Voice AI, Platform Gravity, and Governed Workflows: Reimagining the Modern ATS Ecosystem

[00:00:02] HR tech, work tech, and investment are transforming the future of work. Are you in the know? Welcome to the WorkTech Podcast. Join host George LaRocque for expert insights on the trends, M&A activity, and strategies shaping the workplace. Brought to you by OneWorkTech.com and the Work Defined Podcast Network. Hey everybody, welcome back to WorkTech. It's me, George LaRock, and I have a really interesting conversation today.

[00:00:31] I'm excited that our guest is joining us. Meredith Johnson is the Chief Product Officer at Greenhouse. And I've gotten to know Meredith since she joined Greenhouse. And what I think is really interesting is the lens that she brought to our space. And so after a couple of decades in ed tech and legal tech, she became a really quick study of our space and really like walks the walk now around talent. So I'm thrilled to check in on Greenhouse.

[00:01:00] They've had a lot of announcements lately. And get Meredith's perspective. Meredith, welcome. Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for the kind words. Yeah. Well, I'm excited that you're here. And I framed your background, but can you give a quick intro for anyone that hasn't met you or maybe doesn't? I can't imagine anyone doesn't know Greenhouse at this point, but there might be someone. Sure. Well, great to be here. I'm Meredith Johnson.

[00:01:25] I've been in tech for over 25 years, mostly in enterprise-grade software, but in a variety of environments. Startups that went public and PE-backed environments, as you said, in the legal tech world. And then also spent a long time in my career in the social good and ed tech sector, which was really rewarding. Most of the work that I do has been at companies that are very mission-centered, purpose-driven, and that have their kind of tentacles into what I kind of consider as changing the world.

[00:01:53] So that was no difference finding my match here at Greenhouse. It's been a great almost year and a half with the company. They're doing incredible work. I'm really proud of the problems that we're solving and excited to be here to talk about it. Yeah. So when you, you know, you're now like fully immersed, but you've gone through this transition into this space and you've got what is really valuable, which were and still are to a large degree fresh eyes on the space.

[00:02:22] So I'm curious, how do you view the differences between those other spaces that you mentioned and TA tech or HR tech? And, you know, did anything surprise you about this category or, you know, is the pace over here the same or different? I'm really curious to get your view on that. Yeah, this is a great question. You know, and I've thought about it actually as I've told my story about changing, you know, companies and my why for coming to Greenhouse.

[00:02:50] And I think, you know, there's a lot of parallels in social good and in ed tech and in legal. It really is all about brand. Right. If you think about a nonprofit, their ability to attract donors and to be trusted, right, trusted at how they're going to steward your money, your time, your treasure is really important. And a law firm's ability to attract clients really depends on their people. Right. I mean, there's there's I learned so much about talent strategy in legal tech and I don't think I even realized it at the time. Right.

[00:03:19] So if you think about, you know, a firm's IP and its people like those are those are assets that you can't break apart. Right. And so my teams built my past teams and legal tech built AI that helped firms understand how they won cases. You know what the team composition was that made a winning team. How could they duplicate that again? And it was it was really cool. So in my opinion, it was kind of, you know, recruiting intelligence dressed in legal clothing. So I think there were a lot of parallels.

[00:03:47] I think to your question of what surprised me, I was surprised that here in legal tech, the category has it's a little bit of a laggard in adopting AI. And I get it. And we're going to talk a lot about what happened there and where trust plays a role. But I think I was a little bit surprised by that just because I had been so immersed in AI for at least a half a decade before coming to Greenhouse. You know, but there's a lot of parallels in the sectors I've been in.

[00:04:10] And I think one thing that did not surprise me about the buyers and the customers is they're all across all those sectors, informed, skeptical, you know, decision makers. They are dealing with a crowded tech market. And we're seeing legal and security folks, you know, being more involved in decision making and helping what, you know, make the decisions around what tech to bring in. So, you know, it's been fun. I think there's a lot of parallels that I've been able to draw from in my past.

[00:04:35] And it's also been really humbling and really exciting to have that learning curve you mentioned as I've stepped into this space. Yeah, I said a lot there. I think the first thing that really resonated with me was the people strategy in the legal tech space and how that was almost that wasn't necessarily how everybody was thinking about it. But that connection to the business, that connection to success, the connection to ROI.

[00:05:00] And I think this in this space, unless the line is drawn like with a big, thick black Sharpie to the ROI, on both sides, on the vendor side and the customer side, there's a challenge in connecting those dots. So that's an interesting experience to have had to bring into this space. I like that a lot. Yeah. And, you know, I'd add one thing, too.

