How to Balance AI and Human Touch in Talent Acquisition
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we’re joined by Seán Delea, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Greenhouse Software. Sean breaks down how Greenhouse is rethinking the recruiting experience with the help of AI, without losing the human touch.
From AI-generated scorecards to candidate personalization via “My Greenhouse,” Sean explains how recruiters can manage a 121% spike in applications without being overwhelmed. He also shares his own journey from Cork to leading Greenhouse’s global recruiting, and what makes their ATS stand out in a crowded space.
🎓 In this episode, Sean discusses:
Why human oversight is still essential despite automation
How AI-generated scorecards and interview questions streamline hiring
How “My Greenhouse” personalizes the application journey for candidates
The real impact of a 121% increase in applications and how AI helps manage it
Why Greenhouse’s ATS prioritizes candidate experience alongside recruiter efficiency
Greenhouse is the only hiring software you’ll ever need.
From outreach to offer, Greenhouse helps companies get measurably better at hiring with smarter, more efficient solutions – powered by built-in AI.
With Greenhouse AI, you can generate stronger candidate pools faster and source high quality talent with more precision, streamline the interview process with automation tools, and make faster, more confident hiring decisions with AI-powered reporting.
Greenhouse has helped over 7,500 customers across diverse industry verticals, from early-stage to enterprise, become great at hiring, including companies like HubSpot, Lyft, Trivago, Crowdstreet and Gymshark.
Seán Delea 0:00
Interviewing is a very human experience. It's a very vulnerable thing, and I think having a human who is well trained on how to make that process run as smoothly as possible is still incredibly important. Our focus as a company is more on like, how do we make things more efficient and work better for the humans who have to run that process, and how do we alleviate the mundane administrative tasks so that they can focus more on things like candidate experience or stakeholder management and making sure the hiring team is well calibrated the more strategic work that I think most recruiters actually enjoy, I think that's where her chlorophyll phobic says,
Chris Rainey 0:59
Sure Welcome to the Show, my friend, how are you
Seán Delea 1:02
doing? Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here today.
Chris Rainey 1:04
Your background looks way too organized. Where are you hiding? All of us? I
Seán Delea 1:09
can say that it is always like this. This is a special occasion. I've got the plan saves and everything. It's a little bit more chaotic, and I've just shoved everything into
Chris Rainey 1:20
the into the spare room. But you got real ones, though, right? They are real ones. Yeah, I can't keep them alive all my ones in the studio. I'm ashamed to say they're not real. I'm trying.
Seán Delea 1:30
Yeah, I will say there's a relatively high turnover, but I won't give up on it. I keep just buying them.
Chris Rainey 1:39
I love the way you said, is AI turnover before we jump in. Tell everyone a little bit more about you personally and your background to where we are now. Yeah.
Seán Delea 1:48
So as you can probably tell from my accent, I'm from Ireland.
Chris Rainey 1:53
I had no idea. No idea.
Seán Delea 1:58
I'm from, originally from Cork, born and raised cork, extend the south of Ireland. For anyone who doesn't know, lived in Dublin now for about 10 years. I think I first moved to Dublin for my first job in the tech industry, and kind of have been here ever since, been working in tech now, across companies like Zendesk, GitLab, and then now my greenhouse.
Chris Rainey 2:26
Amazing is that, like, what everyone does? They go, kind of to the tech hub and then move, move down, get a job.
Seán Delea 2:34
Yeah. I mean, especially, I think 10 years ago in Ireland, we have a few tech companies in Cork, but the majority that ordered in Dublin. So if you wanted that tech job, you kind of have to relocate to Dublin. Now, thankfully, since COVID, there's a lot more remote opportunities. So you can have tech employees dotted all over Ireland. But I think back when, back when I joined, it was you kind of really have to be in Dublin, to be at the center of
Chris Rainey 3:02
it, yeah. Tell everyone a little bit about your
Seán Delea 3:06
role, yeah. So, I mean, my role at Greenhouse has evolved over time. I've been here for about four and a half years. So I was originally hired as the first recruiter, hired outside of the US, brought in to help grow the EMEA presence for greenhouse. We were going through a lot of growth at that time, and pretty quickly I moved into a manager role. So then I led and grew out the EMEA Talent Acquisition team. Did that for a number of years, and then I moved into a little bit more of a global role. So last year, I was actually managing all of the recruiters at Greenhouse, including in the US. The team grew a little bit again. So we've now kind of like split the team again, and now I look after EMEA. We've newly launched into eapap, which is also under my remit, and then I manage our executive recruiters in the US as well.
