Hiring software company Greenhouse announced a new feature this week that allows job seekers to identify and signal that a job opening is their top choice.
Dream Job, the feature Greenhouse announced Thursday, gives applicants the ability to select one job per month as their “dream job” and the platform will share that information with the employer, offering a new data point for recruiters to consider when looking to fill open roles.
“Everybody's falling into an AI doom loop, where, for really logical reasons and sensible things, each person’s optimizing locally, and it’s creating a really bad thing,” Greenhouse cofounder and president Jon Stross told HR Brew, pointing to AI assists with writing job descriptions, candidates optimizing cover letters and resumes with AI, and the AI tools recruiters use to match and grade those applications. “It just feels like noise…The whole system kind of breaks down for everyone.”
Many recruiters are addressing these current top-of-funnel issues by relying more on referrals and outbound recruiting, according to Stross, because recruiters are looking to different signals in order to help organize their workflow amid all the noise.
“It’s not that those 1000 applicants are unqualified,” he said. “There’s wonderful folks in there. It’s just really hard to tell apart.”
The Dream Job feature can help sort that pile with a new limiting signal: This is the job a candidate wants most. It’s a concept borrowed from other high-volume selection problems—like college admissions and dating apps.
“You had an opaque or friction-filled process,” Stross said of applying for college before the Internet era. “I had to use a typewriter to apply to colleges. I’d write different essays for every school—so I applied to three schools.”
After the college admissions non-profit Common App grew in popularity and its application became accessible online, a similar volume problem occurred for colleges and universities.
“You fill out your information once, and you hit 25 check boxes. You’ve just applied to 25 schools. So in some sense, it solves the problem, because it made it easier to apply,” Stross said. “But what it really did is it just created this huge inundation of applications…As an applicant, or somebody trying to go to college, it’s tremendously stressful, because you have to apply to all these places and all the rejection rates are really high.”
It made the situation worse for schools, too. Stross said to address the volume issue, colleges and universities turned to a different constraint: early decision. Applicants could still apply to those 25 schools, but it’s only possible to apply for an early decision from one university, and if an applicant is accepted to that school, they agree to enroll.
“What schools figured out is, we would love to have a class of people who truly want to be here. It takes away all of the uncertainty for them that they’re going to accept people [and] they’re not going to come,” he said. “They realized that the intent signal is as valuable as the grade point average in SAT scores.”
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Stross also pointed to a similar problem arc in the dating landscape. Finding a romantic partner out in the wild was hard. Meeting folks in bars and through friends was challenging and time consuming. Dating apps helped increase candidate pool for dates, but this new system also introduced a challenge for users looking to assess if someone was swiping right because dating is a numbers game or if they’re swiping right because they too enjoy hiking, cats, and cuddling up on the couch on Friday nights watching trashy TV.
Enter Tinder’s Super Like, SuperSwipes on Bumble, and Roses on Hinge. This new signal tells users this person isn’t just swiping right but is swiping right. So far, the Super Like has not aided me in finding love, but there’s always tomorrow.
“When folks use those, they tend to match at a higher rate,” Stross said, suggesting that the same principle can apply to jobs.
Dream Job submissions, according to Greenhouse, are already moving faster through hiring pipelines. Dream Job applicants see application review after about six days, compared to 19 days for standard applicants.
For candidates, it’s a chance to improve the odds in a crowded field, but for recruiters it can provide new insights about fit. Who doesn’t want someone working for their company that really wants to be there? Greenhouse’s new Dream Job feature is available for free for applicants who sign up for a MyGreenhouse account when they apply to jobs.
More than 300,000 candidates have signed up for MyGreenhouse since its April launch, and more than 10,000 jobs have been identified as a Dream Job, according to the company.
In addition to the monthly Dream Job signal, MyGreenhouse users have access to quick apply, which allows them to input their information once and then use auto-fill to apply for job openings across all Greenhouse customers. Job alerts allow users to subscribe to companies they want to work for, and the system flags openings that might match their profile. MyGreenhouse users also have access to additional information about the status of their applications, Strauss said.
“We’re trying to generate more and more signals beyond what’s on the resume. That’s more about, what do they want? What’s their ideal job? What are their deal breakers, things like that that we think only helps both sides,” he said.