How to Automate Greenhouse

Greenhouse is where a company agrees how it hires

Greenhouse is the applicant tracking system companies grow into, at the point where hiring stops being something a founder does between meetings. Every open role lives in it: the job, the stages a candidate moves through, who interviews at each one, and the written feedback they leave.

Its argument is structure. The same questions get put to every candidate for a role, the answers land on the same scorecard, and the decision gets made from notes rather than impressions. That is why it turns up in companies that care about hiring fairly, and in ones that have been burned by not doing so.

So Greenhouse is where the process is agreed. It is not where most of the work happens: that is spread across calendars, an inbox, a signature tool, a screening vendor, a handful of job boards and whichever system the new person will be paid from.

The offer waits on somebody who has not opened their email

Very little in hiring is blocked on the recruiter. It is blocked on somebody who has not answered yet.

Four people were on the interview loop, three left a scorecard, and the fourth has been at a customer site since Tuesday. The debrief waits until they write it up, so somebody messages them, waits a day, and messages them again.

Around that sits a ring of jobs with the same shape. Chasing the hiring manager who has to approve the job before it can open. Chasing a candidate who has not signed. Chasing two referees who have not replied. Typing a new hire's details into payroll by hand because payroll closes on Friday. Working out what each board and agency cost against how many people they produced, which nobody does, because it means opening five billing screens.

Each one takes ten minutes. Together they are where the weeks go.

Scorecards, kits and approvals all fire inside Greenhouse

There is more built into Greenhouse than most hiring teams use, and working through it costs nothing.

Interview kits hand each interviewer the questions, the focus attributes, the candidate's resume and the scorecard in one place, so feedback comes back in a form you can compare. Job approvals hold a role until the right people have signed off, and offer approvals do the same for an offer, along an approval chain you map in advance. Self-scheduling gives the candidate a set of times to pick from. Automated reminders nudge interviewers, stakeholders and candidates who have gone quiet, and the reports and dashboards are pre-built, so the funnel numbers are already there.

Every one of those acts on something Greenhouse can see: a reminder goes out because a scorecard is missing from a Greenhouse interview, an approval waits because a Greenhouse offer is sitting at a stage.

That is the ceiling, and most of the chasing lives beyond it. Greenhouse cannot open the screening vendor's portal and see that a report came back clear. It cannot check the signature tool to see whether the offer letter was opened. It cannot look in the HRIS and confirm the new starter exists, or read what a job board charged you last month.

A pipeline that has already been round the other systems

The version worth wanting is a pipeline where the answers arrived before anybody went looking.

The offer signed by the candidate but not countersigned, checked in the signature tool each morning, so the nudge goes out on day two instead of the following week. The background screen that cleared yesterday, read off the vendor's portal and noted on the candidate, so a start date stops depending on somebody remembering to log in. The new hire whose record has to exist in payroll by Friday, prepared from what the accepted offer says and left for whoever owns payroll.

Then the reading. What every board, agency and referral scheme cost against the people it produced, assembled from the billing screens monthly rather than never. Which of your live adverts has quietly expired while the role is still open. Which candidates from a search two years ago now hold the job you are trying to fill.

One boundary holds throughout. Collecting a status and writing it onto a record can run unattended, because it is transcription. An email to a candidate, an offer, a rejection: those reach a person waiting on news about their livelihood, and they wait for a human.

Chasing five systems is not a recruiting skill

Five other systems have to be opened each morning to find out whether anything moved. That is what eats a recruiter's day, and it is the part of hiring with no judgement in it at all.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the signature tool, the screening portal or the job board account, reads what is on the screen, and writes it back onto the right candidate in Greenhouse.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything reaching a candidate is drafted and waits for a person to put their name to it.

Every workflow below names the systems it opens.