Chris Rainey 4:03
Wow, since you're a little bit busy, yeah, learned a bit,
Seán Delea 4:08
yeah, but it keeps it interesting. I've never had the chance to be bored at Greenhouse,
Chris Rainey 4:12
yeah. Honestly, you know, I've interviewed so many people from the team, and I've been amazed at how quickly the company has grown like and scaled, and the clients that you have, it's like you just came out of nowhere, which you obviously haven't. It's taken time, but all of a sudden you're just you arrived, and you're everywhere. How does it feel to be part of that journey? Yeah,
Seán Delea 4:40
it's been incredible. I mean, I was, AI was a greenhouse user before I was okay, yeah, yeah. So I used it in my previous company. We should
Chris Rainey 4:49
probably explain what greenhouse is, by the way, just in case me, and you just have me and you just having a chat away people listening to like, what is greenhouse? Yes, probably, to give that context,
Seán Delea 5:02
yeah, so greenhouse is a hiring platform. We're most well known for our ATS greenhouse recruiting, and then we have another other products and features that we've released over the years. But I think most people listening will know us for greenhouse recruiting. We, I think, are the best in class when it comes to that. I know that's what attracted me to greenhouse as a candidate, because I had been using greenhouse and I had met used many other ETS is in the past, and had varying levels of success and positive user experience with them. So when I use greenhouse, and I said, oh, there's actually a tool that is good at this kind of stuff that really stuck in my head. So when an opportunity to work at Greenhouse came up for me, I jumped at us. And I would say, even in my four and a half years, yeah, we have, we have grown so much in, I think, our maturity as as a company, and how we position ourselves in the market. And as you say, it can kind of feel like it's come from nowhere, but being on the inside
Chris Rainey 6:14
all the hard work, work
Seán Delea 6:17
tension behind that, yeah, it's been, it's been fantastic to be part of that journey.
Chris Rainey 6:21
Yeah, it's so interesting. People always like, Oh, you've, you know, blown up and the company did really well. You're like, Yeah, you didn't see all of the groundwork and many, many, many, many years of hard work to get there, kind of seems like an overnight success effect.
Seán Delea 6:34
Yeah, yeah. No, it definitely wasn't a flu. It was. There was a lot of work, yeah.
Chris Rainey 6:39
So you were a user on the other end in one of the previous companies, what was it about greenhouse, both as an organization, but always and a platform, that really stood out to you?
Seán Delea 6:51
I mean, I think as a as a platform, the thing that always really stood out for me was that the user experience, I think, in my previous life as a recruiter, when I'd used other platforms, the biggest thing was always just a level of frustration, of like, things being clunky or not being like, clear where to find things, or the hiring teams that I'd be working with having a really bad experience are using the product really badly, and I'd be wasting So much time and telling them how to whereas greenhouse was the first one that I used, that it was like, it was like, seamless to use. It was nice to look at hiring teams took minimal training to, like, be able to use it, which, like, reduced my workload so much because I'm not constantly having to remind them, like, this is how you get your feedback in. This is what it's supposed to look like. It's all like, clearly laid out. And I think greenhouse does a great job of always trying to think of the end user and what their experience is going to be like, navigating around
Chris Rainey 7:54
products. Yeah, one of the things that stood out to me early on was that companies, enterprise clients that were working, and this is how we first connected with the team that were using greenhouse. Typically, when they had an ATS, they they would like white label it, whereas actually is the opposite of your clients. They wanted to make sure that the candidate understood that it was greenhouse, because that was a benefit. Yeah. So they would brand that is greenhouse, because then the user would know it would be a good experience. And that just kind of, like, completely, I was like, wait a minute, why are all these companies actually intentionally going, it's greenhouse, yeah, and promoting that. When did that? Was that intentional or, like, I just wondering how that came to be, I
Seán Delea 8:41
think, I don't know if that bit necessarily was intentional, but I think providing a really good experience, both for like, the the user is in the TA team, yeah, also as in the candidate, yes, I think that was always very intentional. And I think you're right, and that, I think a lot of companies are, are like, proud to show that the they use greenhouse software for their hiring processes. And you often see, like, so many LinkedIn posts from candidates that talk about their relief when they go to apply for a job and they see that it's through greenhouse, as opposed to some other ones that are, like, incredibly cumbersome and like, it takes them, like, 20 minutes to get in their application. So I always love seeing those LinkedIn posts, because I've been there myself, like we've all been a candidate, and you know how stressful it is, and the easier it can be made for you, the better.
