Company social responsibility starts with talent

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Learn how Jobber uses the Greenhouse CRM to help themselves and other companies hire

When it comes to hiring, 2020 was a true disruptor. Talent teams have experienced many changes in such a short amount of time: from in-person to remote hiring, localized to distributed work, a steady hire rate to low, slow or high-volume hiring.

Knowing that so many in the business community faced hiring disruption, many more stepped in to offer candidate support – and embrace company social responsibility. Talent teams the world over joined hiring webinars, online forums and made calls to understand not only how survive, but to thrive, during this time.

One story in particular that stands out to us is that of Greenhouse customer, Jobber. As a software company that helps small home services businesses organize their entire operations, Jobber decided not only to scale their own business, but to also help support local candidates affected by the changing job market. We sat down with Yiorgos Boudouris, Talent Attraction Manager at Jobber, to discuss the company’s motivation to go above and beyond.

Can you tell us a bit about your role at Jobber?

Yiorgos: I've been a recruiter for a little over 15 years and have seen hiring technology evolve and change a lot over that time. I mean, I know what it's like to get faxed a resume! Back in the day, we didn’t have conversations about what an applicant tracking system (ATS) or a candidate relationship manager (CRM) were. Fast-forward to today and it’s a whole different story. Kimberly Moore, Talent Attraction Manager at Jobber, was the person who initially identified the Greenhouse ATS for our team to use – and in my role as Talent Attraction Manager, I get to leverage both the Greenhouse ATS and CRM every day.

I really recognize how much easier my life is because of hiring software tools.
Yiorgos Boudouris, Talent Attraction Manager at Jobber

What are some specific areas of focus for you when it comes to working with candidates?

Yiorgos: I focus on our technical roles that support our product engineering organization. Working from our Toronto office, I report to our head offices in Edmonton. When I started, we were about 15 employees in Toronto and now we have over 50 – so I’ve seen a lot of growth within our team. To provide a more specific timeline, we started using the Greenhouse ATS a couple of years ago and started using the Greenhouse CRM in early 2020. That was such a game-changer for the way we approached our process.

What was the motivation within your team to activate the Greenhouse CRM?

Yiorgos: With all the growth we were experiencing, it was really important for us to continue building our talent bench and do a better job of tracking all of the candidates that we meet throughout various parts of the recruitment cycle, whether formal or informal. We did have a process for tracking interested candidates before, but nothing was formalized. We weren’t confident in terms of the data we could leverage from those candidates, as well as the reporting that we can pull from the data we had. So when considering how much we planned to grow over the next few years as an organization, we had to set the talent team up for success. The way to do that was through implementing a CRM.

What did a CRM offer that you weren’t able to achieve before? And why Greenhouse?

Yiorgos: A CRM is vital for companies that want to scale, as well as leverage data to improve hiring processes. At Jobber, whenever we’d talk with passive or active candidates, we’d have to hunt through old emails or remember hallway conversations we’d had in passing. We had notes that were found in the candidate profiles, but those are easy to get lost because they're not specific to a future role. When knowledge is held within the recruiter’s or the hiring manager’s mind, it’s just not scalable, because it’s not being tracked anywhere.

When it came to selecting a CRM, we knew we wanted to leverage a tool that integrated within Greenhouse. We know and love our existing Greenhouse ATS and wanted to set ourselves up for success by adding on the CRM option. The Greenhouse CRM provides a place for us to put all of our candidate information and be much more intentional about how we keep track of it and how we report on our work.

So, let’s talk about 2020 – have the changes of this year impacted your use of these hiring tools?

Yiorgos: This year has certainly been a time of change! We really saw the first few months of the year as an opportunity for us to really look at the back of house and how we're organizing ourselves as a talent team. We really took the time to assess what COVID-19 is doing to the marketplace and how we could help those affected. We realized then that our Greenhouse CRM could really enable us to help other businesses.

Let’s explore that – can you share how you leveraged the CRM to help the business community?

Yiorgos: Yes, it ended up being such a valuable resource during that time. We realized quickly that some of the first people we started engaging with through our CRM were actually those who we knew within the community had been laid off as a result of COVID-19. Here in Toronto, the impact of COVID-19 happened to every single tech community. We were seeing all of these spreadsheets and distribution lists hoping to help those affected find new roles.

At Jobber, we wanted to offer those folks support. If they wanted someone else to speak to, if they just wanted another set of eyes on their resume or on their portfolio, if they just wanted another recruiter to maybe walk through some interview questions and prep them for their next opportunity – that's what we're here for. We didn't talk to these people about Jobber at all, that wasn't the goal.

Because this was happening at the same time as our CRM launch, we were able to use the tool to help us reach out to those in the talent space looking for their next opportunity. We sent emails through the CRM, we added folks in and scheduled calls to determine how to help. We had the idea, but really, the Greenhouse CRM really made it all happen.

It sounds like your team moved fast to identify a need and provide those services.

Yiorgos: Yes, I’m really proud of our team for pivoting so quickly to lend a hand. We got in touch with hundreds of people whose roles had been affected.

We’ve collectively made it through the first half of 2020. What advice would you give companies that are looking to build a scalable hiring process to reach future goals?

Yiorgos: It’s important to advocate for the tools your team needs to be able to hire at scale. What helped our team a great deal was figuring out resourcing. We started by tracking timelines – for example, how long it took us to just do an intake meeting or the amount of time that went into a candidate search prior to a candidate engaging with our hiring team. That’s work that I think often gets overlooked by those who are not a part of recruiting teams.

When we started to actually track that, we were able to build a business case and show the upfront work that's required to hire effectively. We explained the benefits of having a system or a tool to start tracking talent long before we activate a job search (one big benefit is reducing time-to-hire). By sharing this information, we determined that a CRM was necessary for our team to hire effectively. And Greenhouse remains our first choice to offer those solutions.

Is your talent team ready for a CRM? Learn how to design a CRM strategy that will work for your business by downloading our eBook.

Yiorgos Boudouris is a Toronto-based recruitment manager with 15 years of experience recruiting in a variety of industries. Yiorgos works with Jobber (the #2 fastest-growing software company in Canada and #7 overall, according to Canadian Business and Maclean‘s Growth 500), helping to attract, develop and retain great teams.