Designing the future we want to see: Our commitment to DE&I innovation

3 mins, 46 secs read time

Greenhouse was built on the knowledge that diverse teams build stronger businesses. As a mission-driven organization, we’re always looking for ways to help companies build more inclusive hiring cultures.

This is why we’ve recently launched Personal Pronouns, a new diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) feature set where candidates can affirm their correct pronouns with a hiring team, and bring these facets of their identity into their candidate profile and interview kit. Personal Pronouns is one more step on our journey of innovation toward reducing unconscious bias in hiring.

Greenhouse started on this journey in DE&I because of the critical need to level out the playing field in hiring. We knew we’d have to experiment with solutions for companies at different stages of their journey in equitable hiring. And we knew that we would have to create a commercial model that would continuously support our ability to meet customers’ needs. Since those early days, we’ve launched many new features, revisited how we make each available and made DE&I innovation a company priority.

The evolution of DE&I in our product

Looking back on the evolution of our work, I am proud of the progress we’ve made. We were the first hiring software company to develop product features for inclusion. Helping customers reduce bias within their hiring process is integral to Greenhouse’s purpose of unlocking the potential of both people and companies.

We’ve been on this journey since 2017, but when we launched our DE&I product Greenhouse Inclusion we simply didn’t know how the market would receive it. Would it change company behavior and truly level out the playing field for candidates?

Initially, it was hard to know what kind of commitment companies would be willing to make toward advancing diversity in hiring. We knew it was imperative to drive change, but we also recognized that progress would require significant changes to a company’s own behavior in order to mitigate bias in hiring and build a culture of belonging. That’s why we launched Greenhouse Inclusion as an add-on to our existing hiring suite.

To make a long story short, Greenhouse Inclusion was a huge success. In a time of unprecedented change within our society at large, companies in every industry and at every size are embracing the principles of inclusive hiring. Hundreds of companies have taken advantage of the ability to assess candidates more fairly, implement bias mitigation measures, improve through custom data collection and reporting, and embrace more inclusive hiring practices.

Making inclusion more accessible

In this new world, our thinking about the pace of progress around diversity is also evolving. DE&I is an integral part of being great at hiring. No longer a bolt-on set of features, we moved all DE&I functionality into the core of the Greenhouse product to complement our structured hiring approach – which is the first line of defense against bias in hiring. What’s more, we accelerated the development of additional features like anti-bias nudges and Candidate Name Pronunciation.

That constant experimentation and evolution of thinking is also what’s driving our latest decision to increase the availability of DE&I features within the Essential tier of our product. Greenhouse is committed to investing in DE&I innovation for a long time to come. We want to create as much access as possible, for as many companies as possible, while also continuing the virtuous cycle of more investment, more feature development, more data and more value for customers — and ultimately a greater impact on society. We’ve included many features in the Essential version of our product, and we offer advanced functionality and a deeper time investment at the Expert level.

A focus on building belonging and inclusion has become an intrinsic part of who we are as a company and the world we’re trying to help build.

At the beginning of this journey, my Co-founder Jon and I weren’t certain what kind of commitment companies would be willing to make to embrace DE&I and transition to a new world.

We discovered that companies were more than willing – in fact, they were eager to embrace these changes. And through their efforts and ours, DE&I is becoming a deeply embedded practice rather than a check-the-box activity. Thousands of companies use Greenhouse to make hiring decisions every day – that’s why building DE&I into our product has been our priority and our commitment from day one, and why we will continue to develop solutions to make a meaningful impact in the world.