The next chapter for Greenhouse

3 mins, 22 secs read time

We recently secured a major investment from TPG Growth and The Rise Fund. It is a huge step forward for our company, and an investment that will accelerate product innovation, help us grow into new markets and bring us closer to achieving our mission. I want to share why we are so excited about this next chapter.

On the one hand, it would be easy to look at Greenhouse and only see an ATS that can help companies be a bit more efficient in how they recruit. But, the truth is that we’ve always had a more ambitious vision for what we are trying to accomplish. Our mission is “to help every company become great at hiring”. Building the best team is the key to building a winning business. Yet all around the world hiring decisions are still based on hunches and without data, perpetuating biases and limiting human potential. We believe if we are successful in our mission, we will unlock the power of human potential at work. Through our product and structured hiring approach we are trying to help everyone in an organization – executives, managers, interviewers, IT, and recruitment professionals – to each play their part, leading to better, more fair hiring decisions.

Our view is that the downstream impact of our mission is far greater than simply making hires faster or making recruiters' lives a bit easier. It’s about the company overcoming the typical biases in hiring and being able to truly discover the best people for them. Ultimately, this leads to each person realizing their individual potential at work. We are now fortunate to work with more than 4,000 organizations handling almost 60 million job applicants a year. This means that the potential for our impact is huge.

Our view is that the downstream impact of our mission is far greater than simply making hires faster or making recruiters' lives a bit easier.

Here’s an example. As we’ve dug into the data, we’ve identified a metric, Pipeline Parity, that measures the bias in an interview process by comparing the aggregate demographics of applicants vs. those who actually got hired. What we see is that as companies mature and adopt structured hiring practices, their Pipeline Parity improves, demonstrating that they are making decisions based on a candidate’s ability to do the job, rather than the identity of the applicant. So, when we think about expanding our “mission impact”, what we’re talking about is to systematically help our customers to move up the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity curve which will improve their pipeline parity, creating more opportunities for people previously left behind.

And, to be clear, this mission impact is not a “nice-to-have” that is an orthogonal benefit to building a successful business. The main reason organizations choose Greenhouse is that they aspire to this same vision of great hiring. The mission impact IS our business strategy.

The main reason organizations choose Greenhouse is that they aspire to this same vision of great hiring. The mission impact is our business strategy.

When we met TPG Growth and The Rise Fund, they introduced us to their philosophy of mission-driven capital. The Rise Fund is a social impact investing fund looking for business models in which the financial returns are inherently dependent on driving the intended societal impact. That’s exactly how we see ourselves. And, it gives us great conviction that they are the right partner because they share our vision and ambition (and, of course, they use Greenhouse themselves!).

The Rise Fund and TPG Growth bring the partnership and capabilities we want in the next phase of our growth. This investment gives us access to growth capital, operational capabilities and guidance. It will accelerate our pursuit of mission impact - make it more measurable, have our customers be more likely to achieve it and, of course, scale to many, many more organizations.

Daniel and I couldn’t be more excited about our new partner and for this next chapter of our growth as a company.