Find out how Greenhouse made in-house recruiting more proactive, streamlined and strategic.

Fast facts: Key results

• Saved $115K on agency fees
• Increased women in engineering roles from 17% to 20%
• 7% of hires in 2024 made internally

About SpotHero

• 250 employees
• 11,000+ locations in over 400 cities

SpotHero began with a familiar frustration – co-founder Mark Lawrence kept getting parking tickets in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood. He saw an opportunity to make parking easier and more affordable for drivers.

Since launching in 2011, SpotHero has grown to over 250 employees, expanded to 400 cities across the US and Canada, and recently entered a high-growth phase, surpassing 11,000 locations, and $1 billion in parking reservations.
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The challenge

Maria Luna Aguilar, the Senior Tech Talent Partner at SpotHero, said, “We’re doing a ton of scaling and rallying to get these locations to go live. It’s a really exciting, promising future for SpotHero.”
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When Maria Luna joined the SpotHero team, she immediately noticed a flourishing company culture and a great opportunity to make an impact by improving recruiting operations and enhancing the company’s sourcing strategy. Some of the biggest pain points included:

• ‍Over-reliance on staffing agencies: In a single year, they’d spend as much as $115K on agency fees. Working with agencies also diluted SpotHero’s employer brand and limited their ability to build relationships with candidates. “You can’t be super consistent with branding that’s coming out from agencies,” said Maria Luna.‍
• Inconsistent adoption of tools: “When I started at SpotHero, we already had Greenhouse, but it wasn’t fully utilized,” she said. “They weren’t collecting feedback consistently or tapping into all the features.” ‍
• Unstructured (and potentially biased) interviews: Maria Luna described the previous approach to recruiting as “reactive,” where every hiring manager was doing their own thing. “One candidate would experience something completely different from another,” said Maria Luna. “We weren’t using the same criteria across similar roles. This is not sustainable when you have over 40 open roles.” ‍
• Lack of diversity among candidates: Another downside of SpotHero’s reliance on agencies was the fact that the candidate pools tended to be homogeneous instead of intentionally making sure outreach gets to all qualified prospects. “With staffing agencies, it’s more of a ‘let’s get it done, get a person in the seat’ mentality,” she said.

The team needed a consistent, fair process that every candidate could rely on.

There was more of a reactive recruitment process before, where every hiring manager was doing their own thing and every team had their own process. It led to a lot of inconsistency in the interviews.

^{– Maria Luna Aguilar, Senior Tech Talent Partner at SpotHero}

The solution

Maria Luna saw the potential of creating consistent, repeatable hiring processes with Greenhouse. Here were a few of the ways she utilized the platform’s tools to make this happen:

• Standardized interviews and scorecards to reduce any potential bias: When Maria Luna joined SpotHero, hiring managers weren’t consistently providing candidate feedback or using structured criteria. She partnered with them to define core competencies for roles, craft behavioral questions and align everyone on standardized scorecards in Greenhouse. “It’s important to have all feedback in one central source for hiring managers to reflect back on and reference,” she said.
• Streamlined the hiring funnel with candidate insights: By reviewing candidate survey data, Maria Luna discovered many applicants were dropping off at the technical assessment stage. She collaborated with hiring teams to simplify the process and reduce friction – leading to better candidate experiences and less attrition. She also used Greenhouse CRM to re-engage past applicants through warm, targeted outreach, building a more efficient top-of-funnel.
• Automated processes streamlined hiring: Maria Luna leveraged Greenhouse features like auto-reject and auto-advance to eliminate manual bottlenecks in early funnel stages. These automations allowed her to filter candidates more quickly and start with a stronger, more relevant pool – saving significant time across hiring teams.

Preparing hiring managers with the right frameworks was essential to setting candidates up for success.

If we at SpotHero aren’t prepared for the interviews, how can we expect that candidates will be set up for success? That’s why I worked with hiring teams to carve out the core competencies for roles and then create behavioral questions based on that, reflecting all this in Greenhouse scorecards.

^{– Maria Luna Aguilar, Senior Tech Talent Partner at SpotHero}

The results

By putting structured systems in place with Greenhouse, Maria Luna helped SpotHero completely transform its approach to hiring. What started as a fragmented, reactive process became a strategic, efficient engine for growth.
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With job post templates and standardized scorecards in place, hiring managers had a clear framework to evaluate talent fairly – and with less bias. Greenhouse CRM allowed Maria Luna to reconnect with past applicants who were already excited about SpotHero, while streamlined interviews helped candidates move more smoothly through the funnel. These changes didn’t just create a better process – they delivered real results.

• Agency spending dropped from $115K to $0 as SpotHero built confidence in their internal recruiting capabilities and moved away from outsourcing talent searches.
• Diversity in technical roles improved measurably. The percentage of women in engineering roles grew from 17% to 20%, while engineers identifying as Black, Indigenous, and people of color increased from 43% to 48%. These gains were made possible by an enhanced focus on fair and standardized interview practices and ensuring that candidate sourcing reaches all qualified prospects.
• Hiring became faster, stronger and more aligned. “We’ve seen a huge increase in the quality of candidates and quality of hires,” said Maria Luna. “They were able to meet their goals a lot quicker as a team and even exceed them.”

What mattered most was creating a repeatable process that supported both the business and the candidate experience.

Greenhouse helps us do more of a targeted search vs. relying on candidates that are flowing in. We’re no longer doing the post and pray method. Now we’re being proactive and reaching out to candidates, which is especially important when you’re trying to hire top talent.

Greenhouse helps us do more of a targeted search vs. relying on candidates that are flowing in. We’re no longer doing the post and pray method. Now we’re being proactive and reaching out to candidates, which is especially important when you’re trying to hire top talent.

^{– Maria Luna Aguilar, Senior Tech Talent Partner at SpotHero}