Chris Rainey 9:34
Yeah. I mean, this is a perfect segue to a question I was gonna ask later. Why do candidates prefer applying for greenhouse, and talk about my greenhouse, because I think I'm really, really excited about what you guys are creating. Oh, you're created. Sorry,
Seán Delea 9:49
yeah. So yeah. I mean, I think, as I said, like, we've always tried to, like, think of that the candidate experience as well as the, like, the the user. Experience. So we don't want candidates to like, roll their eyes when they see, like, Oh God, it's it's a greenhouse application. And like, we don't want them to have to re enter all the information on their resume like, hundreds of times every time they apply for a role. So we've always tried to, like, make that barrier for entry like as low as possible. And I think the newest, really exciting development there is my greenhouse, which is a new product that we've released that's a candidate focused product, as opposed to, like a TA team focused product. So it's a it's a candidate facing profile, and it means that you as a job seeker, you can create a my greenhouse profile, and then you can get live updates on all of your applications across all greenhouse customers. So let's say you're an account executive looking for a new role, and you identify three companies that happened to be greenhouse customers that are advertising for roles that you were interested in, you can apply for all three, and then you can track the status of your applications for all of those within your my greenhouse stance, so it gives the candidate so much more control and visibility. Whereas in the past, you might have, like, applied for multiple different roles and you probably just had to, like, create had to, like, create your own tracker to keep on track of those, whereas now you can see all of that within your my greenhouse profile. And I think that the even more exciting thing is, is that you can also get alerted to other relevant roles. So if another greenhouse customer advertises a role and it's relevant to what you were looking for, you'll get alerted when that role opens up, and you can get your application in there really quickly. Another part of the my greenhouse platform that I really love is you can select a job as your dream job. So you kind of, I think you got a certain amount of credits every month, so it means that you can't list every job as your Yeah. I was about to say, Yeah, you can't go crazy and list everything as your dream job. But like, let's say, for example, that there is one in particular that you really want to work for that company. The job looks perfect for what you're looking for. You can, you can list that as a dream job, which will then come through to the TA team that you have done. So,
Chris Rainey 12:35
oh, wow. So that interest, so interesting. So does that? Does that massively increase the likelihood that the TA teams didn't gonna see your CV. So it can,
Seán Delea 12:45
it can come up as like a filter. When the TA team is like reviewing applications,
Chris Rainey 12:50
they can say who selected this as a dream job, exactly, filter
Seán Delea 12:53
by like, who was referred. You can also like filter by like, who selected this as a dream job. That's very powerful. So it helps you stand out further and really signify that this, this is one I'm serious about, because you can't use it for every, every job you apply for. So, yeah, I love that feature. I love seeing when, when a dream job application comes through as well. I think that the important you need to make
Chris Rainey 13:20
like, if you have, I know you're probably already probably already done this, but if you haven't, you need to make some type of like post, or like the you know, thumbnail that they get if they get their dream job that they can post on LinkedIn, and it says, like, some little sort of like certificate that I've got my dream job on greenhouse, like. So you need something that you gotta share that because that's so that's so interesting, right? Yeah, yeah, some good social media posts, yeah,
Seán Delea 13:50
yeah. Well, that's a good idea. I don't know if that's on their roadmap, but if not, I will, I will build that one up. Like,
Chris Rainey 13:56
you know, like, you know, when they get the job, it could be like, share it, and then they hit Share, and they can say share to LinkedIn,
Seán Delea 14:01
yeah, yeah. You know, you can do that, can't
Chris Rainey 14:05
you? Yeah, a lot of people do. I've seen with other platforms. I've such, I think I've seen it with your platform. I'm pretty sure I have, but not the dream job bit. So that'd be really people love to do that. They love they can't wait to share, which is a great because a great moment, right? They want to celebrate that as well. What's the benefit for your customers of having this? Do you call it a marketplace? I know it's obviously, I mean internally. How do you describe it in the business?
