The NFL implements Greenhouse AI-powered features to drive efficiency, enhance collaboration and consistently hire the best candidates, easily handling the blitz of thousands of monthly applicants.

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Key results

• Reduced average time-to-fill by 24% – from 63 days to 48 days
• Improved candidate satisfaction rates from 67% to 93% from Q3 to Q4 2024
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About the NFL

The NFL is America’s most popular sports league, with 32 teams battling for a spot in the Super Bowl, the biggest annual sporting event in the world.

Since its founding in 1920, the league has grown into a global organization with offices in the UK, Germany, China, Mexico and Canada. Through NFL Media, NFL Films and its franchises, it continues to expand its reach and bring football to fans everywhere.

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The challenge

Despite the NFL’s vast network of employees during football season, its full-time team remains much smaller. With a lean recruiting team, they needed the right tools to keep up with the seasonal ebbs and flows of staffing and help sift through thousands of monthly applications.

When Amber Trapp, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, joined the team about four years ago, the company’s hiring process was cumbersome and inefficient. Here are a few key challenges they encountered:

• High volume of applications: While the NFL has no shortage of top-of-funnel talent, the challenge lies in quickly cutting through the noise to identify the right candidates – especially with today’s influx of AI-generated resumes. 
• Inconsistent candidate experience: With their former ATS, communicating with candidates was a slow and manual process, impacting the candidate experience and the team’s ability to secure top talent.
• Disjointed internal collaboration: Collaboration was disjointed, unstructured and often happened outside of official systems, making it challenging for their growing team to mitigate bias, gather real-time hiring manager feedback and make data-driven decisions.

“When you’re really lean, you need tools that support you,” Amber said. “You need to be able to move quickly, make decisions and avoid all the back and forth – and you need everything in one place. We need to be able to bring in the right talent at the right moment.”

Having used Greenhouse at previous companies, Amber saw an opportunity to modernize the NFL’s hiring process – implementing a system that could improve candidate evaluation, foster better collaboration and reduce time-to-fill.

After an extensive RFP process for a new ATS, Greenhouse was the stand out because of how in tune it is with the recruiter and hiring manager experience.

_{– Amber Trapp, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at the NFL}

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The solution

Since implementing Greenhouse, Amber’s team has seen significant improvements in productivity, efficiency and collaboration. The process of sorting through thousands of applications takes half the time, and feedback from hiring managers is now near instantaneous.

We’re moving in a way that matches our business – fast. Now, we’re able to keep up and place candidates, close jobs and find talent faster because we can evaluate effectively – a process that’s helping us hire fairly and attract the right candidates.

_{– Amber Trapp, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at the NFL}

Greenhouse’s all-in-one hiring platform and AI-powered features let the NFL track and manage everything in one place – speeding up hiring while eliminating unnecessary bottlenecks. Other key Greenhouse features that help the NFL streamline processes and hire top talent include:

• AI-powered Talent Filtering helps the team quickly surface qualified candidates using smart, keyword-driven suggestions based on each job description tailored to their unique Greenhouse data – making sourcing faster and more intuitive.
• With Talent Rediscovery, the NFL taps into its existing database to find strong past candidates, streamlining seasonal rehiring and reducing time spent building pipelines from scratch.
• Automated email templates make it easy to send thoughtful, personalized messages at scale. Paired with auto-reject rules, the team ensures at least a two-day buffer before rejections, promoting a more respectful candidate experience.
• ‍Interview scorecards and candidate notes keep feedback centralized and consistent. Built-in attributes support structured, unbiased evaluations – helping their hiring team make faster, more confident, data-driven decisions.
  
  

Amber added, “One of the biggest outcomes of our team using Greenhouse is seeing people work more efficiently and the fact we’re also able to close jobs faster. We’re able to move so much faster and better.”

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The results

Before Greenhouse, the NFL’s recruiting team was overwhelmed by volume – thousands of applications, disjointed feedback loops and a hiring process that simply couldn’t keep up with the pace of the business. Since implementing Greenhouse and embracing features like AI-powered Talent Filtering and automated email templates, the team has cut time-to-fill by 24%, going from 63 days to just 48.

That acceleration has freed up the team to focus on bringing authenticity to the candidate experience. With automation tools handling repetitive tasks and structured scorecards supporting faster decision-making, recruiters can spend more time engaging with candidates. The difference is tangible: candidate satisfaction among those who made it past the second round leapt from 67% in Q3 2024 to 93% in Q4.

Greenhouse also brought a new sense of cohesion. With feedback centralized and hiring managers aligned, the process is smoother, more collaborative and far more efficient. Now, hiring feels less like a bottleneck – and more like a team sport.

Now people aren’t bogged down by the hiring process – they’re excited about it.

_{– Amber Trapp, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at the NFL}