How Planet Labs PBC achieved next-level hiring efficiency with Greenhouse Goals

3 mins, 52 secs read time

Planet is a leading provider of global satellite imagery and insights. Driven by their mission to image Earth’s landmass every day, the company is making global change visible, accessible and actionable. We sat down with Clarence Lal, Planet’s Global Head of Talent Acquisition, to better understand how his team sets attainable stretch goals to elevate team-wide hiring performance and scale the business even faster.

Setting clear expectations for new hires and tenured employees

In a period of hyper growth, a company is usually looking for ways to be more efficient. Planet is just such a company. As Clarence explained to us, Planet’s Talent team needed to solve some challenges in onboarding new team members and provide more resources for tenured employees. When asked for feedback on how to improve current hiring processes across the board, employees’ feedback seemed to be all over the places – which made it that much more challenging to land on a good solution for everyone involved.

“Everyone seemed to have different ideas and expectations about what was working and what could be improved,” said Clarence. That’s when Planet decided to try Greenhouse Goals – a new offering from Greenhouse – to drive hiring goal alignment across all team members.

We’re shining a light on areas for improvement to drive transparency and accountability.
–Clarence Lal, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Planet

Greenhouse Goals sets hiring teams up with what they need to align on internal expectations and track against targets so they can get measurably better at hiring. Plus, using reports guided by these goals empowers hiring teams to routinely evaluate their processes and identify gaps to drive a more efficient hiring process – and provide visibility for new hires and employees.

“We now know what the expectations are,” said Clarence. “We have this increased level of transparency – we know exactly what we’re going to be talking about in ongoing team and leadership meetings.”

Additionally, by pulling a report on their submission rate in Greenhouse Goals, the Planet Talent team was able to lead a conversation with stakeholders about why structured hiring is so valuable and why consistency in scorecard submission was one of the keys to success. When the team first set up their goal of improving scorecard submissions, 76% of interviewers were submitting their scorecards within 24 hours. Just three weeks later, that number jumped as high as 96%!

Driving personal and shared accountability

As Clarence explained, Planet believes that company goals should be within “comfortable reach,” whereas individual goals should be more of a stretch. By definition, a stretch goal should be something a team member strives for, with the understanding that achieving it would be an impressive feat.

“Our hiring goals aren’t a punch card,” Clarence shared, “We’re trying to connect folks to their work by making sure individual goals are set based on conversations with hiring managers around larger goals.” And it’s working – in a recent meeting, a recruiter pulled up their Greenhouse dashboard to show that they were behind on a monthly goal they had set together. “Shared accountability and sense of responsibility is what goal-setting is all about,” Clarence said.

Using data to lead conversations

In addition to using Goals to lead one-on-one conversations, Clarence leans on Greenhouse Goals and Greenhouse Reporting for insights on how to improve the hiring process by communicating metrics and progress to the leadership team at Planet. “We often report up to the business leaders and talk about performance metrics,” he said. “This is a great two-way communication tool that promotes open conversations around opportunities for greater hiring efficiency.”

For example, the Talent team began with a goal of two days to schedule a candidate for the next stage of the interview process – before quickly learning they were actually scheduling candidates within about eleven hours. They’ve now adjusted the goal, which can be used to more accurately build out their time-to-hire predictions.

A more predictable, data-driven future

In the past, Planet’s Talent team set internal hiring goals based on anecdotal conversations with other teams. Today, Planet has the tools to show and iterate on future hiring performance.

We’re establishing standards at Planet that are anchored in data.
–Clarence Lal, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Planet

Goals has empowered the Planet Talent team to have important conversations about performance metrics with individuals and with leadership. And, once their goals are achieved, they’re able to use that data to inform future conversations and drive even more predictable outcomes as they scale their business.

Learn how Greenhouse Goals helps teams get measurably better at hiring in this blog.

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