[00:05:24] I think there's another parallel here, which is the criticality of the people that our customers serve. Right. So in social good, it's the constituent. It's the donor. It's the volunteer. Right. In legal, it's the clients that you want to retain and gain their trust and deliver value to time and time again. Right. Better than the firm down the street. And in talent. Right. We're extending brands that attract great candidates. Right. And so that relationship with that end to end user is really, really critical.

[00:05:51] And we think about solving problems and building tech for the consumer, the person that's actually buying the thing. You can't just be thinking about how we operate and use enterprise apps to do work. You've got to think about, you know, those outcomes that you mentioned. Right. What is the connection to the business and how are they able to connect and present themselves in the best possible way to their end constituents? Which in our case is, you know, all those amazing job seekers out there.

[00:06:16] So I have been in this industry as a practitioner and then on the tech side and then now in this seat. It's decades. And I just had I had really good timing in the sense that it was like, OK, you're in this space and now, oh, here's the Internet. Oh, here's here's the cloud. Here's social. Here's AI. Here's everything. And here's mobile. So I've gone through all of these changes over here and I've viewed I've always wondered about other markets and having that.

[00:06:44] It's not a passive constituent because the candidate is is core to this. Yes. But it's not generally the buyer. So everything I'm doing this, I bit off way more than I can chew, I think, on this report series that I'm writing. And I've been talking about how in HR tech, everything has been built from the employer out.

[00:07:07] And now with AI and the candidate or consumer having AI, there's this new this new paradigm, which is we really can't just talk about candidate experience. We have to really build for it. And I think your my greenhouse initiative was one of the first successful initiatives by an ATS or a talent platform to do that. And was that that happened on your watch?

[00:07:33] And I'm curious if you're if some of that legal or social good work, ed tech work played into that. Was that did you have a roadmap to follow at all or? Yeah, well, listen, let me give credit where credit is due. The idea around building out my greenhouse and the understanding that this second constituency who had no purchasing power. Right. But there's enormous states started before I even joined greenhouse.

[00:07:59] So the team has been thinking about this problem set for quite a while and had started to build really build the technology and build the vision before I entered the business. But I'm hoping that the value that I've brought and the team that we've assembled, we've put more investment in it. I've hired a leader. We've got, you know, marketing folks in there and technical experts really with a background in consumerization and B2C solutions. Right. So not just kind of enterprise grade apps.

[00:08:23] I hope my my fingerprint and my footprint there is getting closer to a clear problem definition and to really getting committed to the outcomes that we're trying to drive. And so we've spent a lot of time in the last few quarters building out the team, building out the vision and seeing the success, which we'll talk about in a little bit with regard to engagement of candidates and job seekers. And the signals we're seeing that tell us that we think there's a there here in terms of how we can solve problems differently.

[00:08:49] I think, you know, what's interesting to consider is there's kind of semi-competing but semi-aligned problems across employers and candidates. Right. Employers want efficiency. They want confidence in decision making. They want to reduce risk of making wrong hires. Right. And candidates want to feel seen. Right. They want to be treated fairly. They want transparency. They want to be they want to be respected regardless of the outcome.

[00:09:13] And and I don't think we can reimagine hiring and really affect the impact and change that we want in this space without solving both sides of those coins. And so, you know, that's why we put a lot of focus into what it means to job seekers, what problems need to be solved there and how we believe we can create a network that nobody has yet. And one that's going to work and and ideally change the way we think about hiring. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate both sides of that answer.

[00:09:40] I want to shift and talk about some of the A.I. announcements, but I think that I mentioned that there have been other failed attempts to build what is essentially the job board, the hiring site. However, however, wherever my greenhouse is ultimately headed for your customers in the market, there have been failed attempts by other vendors. And I think it's important to like the shift and the change that we're going through. I say it all the time.

[00:10:07] What was inspirational before is more than plausible now. It's like where I'm seeing things launch and be successful because of the shift, not just in A.I., but the demographics, the candidate expectations, the customer expectations. And I think, you know, Greenhouse's reputation of following their customers lead prop. You know, I'm sure that had a lot to do with this as well. But you made a lot of there have been a lot of A.I. announcements and Greenhouse. Your open event happened.

[00:10:36] I think it was last week. And it wasn't it was probably like hugely seen by your customer base. But you had to really pay attention. Like you had the fanfare didn't didn't go out into the market yet. But can you talk about some of those announcements? I know that there's like some MCP stuff and other things that I saw and I was like, this is pretty cool. What's can you summarize what you put out into the market? Yeah, absolutely. And listen, it's a really exciting time just to go back to something you said.

