How GoEuro hires quickly and efficiently with Greenhouse
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Recruiting and hiring has a huge impact at this quickly growing European travel company based in Berlin. GoEuro is aiming to disrupt the market to bring your favorite travel vendors into one platform—making it easy to choose and book the best and most economical option to travel by train, bus, or plane. We caught up with Jan Lorentz, Talent Acquisition Lead at GoEuro, to find out how he’s helped double the company in a short period of time.
What is your role at GoEuro?
I’m the Talent Acquisition Lead at GoEuro and responsible for hiring amazing people from all over the world to our teams. I have joined the company in fall 2016 and since then we have been growing our headcount from about 120 to 240 employees.
GoEuro is a travel platform that allows customers to find and book trains, buses, and flights anywhere in Europe. By partnering with over 500 European transport operators, GoEuro is revolutionizing the travel planning experience, providing customers with more choice, transparent pricing, and easy booking on mobile, app, and desktop.
What was the recruiting process like when you started at GoEuro?
When I joined GoEuro, my job was not only to find amazing candidates, but also to coordinate all of the interviews. As we are very selective and have an interview process with multiple stages, it was clearly not scalable. After one week of being at GoEuro I got the go ahead to hire a recruitment coordinator and that was a huge success: We streamlined our processes, reduced our lead time, worked on our Scorecards, and the candidate experience improved tremendously.
Secondly, I have introduced a monthly recruiting report to GoEuro in order to bring more visibility to the business about our activities and we’re regularly improving that reporting. Now we’re looking at different ratios, diversity, job levels, and more. By starting to use the Greenhouse tracking links, we are now able to monitor our channel effectiveness properly. By that we have a much better opportunity to see which channels are really working well for us, run A/B tests, and try new platforms.
What were some of the main challenges and frustrations you experienced before using the Greenhouse system?
Before I started working at GoEuro, I was using a different ATS for multiple years and it was horrible: You couldn’t schedule interviews with it, it was destroying the formatting of your job posts, and you needed to have two or three different browsers to get the system to function. We needed to create multiple workarounds to get it to work. It was just ridiculous.
How would you describe your recruiting process now?
We have a well-defined process for almost all positions we’re hiring for and are able to run things in a very automated, seamless way. We drastically reduced our lead time and everyone involved in the process knows what to do and what is expected of them. We’ve been training our interviewers very well and are able to run a very efficient yet personal hiring process for our candidates. Furthermore we have created a VIP hiring process for our senior level roles to assure a truly outstanding candidate experience.
How have you customized Greenhouse to reflect your recruiting process?
One of the key elements was to unify the naming of process stages for all positions in order to run proper reports. We also pre-defined interviewers for certain process steps to make the coordination easier. We are still experimenting how to use the interview toolbox best.
How do you work with your Greenhouse account manager?
Amy as an Account Manager is super. The self-service part in Greenhouse is really helpful and with any general questions we get very quick responses from the team. If we have larger questions, Amy is always there for us. We had an initial session with Amy when I began to review the account and to show some statistics and have implemented ideas from her based on that session.
What are you and your team particularly proud of?
We are really proud of all the great people we have been hiring for GoEuro as such. It's a big pleasure to build such a vibrant, international and diverse company with so many inspiring people and it's fantastic to see the results of our work in all of our teams.
Apart from that, we have been able to attract some absolutely amazing people to our leadership team. We just hired Dave Price as VP of Product from Spotify, Alex Oakley, our VP of People, was scaling Skype from a few hundreds to a few thousand employees, and Filippo Bonsati, our VP of Marketing, joined us from eBay.
We're on a mission of creating a truly outstanding, high-performing, and happy company and that is very rewarding!
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