Driving success for Lyft: How the ambitious startup grew into an IPO enterprise with Greenhouse

3 mins, 24 secs read time

The road to success may look different for every company, but one thing’s for sure – if you don’t have the proper systems in place to support your hiring efforts, your company’s growth is likely to stall out. For on-demand peer-to-peer ride sharing company Lyft, 2018 was a record growth year. They served over 30 million riders while achieving $8.1 billion in bookings and $2.2 billion in revenue. However, challenges and limitations with their existing Application Tracking System (ATS) were holding Lyft back from scaling accordingly.

Before: The Challenges and Limitations

As Lyft’s business gained momentum and hiring needs multiplied exponentially, they found their ATS wasn’t scaling to meet their needs. Some of the challenges Lyft faced prior to implementing Greenhouse included:

• Lack of structured hiring: There was no standardized process for hiring and the ATS was being used inconsistently across the company. Every step of the process was different for each candidate, making it incredibly challenging to scale recruitment. Inefficiencies such as an excessive number of onsite interviews per hire required a heavy time commitment from interviewers.
• Insecure systems and manual processes: Lyft’s former ATS didn’t have the necessary permission settings to allow the recruiting team control over access to confidential and private information. As a result, the team was maintaining critical information completely outside of the ATS in a separate tool that required manual entry.
• Ineffective referrals and reporting: Lyft was using 1,200 different referral sources and candidate tags before partnering with Greenhouse, making it impossible to pinpoint how candidates made their way to Lyft. And since there were so many sources and so much information stored outside the system, Lyft simply couldn’t trust their data.

Partnering with Greenhouse for Hiring Success

Lyft determined that Greenhouse Recruiting met their needs for engaging hiring teams, having reliable data and reducing inefficiencies. Greenhouse Recruiting’s seamless integration with Workday was also a differentiating factor.

Lyft identified two important factors for success when implementing Greenhouse:

1) Going live quickly to limit the impact to hiring roles in process

2) Involving stakeholders from across the company throughout the process

Selecting Greenhouse Recruiting gave Lyft’s Talent team the opportunity to implement true structured hiring. This revamped approach includes:

• Consistent interview plans and stages to drive efficiency
• Scorecards that provide quality feedback from every interview
• Permissions to manage access to confidential information
• Trusted data to understand candidate experience, referral quality and more

We knew we’d be growing, and growing quickly. Greenhouse’s structured hiring and job-centric approach was exactly what we needed. The team has been by our side every step of the way, helping us achieve and surpass many of our recruitment objectives. — Samara Crasilneck, Head of Talent Operations at Lyft

The Results Are In: Better Hiring Practices Across the Board

The results were clear once Lyft began using structured hiring best practices and collecting more accurate data. Here are just a few of the improvements they’ve noted in their first year with Greenhouse Recruiting:

• 96% hiring manager adoption of interview kits, plans and scorecards
• 35% reduced interview time per hire – from 46 to 30 hours
• 50% reduced time spent on reporting and capturing candidate feedback
• 70% of interviewers are submitting scorecards in less than a day

With our previous ATS, we didn’t trust the data that was coming in, which meant we had no way of understanding how we were doing. The Greenhouse Platform has allowed us to access these important insights in real time through intuitive dashboards and reports. Additionally, the efficiency we’ve gained through the structured hiring approach has been a real game-changer and we see this strategy continue to pay dividends. — Samara Crasilneck, Head of Talent Operations at Lyft

After implementing Greenhouse Recruiting in March 2018, Lyft was able to grow from 2,500 people to 4,500 by the end of that year. Today, Greenhouse manages close to one million unique candidates at any given time for Lyft.

We’re excited to see how structured hiring is paving the way for Lyft’s future success and look forward to supporting them throughout their next stages of growth.

Want the full scoop on Lyft’s decision to switch to Greenhouse Recruiting and the steps they took for a seamless rollout process? Download a copy of the case study here.