How Samsara eliminated manual work and freed recruiter capacity with Greenhouse Embedded Operations

Key results:

• Cut new-position setup from five business days to instant, with zero manual work
• Reduced recruiting coordinator effort from 30 to 45 minutes per job down to zero minutes
• Avoided one full-time hire, the team’s single largest cost savings

About Samsara: Samsara is a connected operations platform serving customers across transportation, logistics, construction and public services. With roughly 4,500 employees and a remote-first model, the company has scaled rapidly since its 2021 IPO, placing steady demand on a lean Talent Acquisition Operations team.

The challenge

Samsara’s TA Ops team is small by design, but the demands placed on it are not. With only one or two Greenhouse experts supporting the entire recruiting function, every request landed on the same short list of people, leaving little room to scale.

A lean team carrying too much. Only a few people fully understood Greenhouse, so every project fell to them. With requests arriving constantly and no room to delegate, the team had no capacity to get ahead of the work.

Limited visibility into complex system work. On bigger or unfamiliar projects, the team had no dedicated expert to lean on and little clarity into how changes would play out. That made it harder to move quickly or feel confident in the outcome.

Feature adoption left on the back burner. Keeping pace with new Greenhouse releases was nearly impossible for a team already stretched thin. Without the bandwidth to stay current, useful capabilities went unused and opportunities to improve the recruiting experience were left on the table.

Our team is pretty lean. Anytime a project needed to be done or anytime an initiative needed to be launched, it was really either me or the other person doing it.

^{– Recruiting Operations Manager, Samsara}

The solution

Samsara partnered with Greenhouse Embedded Operations and gained a dedicated Recruiting Ops expert, Ruth, who operates as a seamless extension of the team. Samsara now has a single always-on partner who knows their environment, their people and their goals well enough to move quickly.

A true team extension, not a vendor relationship. Ruth widens Greenhouse expertise beyond the few who held it, joining working sessions and staying connected via Slack and email. She knows Samsara’s workflows well enough that the team never has to re-explain context. She operates like a team member, not an outside resource.

Greater visibility and confidence in the system. When Samsara took on its largest operational projects in recent memory, Ruth was present and available throughout. Her ongoing presence meant the team could move with confidence, knowing they had a dedicated partner in their corner at every stage.

Proactive, tailored feature guidance. Ruth is typically among the first to flag relevant new Greenhouse features. She connects each release back to the team’s goals and walks through what implementation would look like for Samsara specifically.

She knows Samsara so well that I don’t have to constantly regurgitate what I’ve already said a million times. It’s kind of like she’s already on my team.

^{– Recruiting Operations Manager, Samsara}

The results

Since partnering with Greenhouse Embedded Operations, Samsara has seen measurable gains across efficiency, cost, data quality and consistency.

Instant job openings that once took days. Opening a position once took an average of five business days, with coordinators spending 30 to 45 minutes of manual work per job. After rebuilding the underlying workflow with Ruth, positions now open instantly. The surge in new requisitions even had Samsara partnering with leadership to keep pace.

A full-time hire avoided entirely. The most significant outcome was avoiding a permanent hire. Embedded Ops delivered the depth of a full-time Greenhouse expert without the cost of added headcount.

It’s helped us to avoid hiring an additional headcount to support Greenhouse and tool configuration. Avoiding a permanent headcount has been the biggest cost savings.

^{– Head of Recruiting Technology and Systems, Samsara}

Data that leadership can finally trust. With a newly rebuilt workflow syncing every 15 minutes, Greenhouse now gives recruiting leadership an accurate, complete view they can rely on without going back to correct it. The People Analytics team also better understands how Greenhouse data is captured, raising their confidence in reporting.

Consistent hiring across every role. Samsara shifted from ad hoc, manual processes toward standardized templates, so every role looks and behaves the same regardless of who opened it or when.

If you are struggling to scale and maintain your environment, and you don’t have the luxury of full additional headcount, then Embedded Ops, from my perspective, is kind of a no-brainer.

^{– Head of Recruiting Technology and Systems, Samsara}

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