Recruiting platform Greenhouse raises $50 million to grow its diverse hiring feature

Daniel Chait Greenhouse

Recruiting platform Greenhouse has raised $50 million in a series D funding round led by Riverwood Capital.
The money will be used to scale the company's recently launched diversity and inclusion feature, which was created in conjunction with consulting firm Paradigm
The feature surfaces "nudges" or small reminders in real time that point out how users can act more fairly when they're writing job postings, making referrals, and conducting interviews.

Recruiting platform Greenhouse has raised $50 million to expand its recently launched feature that helps companies manage unconscious bias during the hiring process, the company announced on Thursday.

The series D round was led by Riverwood Capital, bringing the company's total funding to $110 million.

Greenhouse is a popular recruitment platform used by buzzed-about startups, such as Airbnb, Warby Parker, Pinterest, and Squarespace. Its new inclusion feature, launched in April, has been in the works for more than a year and was created in partnership with Paradigm, a consulting firm specializing in diversity and inclusion.

"So many companies are waking up to this problem and now they're asking 'now what?'" Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait told Business Insider. "So that's why we think this is the right time to really be investing in this and taking on these challenges rather than just talking about it."

While there are plenty of other software solutions that aim to reduce bias in hiring, Chait says Greenhouse Inclusion is takes a more holistic approach. The program surfaces "nudges" or small reminders in real time that point out how users can act more fairly when they're writing job postings, making referrals, and conducting interviews. These reminders, the program hopes, will prompt long-term behavior changes.

"We want to solve this problem at the main point where it occurs, the behavior of employees," Chait said.

Greenhouse Inclusion also collects and organizes demographic data, so companies can easily access how many women and underrepresented minorities are employed at the company and where those hire are being recruited from.

What about Greenhouse's own diversity?

The idea of creating features for diverse hiring came from Joelle Emerson, the founder of Paradigm. The consulting firm was brought on to help Greenhouse internally a little more than a year ago, and during the process Paradigm mentioned they already advise companies on how to use Greenhouse for better hiring practices.

Chait then asked Emerson if the company could make product improvements that would help what Paradigm was already doing. When Emerson said yes, the two started working together.

While Greenhouse hasn't released a full demographic report for the entire company — Chait tells Business Insider it will release a full diversity report later this year — the company did say that 40% of its executive team is women and across the entire company, employees from underrepresented minorities has increased 12%.

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