Seán Delea 14:37
So internally, we talk about it as like as a candidate portal. So I think the benefit for like our customers is that it is easier for top candidates to apply and then to identify themselves. And I think on top of that, like it's a huge employer branding opportunity, like, again. So it's that whole thing we talked a bit of like, our customers are, like, proud to say that they use greenhouse, and I think this, like, further impacts that, like, I think the better experience you're providing to candidates, the more they're going to want to work for your company. And I think being signed up for something like my greenhouse, where the candidate has a little bit more control and a little bit more visibility is going to be huge for attracting top candidates. And you can even as well, like, connect it to this. It's not specifically my greenhouse, but you can also, like, become greenhouse verified, so you can get certain verifications from greenhouse if you're following a fair, inclusive, structured hiring process. And those verifications will, like, show up on your careers page, so that, again, it's signaling to candidates that we value this thing, and kind of like signaling to them, like, what you stand for as a company.
Chris Rainey 16:05
Oh, I love that. Yeah, love that one. I'll ask is some of these other versions of this stuff appeared in the past, where they've kind of like, I would say one of the downfalls is they've done, like, a pay to play. You know, it's like, you go on LinkedIn, it would be like, this is the sponsor job, and then it appears higher in the search or any of the platforms. Have you made sure that it's equitable in terms of, like, no one's like, paying extra for their job to appear first and stuff like that. You've kind of kept it open?
Seán Delea 16:35
Yeah? It's open in that way. Yeah? Good. Yeah. Good thing to note with my greenhouse as well for candidates, is that it's not mandatory to create an account. Like you can apply for a role to a company that is using greenhouse, and you don't have to create my greenhouse profile. And if you do create a my greenhouse profile, you can delete it at any time. It's not we're not going in the direction of like every time you apply for a role, yeah, moving out, but you have to go create a profile,
Chris Rainey 17:05
yeah? What's stopping people? Or how have you you mitigated people just spamming apply? Because that's a big challenge that many companies are having right now. We've made it so easy for people to apply that they're just spamming. You get the same person applying for 10 jobs.
Seán Delea 17:23
Yeah, yeah. You can turn on certain features that, like candidates would be limited on the number of times that they can apply for a certain role. But it's true that like ta teams are getting a huge inflow of applications. I think now that the candidate market, it is a little bit more AI enabled. We're seeing that a lot more. There was recent insights from a greenhouse candidate experience reports, and I think it was something like 121% increase in the number of applications that recruiters are seeing, which is it's tough to manage. I mean, I think we recently opened a role for a people business partner specialist, and I think the role was open for like two days, and we got over 2000 applications. So as you can imagine, it's very hard to get through all those applications when you're you can be working like 567, plus other roles. So I think the way we try to mitigate that is by using some of our talent filtering features which are AI enabled. So with that, you have features like, you can filter by who has selected this as a dream job. But you can also filter it using like keywords in the same way that you would say on on LinkedIn. So like, let's say, for example, you're hiring for a sales development rep, you can, like, filter by keywords such as lead generation or cold calling, and that will, like, bring the most relevant candidates for the role to the top, which, like, helps recruiters to, kind of, like, get to the most relevant candidates as quickly as possible, which is really important when they're, like, working across multiple roles and have all these applications flooding
Chris Rainey 19:16
in. Yeah. And you also have the opportunity to generate candidate attributes from the job descriptions, right? Yes,
Seán Delea 19:22
yes, yeah, that's a huge one. And I think it goes back to the whole thing of like, I think TA, teams are being challenged with increasing efficiency and productivity, without necessarily increasing headcount for their teams, there's obviously been a lot of ups and downs for TA teams over the last few years, and I think most teams are being very cautious about repeating the mistakes of the past. So greenhouse has been focused quite a lot on releasing for. Features and products to help ta teams to be more productive and efficient without needing to increase their headcount. And I think some of those AI features like are making a real impact there, so particularly things like scorecard attributes. So obviously greenhouse is really big on structured hiring, which basically means just aligning on a on an intentional plan for each role, including, like, aligning on some predefined attributes and qualities for the role. So you're then assessing candidates throughout the process on those attributes, as opposed to, like, just going on your gut instinct or a feeling, or how well you vibe with the candidate, that it's a little bit more objective. But as you can imagine, doing all of that for every role you're working on can be quite time consuming, especially if, like, you're working on like really distinct different roles. So it takes quite a lot of work, but now within greenhouse, with the click of a button, you can generate scorecard attributes for the role that's based on the job title or the job description or maybe any pre existing attributes, and then you can then assess the candidates based on those attributes that have been generated for you that are relevant. And even then, from even better like the next step, you can generate AI interview questions based on those attributes to help you assess for those attributes as you go throughout the process. So as you can imagine, that's taking so much work off of a recruiter's place.
