How Good is Your Company at Hiring?
May 30, 2025 – Most companies recognize that talent is essential to success, and that being highly effective at hiring is one of the most vital skills for any organization and its leaders. Yet, hiring remains one of the weakest areas within many companies. A breakdown occurs in the interface between the people who are tasked with recruiting and those who are tasked with the business side and think they can just delegate hiring to HR and the recruiting team, according to a recent report from Greenhouse Software. “When it comes to hiring, organizations are all over the spectrum of competence,” the study said. “The companies where hiring has become a huge competitive advantage have adopted a framework for hiring that creates internal alignment, works for everyone and succeeds in attracting amazing talent.”
Greenhouse points the term hiring maturity is a methodology for how companies can evaluate the effectiveness of their hiring so that they can work to improve hiring performance based on their current state. The report noted that it is built around four key competency areas:
- Identifying and attracting the best talent for your organization.
- Owning every moment of the hiring experience.
- Making confident, informed decisions.
- Using data to drive operational excellence and improve over time.
How Good is My Company at Hiring?
If you’re a business leader who is curious to know how effective your company’s hiring processes are, Greenhouse’s 10-question assessment below is a good starting point. “Set a meeting with your head of talent or chief people officer, and start the conversation,” Greenhouse said. “The questions are designed to stimulate a conversation about hiring – from key hiring metrics to how your company approaches new hire onboarding. Being great at hiring creates a competitive advantage and it will help you achieve your business goals.”
Related: Strategic Workforce Planning: Choosing Between Growing and Acquiring Talent
As a business leader, Greenhouse explained to pose the following questions as conversation starters with your talent leader – whether that’s the chief people officer or the VP of talent. Ask them in order to understand each part of the process and to gain a strong grasp of your company’s current state of hiring.
Greenhouse’s 10 Questions to Pose to Your Talent Leadership Team
- What are we doing to identify and reduce bias in our recruitment process and create a more diverse organization?
- In terms of how we are improving our recruiting function, what was the focus from last quarter? What were our results? And what is the plan for next quarter?
- What is our theory on why candidates would choose to come work with us over our competition? And how do we ensure that each candidate has that kind of positive and engaging experience when they apply?
- In order to judge the success of our recruiting function, what are the metrics we will look at and on what cadence?
- What is our plan to ensure new hires get off to a fast start after they join? What metrics can we look at to see if it’s happening?
- What is our training plan to bring new employees up to speed on how we hire? For recruiters? Interviewers? Hiring managers?
- Where are we finding our hires? What percentage of new hires were passive candidates? How dependent are we on agencies?
- What is our candidate satisfaction score? Glassdoor score? Comparably score? Are we present on other transparency-focused sites like Fairygodboss, InHerSight and others?
- How predictable is our hiring model? Is it aligned with our financial plans to ensure that we’re predicting headcount costs accurately?
- How are we thinking about balancing the speed and efficiency of recruiting operations with the quality of our hires?
After you discover the answers to these questions and hopefully facilitate a lively and insightful discussion with your people leadership team, complete the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity assessment. The information and performance details you’ve uncovered, paired with the customized results of the 12-question, five-minute assessment quiz, will give you and your hiring team a strong foundation to begin pinpointing key areas of development and improvement when it comes to your hiring.
Related: 9 Talent Acquisition Trends You Must Know to Drive Success
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
