Optimize and streamline: Structure your hiring process for efficiency

4 mins, 52 secs read time

Design a comprehensive hiring and interviewing process for scalability across your organization

Maintaining a structured hiring process is foundational to your hiring success. Doing so helps you make quality hiring decisions time and time again. It also provides the structure to scale your team, allowing you to quickly and effectively meet the business goals that keep your organization thriving.

Whether you're new to structured hiring or your process could use some fine-tuning, we know that optimizing your hiring process can seem overwhelming. We’ve organized this process into three actionable steps so you can quickly build the structure you need to increase your team’s hiring efficiency.

Map out your key workflows

Interview stages

Engage your hiring team to create a repeatable and scalable interview process that accurately reflects your organization’s hiring practices and facilitates discovery. Keep in mind that your interviews should be consistent across departments, while allowing for variation where it makes sense (skills-based testing, take-home projects, etc.).

Here’s a sample interview pipeline:

Review your existing pipeline metrics and work with your hiring managers to determine which stages are must-haves and which stages are unnecessarily lengthening your process, causing candidate drop- off or muddying your data. As a best practice, you should have approximately 8–10 stages in your interview process.

To complete a more in-depth assessment of your hiring process, our structured hiring eBook provides interactive worksheets and an action plan you can use to guide your teams and implement better workflows.

User permissions

After reconfiguring your interview process, review your user permissions to make sure every role in your organization is accounted for within the hiring system.

Create permissions that accurately reflect everyone’s role in the hiring process. Aside from your site admins – typically the users responsible for configuring and maintaining Greenhouse – create roles for your entire recruiting team and anyone else in your organization who is a decision maker in your recruiting process.

If you’re unsure where to begin, review the article Optimize and streamline: Build teams with a focus on clarity, security and compliance for permissions guidelines and suggestions for custom job admin roles you can adopt for your team.

Job and offer approvals

Configuring an approvals process that replicates your internal job and offer approvals can save you time. Automating your approvals allows your decision makers to review detailed information and communicate about the job or candidate directly in Greenhouse, maintaining the system as your central source of truth for all hiring decisions and activities.

There are three types of approval workflows that can be configured. Choose to configure some or all of these workflows based on your team’s needs:

Job approvals

Approvals to start recruiting

When this workflow is in place, newly added jobs will remain in draft status until they are approved. Once approved, the status of the job changes to open and the Job Post can be made live on your career page.

Official job approvals

When this workflow is in place, open jobs need to be approved before offers can be created.

Offer approvals

Approvals to extend offers to each candidate

When this workflow is in place, each individual offer must be approved before it can be extended to the candidate.

Audit your existing account configuration

After deciding on your future hiring process, review your existing Greenhouse configuration to determine where you need to make revisions. For this, we recommend conducting a Data Quality Audit. This checklist is designed to assist your organization with data cleanup and process maintenance. When updating your interview process, you’ll want to especially focus on your job stage cleanup to ensure that your new process is captured in your Greenhouse workflows.

Once you’ve completed your job stage cleanup, enable the following options in Greenhouse to prevent users from reverting back to inconsistent job habits:


Prevent future stage name variations

Limit the number of users who can create stages by updating user-specific permissions for your job admins

Disable copying of Greenhouse default stages

Lock down your new process by disabling the ability for Job Admins to copy Greenhouse default stages in permission policies

Create template jobs

Streamline the job creation process so users don’t have to enter repetitive information. such as desired candidate attributes and common interview questions

Restrict job creation to template jobs

Then, via permission policies, disable the setting called "Allow Job Admins to create or copy non-template jobs during job creation”

Want to learn more? Check out these best practices for cleaning up stages.

Create a training and enablement program

To be a successful hiring organization requires company-wide adoption of your structured recruiting process. Conduct training for your hiring team to align them on your new process and set interview expectations for all roles and across all teams going forward.

For interviewers who participate in interviews and submit scorecards, focus training on interview best practices and scorecard feedback expectations.

For job admins such as hiring managers, recruiters and coordinators, conduct hands-on training sessions to walk users through your new interview process. Customize your own training curriculum or reference our job admin/hiring manager training template.

For site admins who are responsible for maintaining your system setup and configurations, leverage our New admin training guide to supplement your team’s new process training.

Your hiring process is dynamic and will continue to evolve as the needs of your organization shift. To maintain a process that works over time, decide on a review cycle to regularly revisit and make adjustments to your hiring process. This will keep you accountable to your hiring needs and help your process stay efficient and organized.

View the Optimize and Streamline webinar series for more tips and best practices on building a more efficient hiring process.