Greenhouse releases new features, further incorporating AI into its platform

Hiring platform Greenhouse earlier this month announced its spring product release featuring new AI capabilities to make hiring decisions faster and easier for TA pros.

In its spring release, Greenhouse launched a new AI capability to help recruiters craft emails and set communication cadences with candidates. It’s one of many ways Greenhouse has updated its platform to incorporate the benefits of AI technology so recruiters can leverage it responsibly.

“What we’re hearing is that there’s a lot of fear in the market around what’s safe to use. Can you put [personally identifiable information] into ChatGPT or is that a no-no?” said Jon Stross, Greenhouse’s president and co-founder. “The message [recruiters] are getting in a lot of companies from their legal and security people is: You’re not allowed to use ChatGPT. We embed all this stuff in Greenhouse, even though it’s the same thing…Doing it in Greenhouse, where we go to your security people and say, here’s why it’s safe…that’s actually a huge win.”

By housing generative AI-based tools inside the platform, Stross said the company can assure customers how the engineering works, the models it’s using, why it’s safe, and where the data is stored and how it’s used.

In the release, Greenhouse launched a new candidate texting solution, in partnership with text recruiting platform Grayscale, embeddable e-signatures, and changes to the workflow and candidate profiles inside the platform.

Stross told HR Brew that Greenhouse is looking at incorporating AI in three different buckets: content generation tools (such as the email generation capabilities or interview questions), AI that doesn’t “look like ChatGPT”—such as anonymized résumé review—and decision-making tools, which Stross described as “fraught.”

The third bucket. There’s not a bot behind the curtain at Greenhouse making decisions about hiring for its clients; rather, the company is working on tools that help recruiters sift through applications.

“As a recruiter, you have to explain the decision to both the hiring manager and the candidate, and so when you outsource it to a black box that you can’t even explain, it gets really risky, both legally…and ethically,” Stross said.

What’s more useful, and what Greenhouse is developing, are filtering tools that help them “surface more data, [and] allow you to filter those down in an explainable way,” he said.

AI can help make smart hiring decisions as candidates, too, rely more and more on generative AI to improve their prospects along the hiring process.

“I think that the whole process is getting worse for both sides right now,” he said of recruiters and candidates leaning on generative AI. “The ultimate answer is not that the AI will just fix it. We’re going to have to generate new ways of applying, such that you’re generating more differentiating data.”

And because “these large language models are really good at categorization,” recruiters can rely on the technology to do the heavy lifting but not make the call.