompts delivered at appropriate times to minimize unconscious bias through best practices.
- Structured decision-making to ensure candidates are consistently evaluated by anonymizing identity and other resume criteria, including names of universities that might bias recruiters or hiring managers.
- Candidate data and analytics to facilitate identification of problem areas by providing demographics throughout the recruitment/hiring funnel.
The latter feature is the most compelling one to me. According to Brandon Hall Group’s 2017 Hiring and Internal Mobility survey, only about 20 percent of the organizations use these metrics on a regular basis to measure the effectiveness of their hiring practices: percentage of diverse hires (20%) and percentage of diverse candidates (16%). Other metrics received much higher percentages, such as time-to-fill (57%), voluntary new hire turnover (56%) and quality of hire (48%).
Unfortunately, you can’t fix what you don’t measure. Organizations need to assess hiring success in terms of diversity and inclusion along with other metrics, like quality of hire and new retention. Greenhouse Inclusion goes a long way in helping organizations become more aware of where problems occur in the recruitment/hiring funnel. With this knowledge, they’ll be better equipped to improve inclusive hiring practices.
I look forward to more innovation from Greenhouse, especially in the important areas of diversity and inclusion.
Daria Friedman, Principal Analyst, Talent Acquisition, Brandon Hall Group