Greenhouse Reviews

We use the product to post jobs and organize job descriptions. We also use it for applicant tracking, reviewing resumes, reaching out to applicants, and scheduling appointments.

The product is easy to use. It's really intuitive. The things are laid out well. The search function seems to be better than other products. When I search for a name, some of the applicant tracking systems struggle to find the name, and I have to keep spelling out the entire name. 

Greenhouse has a better search function than other products and finds candidates quicker. I haven’t had issues with bugs. I have noticed other products freezing up or acting weird for some reason. However, Greenhouse is a solid solution. It has a really nice layout that tells us about upcoming events.

When we use Lever, we can look at five different calendars at once and schedule a candidate for five different interviews. I don't think that we're able to do that with Greenhouse. Lever just makes it easy. If we have to schedule multiple interviews in Greenhouse, we will have to schedule them individually.

We have had instances where people have wanted to interview four different people in the same afternoon, and Lever made it easy. It is not as easy with Greenhouse. We can’t do it all on one screen.

I have been using the solution for two and a half years. I used it recently, in December.

The tool has the least bugs compared to any other tool I have used. I didn't have any problems with Greenhouse. Other products would freeze up from time to time. Greenhouse has always been a really solid product.

The tool is pretty scalable. Most of the companies I worked for were all startups. That's one thing that's nice about Greenhouse. It caters to companies of all sizes, and it's easy enough to use as a small startup without a lot of resources.

Greenhouse takes care of small companies just as well as any of their big customers. It's easy to use for a startup and scales way up. The last I used it, we had 1200 to 1400 employees. The tool was pretty solid and worked fine.

Greenhouse support is always really good. It has been the best I've worked with compared to other companies. Once in a while, I can't get a hold of someone, or it takes a while to reach the support team. I don't know what their tech support hours are. Usually, we can just hit the little question button and have a live chat with someone right away.

Positive

Lever was the first solution I used. It was good when it worked. It had pretty serious bugs. We stopped using it because it had so many issues. I had to do a video capture of Lever because it was acting weird, and the support person told me they could not explain why it was happening, so they let us out of the contract.

I've implemented Greenhouse twice, and it has an easy-to-use program we can follow. It walks us step-by-step through the data import from the old ETS. We can get things set up and organized and train the power users and interviewers. The product has a smart and easy way of implementation.

People from the vendor team worked with us for the first couple of weeks. They worked with us at a walk-through and ensured we did everything right. Greenhouse does all the maintenance. We do not have to maintain it.

Greenhouse is moderately priced. The product’s pricing is based on the number of users. As a company grows, they charge more. The first time we went to renew, they wanted to bump us up on a new annual contract by quite a bit. We told them that the price was too much and they reduced it a little. The solution is cheaper than Lever and SmartRecruiters. The tool is pretty affordable for startups and medium-level companies.

The tech support is really good when we need it. Generally, we don't need support. The integrations are easy if we're trying to do something fancier. It's a solid ATS and probably the best I've used. I have used five products, and Greenhouse is my favorite. Overall, I rate the product an eight and a half out of ten.

This solution is an applicant tracking system, so it does everything from manage job postings on your career site, to applicant tracking and scheduling interviews. Plus, it's a resume database. It also has email functionality built into it. It's sort of like a CRM but for the entire hiring process. It does everything from allowing people to submit resumes all the way up to the offer letter process. There's also connectivity for background checks.

It's usually deployed in the cloud somewhere since you don't want to host it locally necessarily. Anyone who may interview someone is a user so you can have nearly everyone in the company as a user, because eventually everyone will probably interview somebody.

I think the ease of use is one of the most valuable features.

Probably the biggest issue with Greenhouse is that the scheduling portion isn't very strong or smart. Scheduling is something that is critical and important and speeds the whole interview and hiring process quite a bit. Some other companies have built the scheduling portion of the tool to be a whole lot more user-friendly. For example, if you're scheduling panel interviews and you've got someone coming onsite for five interviews, with some companies like Lever, you can go in and look at everyone's calendar and it will help find the time and organize the interviews in such a way that you don't have to go back and forth with four or five different hiring managers to check their availability. 