Chris Rainey 21:49
Yeah? So much time. And I'm assuming the next person who's maybe interviewing that candidate has all of that those insights as well.
Seán Delea 21:57
Exactly. Yeah. So the plan would be that, like, as a recruiter is kicking off a role, they can, like, use AI to generate the scorecard and the attributes needed, and then they can, like, design the interview plan for each step of the process and get AI generated questions for each stage of the process for that
Chris Rainey 22:16
person that's for those attributes, amazing. But then you also don't have the same person, like, five people asking the poor candidate the same questions
Seán Delea 22:23
exactly, which is something I've experienced, me too, me too. Where it's like you're basically like, you're doing the same interview over and over again.
Chris Rainey 22:33
Yeah, you haven't even spoke to each other. You haven't even valued my life. You haven't even valued my time that I spent the first time. Yeah, nothing more frustrating. Yeah, it's frustrating, yeah. And a lot of time also that it's not just, it's not the managers fault. They just don't have the system and capability and structure set up for them to be successful too, or whoever's interviewing like so it's, it's not that they want to ask the same questions. They just don't have a tool like yours to be able to give them the context
Seán Delea 23:03
exactly, and I think Don't, don't, maybe necessarily take the time to plan it out at the start, like, who's going to meet with them and who's going to assess for what at each stage, as opposed to just picking, like, oh, it's important for these three people to meet them. And like, let's just see what they ask them,
Chris Rainey 23:21
yeah, what are your thoughts on using AI generated interview like, like, where you where you have, like, the chat bot agent now and in this day and age, asking quest Pre screening questions to filter candidates before interviews, etc,
Seán Delea 23:42
yeah, yeah. It's not something we've kind of tried to try to use ourselves that much. I think there probably are use cases for it, depending on kind of, like, what industry you're in and what you hire for, like, maybe, like, off the top my head, I'm thinking like, if you're doing, like, high volume recruiting, like, maybe it's a good way to, kind of, like, wiggle down that talent pool a little bit more. I think for us, we haven't yet seen clear indicators that, like, it's really successful. And I think for the roles we hire for, I think we want to use AI to, like, make a recruiter's role more efficient, and that's where, like, stuff like the AI generated interview questions and scorecards come in. But we still want to kind of like maintain more human oversight, so we haven't kind of gone yet in the direction of chatbots.
Chris Rainey 24:37
Yeah, no, I agree with you, by the way, and I think the only, the only time I see it work is you're right? Like, high volume frontline worker. I mean, like, like, Do you have a driving license? Because, because this job requires you to drive right, you know, something like that, where it's like, okay, we want, we could probably save a lot of other people, a lot of people's time, by just asking those simple questions up front. So check. You know, yeah, it's much of much as the benefit for the candidate is for you just don't waste each other's time to be able to do that. I just, I was just interested, especially given how, how smart, you know, now we're getting with with agents, it kind of opens up a world of opportunity and possibilities that we just didn't have before. Yeah,
Seán Delea 25:23
yeah. And, I mean, that's the thing, like it's evolving so quickly that it's who knows where we'll be in six months time. You know,
Chris Rainey 25:30
yeah, what does it thinks maybe a common misconception about greenhouse that people have,
Seán Delea 25:38
I think a common misconception that I think candidates have is that there, that there's not humans reviewing the applications that are coming in. Like, I often see, like, LinkedIn posts of like, here's how you can, like, trick the ATS to, like, get your application through the process. See those, yeah, yeah. Like, that's not what's happening. We don't have some boss that is, like, reviewing applications. It's always a human. Like, we have features built in to, like, make that process easier for the human who is reviewing the application, but it is a human on the other end of the process. Like, greenhouse is not a boss in itself. I'm glad you mentioned
Chris Rainey 26:20
that right, because there's a lot of we're not going to mention companies. We all know the ones that are in trouble right now for doing what you just described, and that's obviously sparking a lot of concern from people, and quite rightly, right? Because people are finding out, and I know from speaking to your team that that's a stance that you've always taken from the very beginning. Yeah, so, and I think that's something really positive, that it's always coming back to the human and empowering both the applicant and also the recruiters to do the best job they can and spend the most time with a candidate and make the best experience possible. Focus there. Let's let's not focus on how we can leverage AI to skip all of the parts that really make it human.
