Interview Load Balancing with Greenhouse's Caitlin Wilterdink

November 13, 2015 at 12:00 PM by Rob Stevenson

O Brave New World

That has such ATS in't.

 

The Applicant Tracking System has come a long way over the past few decades. Far beyond just a way to monitor candidates at every stage of the hiring funnel, they now offer advanced analytics and tracking information to provide your organization with crucial insights into your recruiting process.

Naturally, Recruiters at these ATS companies are taking full advantage of their own tools. When Greenhouse's Recruiting Manager Caitlin Wilterdink joined us on Hiring On All Cylinders, we were able to get an insider's view on the organization's recruiting process. This spanned from the kick off meetings they have for newly opened roles, through the obvious of how they themselves use their tool, to the projection of recruiting capacity based on historic funnel data. 

Interview Load Balancing

When you're assembling your interview process, you want to create a normalized, reliable, and scalable means of evaluation. The goal here is not only to build a finely tuned assessment machine, but to ensure that all candidates are judged on the same criteria in comparable hiring environments. One way Caitlin's been able to normalize this at Greenhouse is through a practice called interview load balancing, which aims to eliminate interview fatigue among tried and true interviewers. Specifically, Caitlin was able to determine that one of her hiring managers routinely gave detailed interview notes on up to four interviews per week, but anything after five tended to be curt and carry a harsher final judgment. Here, candidates interviewed later in the week were at a disadvantage, and likely weren't being assessed on the same ground as candidates earlier in the week. As a result, Caitlin was able to manage this hiring manager's interview schedule in such a way as to get consistent, normalized post-interview results.

 

Recruitment Capacity Projection

Caitlin thinks about her recruiting goals in the same way a Director of Sales or Marketing projects pipeline via a standard funnel. Taking stock of her recrutiment team's activities posted in Greenhouse and other tools, she is able to project how many hires they are likely to produce, and use this both to set aggressive goals for her current team as well as argue for the team's growth. In this episode, she dives into the specifics of this calculation and explains how she uses this as a barometer upon which to measure her own team's productivity.

 

Barrel Candidates

Later, Caitlin and our Head of Talent Vivek swap some clever recruiting strategies, such as how to identify "barrel" candidates, or people who are likely to turn the heads of others at their previous company and bring them over to yours. As they point out, barrel candidates are a supreme way to turn one hard-to-find hire into three.

To hear the full measure of interview load balancing, recruitment goal projection, and maximizing referrals simultaneously with outbound recruiting, you can stream the full episode below, or via iTunes here.

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