I used this tool for about two and a half years.

The solution is pretty solid and stable. I don't think we had issues with it. I've had more issues with other ATSs than I ever did with Greenhouse. 

The company that I implemented Greenhouse for had only about 54 people when we first implemented it. When I left, we had a couple hundred employees, and I know it can scale to thousands of employees, if not many more.

The initial setup is pretty involved. It'll usually take you six or eight weeks to do it. What's nice is that they lay everything out in steps of what you need to do and you work with one of their technical people. When I did it, I had a call once or sometimes twice a week, depending on how much stuff I had to do. It was laid out with timelines and everything to make sure that we made it through, but it took about eight weeks. 

The final step is moving all your existing data over into Greenhouse. Everyone theoretically starts with another database and they're moving from one ATF to another, so you have to move all of that data over, which can take a while. They have to clean the data and make sure everything matches, so that can be a bit of a hassle because it's pretty involved. If you have a couple of people working on it, that speeds things up, but when I did it, I was on my own and it took about eight weeks.

As far as software updates, I think it's all pretty well automated because it's hosted in the cloud, so Greenhouse manages all the software updates. There's generally no updates for the user except for maybe once or twice a year when they may have downtime, but otherwise, I think it's all done in the cloud by Greenhouse.

Greenhouse was reasonably priced when we first got it. I compared other solutions, like Lever, and it was fair. They base the pricing on the number of users. The company I was at had 54 people, and I think we originally paid around $8,600. Then as you grow and add users, they have a tiered pay structure and it goes up. The one thing I didn't like, and what caused me to move from Greenhouse, was that they wanted to bump us up almost 20% over what the previous cost was. It's like they were getting a little greedy. I think it's because they know that it's a hassle to migrate from one ATS to another and it takes a while, so they think that they sort of have you handcuffed, but I said, "No, we're not going to do it," and we went to a different solution.

My advice to others looking into the solution would be to look at their scheduling needs and the scheduling functionality and compare it to some of the competitors, like Lever, particularly if people are doing panel interviews and onsite interviews. Lately they haven't been a big deal because everyone is remote, so you don't have people coming into an office building and interviewing with four people in the same day. The biggest thing for me was that Greenhouse sucked a lot of time when we were trying to schedule, whereas Lever made it very fast and easy.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten.

I use it to track hiring for the roles open in my organization. I look at the candidates' pool, and I can see how the candidates are progressing in different pools at different places.

It provides very good flexibility to create filters. Therefore, I can look at candidates' progress across different stages. I can also follow candidates to get updates about where they are in the cycle.

There are dashboards that I can see, but for pending things that I have to look at, it should provide alerts. For example, if there are 10 new people who are added to the job that I'm involved with, it should provide me with a chart or notification so that I am prompted to look at it. Currently, I have to go and look at the dashboard. There should be a little bit of intelligence to prompt action.

They could come up with a baseline or intelligence on how others are hiring for specific roles, such as project management. There should be some industry insights so that our recruitment and hiring could be done better. Such a feature could be useful. It should give us an idea about how other industries are handling the hiring process and benchmarking candidates. For example, what are the things that other people are looking at? What are the things that I am looking at? They can build a lot more intelligence in the system.

I've been using it for four years.

It is very stable. I have never faced any issue with its uptime. Whenever I've tried using it, it has always been up.

I don't know about its scalability, but our entire organization is using it. There are about 500 people in the organization, and we haven't had any issues. There are different types of users for this product. We have recruiters who set up everything. We have managers who are required to look at specific job posts. Then there are interviewers who look at specific candidates and provide responses or evaluations on them. So, there are multiple users.

I don't deal with them. Our IT team deals with them.

It is straightforward.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It does everything that I'm required to do, but I have to spend a lot of effort in, for example, creating filters or even creating reminders. They should come up with some kind of out-of-the-box dashboards and notifications so that I don't have to set them up myself. Other than that, its stability is good, and it does have all basic functions.