A brand like no other for a company like no other
2 mins, 4 secs read time
I believe in the power of hiring
From individual well-being to overall business success, few things have a more profound impact than hiring.
Almost all of us have, or have had, a job at some point in our lives. And when it’s a full-time job, we’re likely to spend more time in the workplace than outside of it. If you’ve ever had a really great job (or a really terrible one) you’ll probably agree that being in the right role at the right company makes all the difference.
From an employer’s perspective, hiring is critical. Managers know how challenging it is when an open role stays empty and work begins to pile up. Or when they find the right candidate, only to lose them to a competitor at the eleventh hour. Not to mention the negative long-term impacts of hiring the wrong person for a role. Employee churn because of mishires isn’t great for morale and it’s even worse on a company's budget.
Before I joined Greenhouse, I wondered if it was the right move for me. I’d spent my career in agencies and boutique design firms, working with some big names on branding the “next big thing.” At the time, I wondered if HR technology was a place where big things happened.
What I’ve come to understand is that advancing the mission of a company like Greenhouse is to be a part of positive change, for both the company I’m part of and our society at large. Being a part of Greenhouse means I’m helping to solve an important problem in the world – because hiring is a big, big thing.
Oh. I didn’t realize we were going to redesign the logo.
Daniel Chait, Greenhouse CEO
Why we renewed the Greenhouse brand
Greenhouse has expanded our mission and our reach. We're helping more kinds of businesses, of all sizes, become better at hiring. We’re taking on important problems like reducing bias in the hiring process so that companies can build more diverse teams. We’re changing the hiring conversation from being mainly about HR processes to one that's about enabling positive individual and business outcomes. Nearly a decade after starting our journey, it’s time for our brand to reflect this evolution.
Hire for what’s next.
At our core, Greenhouse is a mission-driven company. We believe that when companies are great at hiring – when they can confidently and repeatedly put the right person in the right role – business and individual potential are unlocked.
We weren’t sure we were the kind of company that has a tagline. But ultimately we decided that as a company with a focused mission and a lot to say, a tagline would be shorthand for all that.
Carin Van Vuuren, CMO at Greenhouse
When companies make hiring a priority by investing in the right tools and processes and committing to improving over time, they unlock confidence. That confidence empowers them to take on whatever is next because they know they can find the right people to help them do it. Our shorthand for that: Hire for what’s next.
Our brand for what’s next
People who use Greenhouse love Greenhouse. They're part of our community, and our brand has always been a part of that. Here are a few details about the decisions we made for our new brand.
Logo
Our new logo is an evolution of our previous look; It’s more connected, has a g that better represents growth and is more unique overall. We like it.
Color
Our color palette is focused and bold. We’ve shifted our primary brand color to a true green – it’s in our name, after all.
Typography
We’re using Untitled Sans and Serif from Kilm Type Foundry. We think the addition of a serif face brings another human element.
Plants and botanicals
We’ve reimagined our botanical imagery by combining with fingerprint graphics. It adds another human element to something that’s part of our brand history.
Photography
Photos are an important part of our visuals. We use photography that’s warm, natural and candid. We‘ll work over time to build a photo library of Greenhouse customers and team members. Let us know if you’d like your picture taken!
Our website
Our new website not only reflects our new branding, but also creates a better overall user experience and makes it easier to find integrations. It also brings together hiring guidance, customer stories and resources. (By the way, you're on it right now.)
Our product
You may have noticed a few changes to our product, such as updated colors and a new login page. You’ll see more product changes over the coming months, too. We’ll be sure to give you a heads up.
Even more
We put together a robust set of brand guidelines so that our team and partners can use our brand consistently and accurately.
Our new look: All human
People are central to everything Greenhouse does. So it’s only natural that we’d want our brand expression to feel human. We could have just included more people photography (which we did), but we also sought to add something more uniquely Greenhouse.
When we first came up with the plant idea, everyone thought it was a bit ‘out there.’ No matter how we change, we’ve got to keep Greenhouse a little weird.
Daniel Chait, Greenhouse CEO
One way to infuse humanity was with our brand imagery. We took images of fingerprints, turned them into leaves and combined them with classic botanical images. It took a little iteration, but the end result is an evolution of brand visuals that feels fresh, human and original. It’s also a little bit weird, which is a great thing in our opinion.
Our new voice: Open, brave and driven
Another way we’ve made things more human is through our brand voice. To achieve our mission, we engage everyone with a stake in hiring, from managers to business leaders and across every department. That means moving beyond industry jargon and buzzwords to more confident and candid language. In other words, we speak like humans.
Our new brand makes me really proud to be part of Greenhouse. It feels like such a true reflection of who we are.
Tony Huỳnh, Strategic Consultant at Greenhouse
Our brand goes beyond the look and feel
This new approach to our brand is more than messaging and graphics. It’s something that every department and team at Greenhouse is part of. In every aspect of our business, we ask ourselves how we can help our customers hire for what’s next. We do this by:
Providing access to all
We’ve been intentional in the creation of our brand elements, visuals and experiences to make them as accessible as possible. That means color contrast for readability, web experiences built for screen readers and closed captioning for our videos, to name a few. We’ve worked hard to meet WCAG 2.0 AA standards.
Fairly pricing our products and solutions
We've broken with industry convention and offer our products based on an organization's stage and hiring needs, not just their size. That way, customers have room to grow as their hiring needs change.
Building our mission into our product roadmap
In our industry, it’s easy to get into a competitive war for the longest feature list. We don’t think that’s the best way to ensure our customers’ long-term success. Instead, we’re building our product roadmap to help companies get measurably better at hiring.
Measuring and evaluating our progress
Greenhouse is a mission-led company, so we have to go beyond the typical measures a company might use to evaluate their success. Starting this year we will introduce “mission metrics” as a way to evaluate our progress in making our customers great at hiring.
We didn’t do it alone
We worked with some amazing creative and strategic partners to realize our new brand. We could have never done it without them.
Bread n Butter – brand strategy and messaging
Order – brand identity design
Instrument – web strategy, design and build
Dress Code – manifesto video
Rival LA – motion graphics and design
Trenton Kenagy
is VP of Brand and Corporate Marketing at Greenhouse. Prior to joining Greenhouse, Trenton was a founding partner of ThoughtMatter, a purpose-driven brand design studio driving change across diverse sectors, from arts and culture to health and economic development. Previously, Trenton spent 10 years leading brand design teams at WPP agencies VML/Y&R, working with Microsoft, Gap, Inc, REI and Alaska Airlines, among others.