Seán Delea 27:06
Yeah, exactly, because that at the end of the day, like it is interviewing, is a very human experience. It's a very vulnerable thing. And I think having a human who is well trained on how to make that process run as smoothly as possible is still incredibly important. Our focus as a company is more on like, how do we make things more efficient and work better for the humans who have to run that process? And how do we alleviate the mundane administrative tasks so that they can focus more on things like candidate experience or stakeholder management and making sure the hiring team is well calibrated. The more strategic work that I think most recruiters actually enjoy, I think that's where our core focus is. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 27:51
you should have such an interesting job because you're living it on both sides, right? You're using you're doing it internally, and you're also using your own tool. What do you love most about your job?
Seán Delea 28:05
Honestly, it's probably just what you you said, like, it's a little bit like meta, like being on the TA team at Greenhouse. Like, we obviously are the end users of the product ourselves, and we're using it every day to hire people into greenhouse, but it's super interesting being able to see behind what goes into making the products that we all use. And you know, we get to interact in a with other teams in the company that, like you probably wouldn't get an opportunity to in many other teams, like, we would work closely with our Product team, for example. So if they're thinking new through new product features, they'll often come to our team for some initial feedback. Or would like our perspective on like, how do you currently use this feature? Like, why aren't you using it this way? Like, what would be the limitations? So that's like, really interesting work for us and our team. I've even kind of like joined customer calls on the past. I've worked with our sales team. They'll
Chris Rainey 29:13
bring you in. You're like, their secret weapon.
Seán Delea 29:18
It's like, if we have current customers you were, like, they're, they're often interested in, like, okay, but like, how does the greenhouse team do this thing? Interesting? And, like, sometimes I'll join on a jump, on a call with a customer, and talk through, through our approach, because, I mean, that's the thing about greenhouse, is that it's, you know, it's quite customizable. It's so there's multiple ways of using it, but it's always interesting for customers to hear how we're using it.
Chris Rainey 29:44
You need to chat to the sales team like Guys, what's my cut? Yeah, what's the commission? I don't
Seán Delea 29:53
know. Maybe, maybe I should implement some variable components.
Chris Rainey 29:58
Listen, man, I really enjoyed the comment. Speaking, is anything we didn't speak about that we should have.
Seán Delea 30:05
I think, I think we probably touched on the main things. I think the things I'm most excited about with greenhouse at the moment are the my greenhouse platform for candidates. I think that's going to make a huge impact to job seekers. And the other thing is our greenhouse AI features, I listed a few of them here today because there's a bunch more that are. They're all available for review on our on our website. So I just encourage anyone who's listening to go have a look, if they are current greenhouse customer, to talk to their their customer success manager about these features and make sure that they're getting the best use out of their greenhouse
Chris Rainey 30:45
products. Amazing. And where can people connect with you personally? If they want to
Seán Delea 30:49
reach out and say, Hi, I am always happy to connect on LinkedIn. Name is Sean delay, so please feel free to add me
Chris Rainey 30:56
amazing. Well, Sean, it's great to chat with you someone who's living on the inside and the outside. It's quite unique to get that perspective. And for everyone listening, there'll be a link to connect with Sean below in the chat or in the description, wherever you are or listening, that there'll be somewhere just to connect as well. But apart from that, I appreciate you coming on and wish all the best until next week.
Seán Delea 31:18
Great. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be here. Thanks. You.
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Sean Delea, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Greenhouse Software.