[00:11:06] And I'm laughing when you said cloud because I'm remembering how difficult it was working, you know, for a company that was selling enterprise CRM and financial applications and application management for the school sector. And we used to debate all the time this this move to the cloud with our customers. Right. Everybody. They didn't understand it. They were scared of it. They were worried about their data. They didn't trust. It's so funny now that we're like, no big deal. Everything's in the cloud. Right. Now we're in this A.I. shift. Right. And that's technology. Right. Technology changes. It's so exciting. It's a little bit scary. Right. Right.

[00:11:36] And so it's like I love that. I mean, that's the thing my teams get kind of excited and geeked out about. And so, you know, I mentioned that I was surprised that talent hadn't already leveraged and adopted A.I. for these big problems they're facing. And I'm excited that it's here. Right. And so one of the things that I'm most proud of in my tenure at Greenhouse is making sure we had the right team and the right people focused on the biggest problems for our customers to come out with the right technologies. And so I want to preface my my comms here around our A.I. features that, you know, we're not chasing fads.

[00:12:06] We never have here at Greenhouse. We're not just trying to throw out solutions to get the brand awareness. And we're not trying to just do speed and efficiency. Right. I am fastidious about making solutions that are really effective. Right. And that have proven outcomes and that are focused. And that's the approach we've taken with our A.I. investment. You know, I think the through line here is responsible, defensible, auditable. AI is really, really important.

[00:12:33] And the hard line is that the human, especially in hiring, should always make the hiring decision. Right. A.I. can inform. It can surface. It can summarize. It can help bring insights and matches that we never could do years ago. Human. That human has to make that decision. And so our investment in our recent releases have been really exciting.

[00:12:52] We've been doing embedded AI in Greenhouse recruiting for a long time to make processes more simple, more automated, faster, friendlier, a little more foolproof, protect structure. And that's been really exciting. And there's no difference in the approach that we just did to bring a note taker to market. So we now have embedded AI note taking for all of your interviews and calls right within Greenhouse recruiting, which is great. Looking for the inside scoop on payroll, whether you're a payroll pro or just curious about your paycheck.

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[00:13:49] It's so much accessible and more affordable for our customers. And so I'm really excited about that. Of course, we launched Real Talent earlier this year, which is a really critical brand new solution that helps with top of funnel talent matching and fraud detection and ID verification. So that's been really, really important. And there's there's bits that underpin that solution that are AI backed. And then we're bringing AI responsibly into our analytics solution. So our brand new reporting and analytics solution uses AI to help surface proactively insights.

[00:14:18] And we're also doing fun things with like conversational UI. So now we have a chart agent that you can people like me can just ask a question and it's going to it's going to give you back beautiful, intuitive visuals that you can tell it, hey, change this or make this adjustment or you can ask a follow up question. And so those are examples of, you know, where we're improving the efficacy of the workflow and where we're bringing solutions to our customers that they really needn't expect.

[00:14:42] I think, though, what gets even beyond that and where I'm super excited is our investment in voice AI with our Azure acquisition, which I know we're going to want to talk about, you know, and I just want to make sure that I think the tough thing that I observe in the market when I when I mentioned crowded tech is there's so a lot of things sound the same. And a lot of people just throwing AI in front of, you know, any product release. And I keep telling all of our customers and stakeholders in the in the community, just make sure you're asking the questions, right? Ask about the principles.

[00:15:12] Ask how these solutions are being built. What technology are they backed by? How transparent is your partner and your vendor being? Are they auditing? And we take that stuff really seriously. We've assembled internal committees, external advisory boards, and and they're real. They you know, they they're not just kind of a rubber stamp. They actually can stop builds and they steer the way that we think about building. And I think that's really important. And we're very transparent about what we build and very transparent on a monthly basis with all of our audits. Yeah, that's that's great.

[00:15:42] I think the there's a there's a customer led aspect of that. There's a scale that that that I'm just hearing, you know, we're building this to scale and that that sort of governing principle, that through line that you talked about. Yeah, that's really important. And it's a lot of what I I'm not going to call any other vendors up, but a lot of what I see as I go through the market, take briefings is, you know, the trend is agents. So we're releasing 25 agents. The trend is, you know, MCP.

[00:16:12] So we're really oh, we're doing MCP. It's not it's not a there isn't a clear vision or path for the customer. And I think that that customer led philosophy is in like coming to bear for you right now in a very good way, as we've had AI for a while and everybody's just been in pilot mode and trying to figure it all out.

[00:16:35] And in this I think this next year is going to be about really getting out of pilot mode and applying, you know, and looking for results. But you mentioned the Ezra acquisition and I know that just closed. And we had Daniel here talking about the acquisition right after it closed. But I wanted to get your view on sort of the strategic logic, you know, why voice? Why now? Why acquire and not build?

