How Greenhouse helped IDEO build a flexible recruiting process

4 mins, 4 secs read time

Have you ever been frustrated by a lack of flexibility in your recruiting process? You’re not alone! Megan Weibler, Global Director of Recruiting at IDEO, was at a breaking point with her applicant tracking system. Some of her biggest pain points included the lack of efficiency, unclear communication between different parts of the system, and the inability to keep track of historical data. If it sounds stressful, that’s because it was!

That lack of transparency, for someone in my role, gave me hives.
Megan Weibler, Global Director of Recruiting

How did IDEO transform and streamline their global recruiting process?

The problem

With nine offices across the globe, IDEO needed to have a transparent, efficient process. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Tasks took much longer than they should have and there was no easy way to access to information from the past or across offices. Here are a few of the major difficulties they were experiencing.

Our biggest pain points were:

• We couldn't quickly assess a group of candidates
• We weren't easily able to share candidates with hiring managers. It was a world of downloading and uploading into spreadsheets and emails.
• Collecting and tracking candidate feedback was disjointed
• Recruiters across the studios didn't have visibility into a candidate's application history. Had they applied at another location? No idea.
• The system forced an inconsistent process across nine locations.

The requirements

Megan knew that in order for her recruiting process to be successful, it needed to be both global and local. There would need to be enough consistency to allow useful data collection and oversight across all offices, but there would also need to be enough leeway to allow each office to add some nuance and individual character to the process. Megan realized that if the system was too rigid, it’d be dead upon arrival. Here’s how she summed up her team’s recruiting requirements.

Our needs:

• Design a recruiting process that allows each location's recruiters to think and act globally while supporting the nuance of their location
• Help us create and maintain a consistent recruiting and interviewing process across all locations.
• A collaborative tool that increases our efficiency and integrates with our other systems.

The solution

After interviewing several users and vendors, Megan and her team decided that Greenhouse was not only a great platform, but could be a strategic win for her team. By using Greenhouse’s features to meet their users’ needs, IDEO was able to both roll out a new ATS and a new recruiting process.

Here are a few of the ways Megan and her team used Greenhouse to build a consistent, efficient, and flexible recruiting process.

Stages

Megan used stages to create a standardized, structured approach to interviews. She pre-loaded each stage with the interview types, so recruiters could choose from a drop-down menu. For example, if a recruiter was scheduling a first-round interview, they could choose from a list of all the interview kits that were applicable in that stage.

But there was still room for customization. Local offices had the ability to change the title and add or remove questions so they were in line with their unique culture and the specifics of the roles they were interviewing for.

• Stages are consistent moments in the hiring pipeline that every recruiter has to follow
• Stages are a "do not touch" area of the process. Which means no one can add, delete or edit the names of the stages.
• Each stage has a specific focus area or purpose in our hiring process.

Scorecards

Megan populated the candidate scorecards with a framework of skills, qualifications, and cultural values that IDEO evaluated against, but scorecards were adaptable to each individual role. This created structure for all interviews and ensured that interviewers were consistently assessing candidates on key criteria rather than simply guessing which characteristics mattered most for a particular role. “Scorecards empower a diverse user group,” explains Megan.

Templates

The recruiting team was able to save a lot of time and effort with templates for job descriptions, scorecards, and stages. Recruiters and hiring managers still have the ability to make changes, but the standardization allows Megan to collect clean data and ensure consistency in the interview process company-wide. This approach made the interview set-up process go from labored to quick and efficient.

The end result

By implementing Greenhouse, Megan and the recruiting team were able to be strategic and address a global need while respecting the individual character of IDEO’s local offices. Greenhouse’s flexibility allowed them to bring a broken process back to life, give recruiters the knowledge they needed to be strategic partners, and empower employees to make referrals at any time. The recruiting team at IDEO now feels confident that candidates are getting an experience that’s in line with the company’s values and priorities.

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