CarGurus puts hiring in the fast lane with Greenhouse, building a structured, data-driven process that can keep up with any market condition – even as applications revved up 2.5x post-Covid.
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Fast facts: Key results

• Reduced time-to-fill by 18%
• Increased scorecard completion rates from 40% to 98%
• Improved candidate satisfaction scores by 12%
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About CarGurus

• Founded in 2006
• Headquartered in Boston, MA
• Over 1,000 employees
  
  

Founded in 2006, CarGurus set out to bring transparency and unbiased car ratings to the automotive industry. Today, it’s the most-visited car shopping site in the US, helping millions of consumers make informed decisions while connecting dealers with information, tools and data to help them sell more cars.

Headquartered in Boston, CarGurus also operates in Canada and the UK. With more than 1,000 employees and nearly $900M in revenue, the company continues to evolve, enabling consumers and dealers to confidently and conveniently buy and sell any vehicle, anywhere with the best selection and price.

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The challenge

In 2021, CarGurus was in full throttle. The company experienced rapid growth, and the talent acquisition (TA) team had to rethink its approach to hiring to keep pace and scale effectively. That’s when Brandon Morrill came on board as VP of Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition. With over a decade of experience as a Greenhouse power user he quickly identified key challenges and areas for improvement: 

• Scaling hiring: Legacy processes limited the team’s ability to scale hiring at the pace of growth, creating an opportunity to modernize and streamline how they filled critical roles.
• Tools and workflows: Greenhouse was in place, but not utilized to its fullest potential and hiring plans were managed manually in external documents like Excel, limiting real-time visibility into hiring progress.
• Decision-making: The team recognized clear value in adding more structure and shared resources to empower hiring managers with clearer criteria, enabling faster, more confident decisions. 
• Candidate experience: Disconnected processes eroded the team’s ability to provide a smooth, engaging experience for all candidates.

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To address these challenges, CarGurus needed a structured, scalable hiring strategy – one that included process overhauls, recruiter upskilling and better tool adoption.

Hiring managers were underutilizing scorecards and other data-driven tools that would bring more alignment to their discussions and confidence to their hiring decisions. Adding these helped us move even faster and hire well.

_{– Brandon Morrill, VP, Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition at CarGurus}

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The solution

Brandon led the charge in helping CarGurus transform its TA function, introducing a more structured, data-informed approach that put consistency, collaboration and candidate experience at the forefront. A central part of this transformation included introducing a recruiting operations function to optimize processes and unlock the full potential of Greenhouse.

Brandon shared, “It was evident once we started looking at the data that we needed to promote structure within hiring. We needed to fully align on hiring criteria upfront, embed them in scorecards and ensure people were completing them so hiring managers could leverage them to make confident, data-based decisions. Greenhouse played a pivotal role in driving our adoption.”

To elevate efficiency and consistency throughout the hiring process, Brandon and the TA team began to address their challenges head-on:

• They declared the Greenhouse all-together hiring solution as their single source of truth, eliminating reliance on disconnected systems while ensuring accuracy and alignment across teams.
  
  
• Custom email templates helped the team move quickly through high-volume hiring while maintaining thoughtful, human messaging – striking the right balance between efficiency and personalization to elevate the candidate experience.
  
  
• Greenhouse robust reporting tools like real-time dashboards and custom reporting features allowed them to get an at-a-glance view of hiring performance, allowing their team to assess pipeline health and identify opportunities for improvement.
  
  
• Interview scorecards helped them implement a structured hiring approach with refined processes and standardized hiring criteria and scalable systems – empowering recruiters to make strategic hiring decisions.

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He added, “Greenhouse allows us to codify our hiring criteria and provide hiring managers with the data they need to make better hiring decisions.” 

There are a lot of tools and technology within Greenhouse that have helped us become more efficient, more aligned and ultimately drive faster, better hiring.

_{– Brandon Morrill, VP, Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition at CarGurus}‍
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The results

Since adopting a structured, data-driven approach with Greenhouse in 2021, CarGurus has improved hiring efficiency, strengthened alignment with hiring managers and elevated the candidate experience.

With Greenhouse as his strategic partner, Brandon built a high-performing recruiting operations function, gained company-wide buy-in and fostered a culture of hiring. Time-to-fill dropped by 18%, referrals jumped by 65% and scorecard completion rates skyrocketed from 40% to 98%, empowering hiring managers to make faster, more confident decisions.

The TA team now feels more supported and fulfilled – and it shows in their team engagement scores. Despite applications per job more than doubling in the past few years, candidate satisfaction scores rose from 4.1 to 4.6 (12%) in 2024, with candidates praising the team’s responsiveness, organization and transparency. “We’re seeing an impact in the quality of hiring, too,” said Brandon. “We’re making faster, higher-quality hiring decisions with fewer interview rounds.” By unlocking Greenhouse’s full potential, CarGurus built a scalable, data-first hiring engine primed for growth.

With Greenhouse, we’ve seen significant improvement across the board in almost all TA metrics. And qualitatively, our hiring managers love it. It’s embedded in their workflow and is clearly making their day-to-day significantly better.

_{– Brandon Morrill, VP, Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition at CarGurus}

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_{1) Similarweb, Traffic Report (Cars.com, Autotrader, TrueCar, CARFAX Listings (defined as CARFAX Total visits minus Vehicle History Reports traffic), Q4'24}