[00:17:03] And and does it point to something for the future for for greenhouse? So I'll let you take any or all of that, whatever, whatever you like. Yeah, wonderful. Well, this is such an exciting time for greenhouse for all of our customers, really new customers, because what's really beautiful about this solution is it's going to help us solve one of the biggest problems, which is what's happening at the top of funnel, right, where structure has always been hardest to enforce.

[00:17:29] Volume is the highest candidate kind of time for candidate is the lowest. The the the need or desire to kind of use gut kind of creeps in more. Right. And and great, great people get missed. Right. And so voice extends the, you know, the structure and and, you know, all of that reduction of bias and kind of fair shot transparency to the to the very beginning, which is really exciting.

[00:17:56] You know, and I knew that this was going to be a place we were going to want to lean in early on. I mean, when we think about the timing of like, when did you decide and how did you decide if you were going to build by our partner? Last year, my team committed that we wanted to bring this functionality to our customer. I didn't see a way to achieve our vision and to solve the big problems that are facing the space without technology like voice AI. So I was super passionate about this last year.

[00:18:20] And when we started doing research, it was really clear to me that the quality that I knew we were going to want and my vision for what that solution was, we weren't going to build that as amazing as our team is. We weren't going to build it fast enough for us to get to the problems soon enough to get those outcomes for our customers and really to hit kind of a enterprising ambition that I had. So, you know, we started doing research and we did a ton. I think I've probably seen every single or close to every single voice interview on the market.

[00:18:47] And so I actually feel very educated when I talk to our customers about why Ezra is so different and so special and where I would have caution about bringing other solutions into our ecosystem. And I wouldn't. And I think a lot of people are doing interesting and great things. But Ezra was the only one that had proven that they had spent years getting that conversational voice AI right. Technology that is genuinely differentiated. It's very natural. It has very good turn response. It offers cheat detection.

[00:19:15] And what was really cool was it was built to interact not just with the candidate, but the hiring teams. So we can get signal in interviews with recruiters and with hiring managers to better understand what is that real need for the business. And it's actually bringing through conversation richer signal for the interview kit, the job description, the structured questions. And that's a really powerful differentiator. So I was super excited the first time I saw it.

[00:19:40] And honestly, George, it was kind of frustrating to take the time to do all the diligence to look at all the solutions and get to a joint decision. Because I saw this solution back in Q3 of last year and I wanted it right then. And so the founder is amazing. The team's amazing. And we're really proud of the solution and so excited to be able to bring it to all of our customers and other customers. Because it's got pre-built integration with greenhouse recruiting, but it works alongside other ATS and other platforms. And that's great.

[00:20:08] And I want to kind of bring that value to as many companies as possible. Okay. I, you know, I remember seeing you. This was probably halfway through your journey on this at HR Tech. Yeah. And we couldn't, I couldn't go talk to anybody about it then, but I could, we could talk about it now. And you, you were on the voice thing then. And so validated this was sort of the future that you saw.

[00:20:32] And what was different about that conversation at HR Tech than what I've, other conversations I've had across the market was everybody else has been focused on chatbots. Everybody else has been focused on, like, like I said, like, okay, that's the thing. We need that on the front end. So everybody was pursuing that. And you had sort of taken it a couple steps further and said, I think the future's voice. Does, I have two questions about that.

[00:20:54] Does it sounds from what you said, like the introduction of this doesn't change Greenhouse's ability to offer a structured hiring experience. And I know there's optionality there for customers as well, but it sounds like there's no change on that by introducing this into the process. Am I right? Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, I would say, I don't know if I would say voice is the future. You just said that I think it is a critical piece of the future. And here's why. Okay. It needs to be really clear. And we'll see.

[00:21:23] We'll see how these hypotheses play out. But when you and I met last year at HR Tech, you're right. A lot of people are doing chatbots and copilots and conversational UIs, which is great. It's meaningful for some workflow automation and workflow support. But that wasn't solving the problem I'm trying to solve. I'm trying to get really great, clear, trustworthy signal at every stage of the process. And so voice does that better than any other modality. We know that, right? And you can even look back at history, right?

[00:21:51] We've been writing for, what, hundreds or thousands of years. You know, people have been talking a lot longer than that. So it really is the method by which most information is conveyed. And you can get so much more rich signal in that. And so it isn't replacing structure to your question. It's actually bringing structure to that early process that it was really never there, right? Where there's a lot of AI slop. There's a lot of noise. People don't get looked at. You get kind of tired. You look through as many candidates as you can.

