Source: 2024 Greenhouse Candidate Experience Report
As businesses race to find the gems in a vast applicant pool, their talent strategy and the candidate experience they deliver can make or break hiring performance. A subpar, impersonal, unstructured or overly extended recruiting process risks losing star candidates. Haphazard approaches lead to process bottlenecks, high turnover and rehiring expenses. What happens when the C-suite commits to a more disciplined framework? “We’ve seen with our experience that better hiring and onboarding can make a huge difference in the percent of top performers hired, their time to ramp up and retention rates,” says Greenhouse’s Todgham. While bad hires might drag a company’s value chain, a skilled workforce propels it forward. Research shows that companies capture greater shareholder returns when they make talent a focus of broader business strategy and bridge HR and finance strengths and priorities. Todgham says Greenhouse advocates for a structured hiring approach in which HR, technology and finance leaders equally embrace hiring as a critical driver of business success.
Source: 2024 Forbes Research CxO Growth Study 4.0
Even though human capital powers all facets of a business, it’s not uncommon for finance leaders to take a back seat in hiring. Todgham says many CFOs overlook it for two key reasons: First, they think and speak in measurable insights, while talent outcomes aren’t so easily quantified. Second, CFOs navigate urgent, competing business needs that may overshadow hiring in the moment. “I think intuitively all CFOs understand the most important investment is their people,” Todgham says. “But they often put limited analytical focus on talent decisions—where to deploy resources, when to surge or pull back, how to ensure the best talent works on the most important projects—compared to investment decisions that are ultimately less consequential but easier to measure.” Todgham says that’s a mistake because organizations that sustain their HR focus maximize growth by retaining shining employees.
Source: Greenhouse & IDC
Data-driven hiring as an institutional cornerstone empowers recruiters and results in what CFOs want most: far-reaching, measurable ROI. And organizations actually can demonstrate HR success in hard numbers. Greenhouse encourages its customers to use Employee Lifetime Value (ELTV)—a metric that tracks an employee’s impact on revenue, innovation and culture to measure their total net value to the business—to frame people initiatives in terms of ROI, helping talent acquisition and finance leaders speak a shared language. Such metrics also help transform talent acquisition into a more proactive, flexible and efficient function. Greenhouse streamlines hiring data to extract actionable insights, helping companies recruit at scale, improve reporting to business leaders, optimize hiring practices and increase employee output. For example, if it’s taking too long to onboard, you might reduce ramp time by seeking talent with more experience or revisiting your orientation process. When one study explored outcomes for Greenhouse customers in 2024, results revealed a 36% efficiency boost for recruiting teams that used the software.
Source: BlackLine
Setbacks related to employee turnover can crater a budget. Research shows some companies might lose up to $355 million a year due to workforce disengagement and attrition, for example. But the more pressing obstacles companies experience when they neglect to form a strategic approach to talent extend beyond initial rehiring costs. For instance, the absence of a streamlined hiring workflow can prevent decision makers from anticipating staffing needs and planning future talent pipelines—crucial actions for CFOs. These lapses in insight can lead to costly mistakes like overstaffing or understaffing, putting a company’s financial stability and stakeholder trust at risk. “The CFO role has become more strategic over time,” Todgham says. “Particularly for growth companies, there’s relatively more focus on driving the strongest business cases that will maximize profitable growth—and maybe a little less focus on having the best accountant in the CFO seat or minimizing expenses and closing the books.”
Source: Greenhouse & IDC
Strategic hiring can power a more diverse, resilient and high-performing workforce—which underpins not just company culture but also business success. “By adopting inclusive hiring practices,” says Mozilla’s Muhlheim, “we have cultivated a diverse, adaptable workforce that is perfectly positioned to drive sustainable growth and long-term success.” Talent acquisition and retention platforms can help organizations put these principles into action. Greenhouse enables anonymization of resumes and job skills assessments, for example, to reduce bias, inspire more equitable recruitment practices and improve candidate experiences, ultimately bringing in stronger hires. When Greenhouse implemented anonymized take-home assessments, overall pass-through rates increased by up to 10%, effectively reducing bias against historically underrepresented groups. Black candidates—who were up to 12.4% less likely to pass non-anonymized tests compared with white candidates based on a 2022 Greenhouse analysis—benefited significantly, for example. Companies went from meeting just 46% to almost 72% of their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives after partnering with Greenhouse.
Muhlheim and Todgham advise prioritizing long-term benefits over immediate savings in your hiring approach. In a downturn, for example, letting go of a core talent pipeline strategy like a college development program may yield short-term savings, but it can be detrimental to long-term financial health. “Even if you’ll be hiring less in a downturn, do you want to hire less effectively?” Todgham says, adding that the key is in the balance and maintaining “a fundamental investment in your hiring tools, practices and processes.”
Maximize ROI Over Cost-Cutting
Cultural impact is as crucial as the bottom line—even if it doesn’t show up in dollar signs. “We also need to look at the value of hiring employees who are strong cultural fits and add to company culture,” says Muhlheim. “While this is not a specific financial metric, we know that strengthening the culture improves the productivity of every employee that works within it. Even as CFO, it is important to help drive this metric as a measure of success.”
Prize Your Cultural Wins
For an effective HR-finance collaboration, Todgham recommends having strategic discussions about investment in hiring and taking the time to bring up and execute the ELTV concept. “It can be hard to build a trusting relationship between finance and HR, but great companies do it,” says Todgham. “And they succeed precisely because they lean into hard things.”
Do The Tough Work Of Building Trust
