Why Greenhouse Rules

Greenhouse is an applicant tracking system and recruiting software designed to optimize your entire recruiting process. Find better candidates, conduct more focused interviews, and make data-driven hiring decisions.

Sometimes I think that hiring software is a super saturated market. I see companies like Lever, Jazz, Yello, and hundreds of others in the space and I can’t help but think “Why would you try to start to a recruiting software company?”. Granted all of the companies mentioned do an excellent job and serve the needs of their customers, but I want to speak from a developers point of view as to why I feel like Greenhouse is the best.

1. Their API docs are awesome

As a developer working with any third party service you’ll know that not all services keep an up to date docs, if they even have docs at all. Greenhouse are utilizing a generator called Slate that just looks fantastic and above all helps me find exactly what I’m looking for. You can find Greenhouse’s docs here.

2. You can just use their Job Board API anywhere

This to me is the kicker, in that their Job Board API allows for a fully customizable experience. Before getting the chance to use Greenhouse, I had been working on customizing JazzHR career pages. Now JazzHR has a wonderful backend and a great administrative experience, but at the end of the day you’re adding CSS to their templates they’ve already made, not allowing any customization. With Greenhouse’s free-for-all Job Board API you can create a specific job board experience tailored to your company. With a company like Sprout Social who truly value the candidate experience, it was a must have to not necessary have a stock approach like companies such as JazzHR and Lever.

Another big side of their open-ended API is that prototyping is actually a possibility. Here’s an example of something I was able to whip up in minutes without it needing to live in our code base to show an experience where a user can filter jobs by location. This may also be a good time to mention that Sprout Social is hiring!

See the Pen Sprout Social Open Positions Filter by Justin Conway (@conwaydev) on CodePen.

The ability to simply show a list of jobs and their attributes on any web property is a super useful feature. All that said I think that Greenhouse have done a wonderful job with the ability of customization and creating solid API docs to help developers build out awesome experiences.