[00:22:19] You make a gut choice and you start bringing people in the funnel. That's not good enough, right? Like we can do better. And technology is here that can help. And that's what's so exciting. So I think voice is an extremely critical piece of how we solve the problems, both for our customers and for job seekers. And it actually brings that structure and secures that structure earlier. So it really has some dual purpose that I'm super excited about. And I've got a vision for kind of how it'll play a role now and kind of as the future unfolds. Yeah.

[00:22:48] So without giving away any secrets, it sounds like where Ezra already provides value to the hiring team, you're looking at how to leverage that through the whole process beyond just the interview. I think that's even been stated in the other conversations we've had and the press releases and such. Is that fair to? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think so.

[00:23:13] When I kind of think about that horizon, you know, right now it's great at top of funnel screening at scale, right? You mentioned scale earlier. And we know that, you know, application volume is up over 400 percent, you know, over the last three years, which is insane. And so it's urgent. It was urgent last year, right? And it's urgent now. So voice lets every candidate be heard without overwhelming recruiting teams. And it's bringing that structure to the forefront, which is great.

[00:23:37] I think we'll see it evolve into a more strategic feedback loop where, you know, the data that's coming out of those interviews and those conversations creates pattern recognition. It can make matching stronger. It can make more confident decisions for companies, which is really exciting. And then I think long term, you know, you said earlier, like voice is the thing. And I think it's a super critical thing. I think voice becomes this kind of new interface layer, right? And it's not just for companies.

[00:24:06] It's certainly for candidates. It's for candidates to present themselves in a new way. And I think we'll look back and we'll kind of smile and remember, you know, remember when we had all the job boards. Remember when we had all the networks where all the people were. Remember, you know, that that was what we needed for a long time. And now technology has made it, you know, completely different to present yourself and to create good signal and to connect needs to humans and humans to needs. And I think that's where the future is headed. Yeah. Well, I saw an article in the last week.

[00:24:35] I think it was Business Insider. It might have been the journal. I don't know. But it was the title was Whispering is the New Typing. And the article was all about how in a lot of offices you go into now, there's like this din of whispering because everybody's talking to whether it's Claude or whatever system, whatever AI they're using. And nobody's really tight. It used to be like you hear the keyboards going. And so I think we're kind of on that path.

[00:25:01] And I spend a lot of time, you know, pontificating to Claude about what I want to achieve with a certain article or whatever. And so I think that's where we're headed. Siri is one of my best friends, you know, all that. So I think there's a I think we're at the very early stage of behavior changing to where I know there's a lot of, you know, in your research has identified some pushback from a candidate perspective on voice.

[00:25:29] And I've said this so many times when video interviewing rolled out. I was there and everybody had their pitchforks out and their torches. And it's like this is never going to fly. It's not good for anyone. And look at us now. It's the technology improves. Thoughtful vendors build for customers, build for candidates. And we this is we're headed there. We're on our way. So I think it's good to have someone who's customer led helping move it along.

[00:26:00] So anyhow, I get excited about like the the there's like this friction in the market. And I think we've all been I was there. I was selling enterprise leading a sales team, selling enterprise systems. You mentioned the cloud. And we used to I mean, the security audits and so we're just you know, it's just almost they would almost kill us. And and then they were just gone. And then it was it was. And I think that's the kind of transition that we're in now in many layers.

[00:26:30] But one thing I want I'd love to hear you talk about a little bit is and I think this is really important optionality. So you talked about the fraud detection and the clear partnership and we talk about voice. So some candidates may or may not be able to use voice. Some candidates may or may not be able to or they may just choose that they don't want to go down a particular path.

[00:26:54] My understanding through other conversations like this is that you're not building one sort of silo for candidates to come through, but you're providing optionality in as much as possible. Is that am I can you validate that for me? Yeah, I think, you know, we are. And I think what's interesting going back to your kind of reminder of where we've all come over the last decade. I mean, I'm right there with you. I remember the first video interview I had to do. And, you know, that was in a world before I don't even know FaceTime was out.

[00:27:23] Right. We weren't we this is the smallest computer we have. Right. And so I don't type that often on it. I'm always whispering to it. My team will tell you that I'm like a big voice to text. I think it kind of annoys my family. But you're right. So you think back to before all the social media, before remote work. I mean, we're on video calls all day, every day. Right. It's a totally different world. And I think one of the fun things if we put our chief people, chief product hats on is you kind of have to think and imagine what the societal norms are going to be.

[00:27:53] Right. And when will they kind of go backward? Right. Where we want to work in small groups and, you know, face to face or where are we going to keep leveraging technology? So it's kind of fun to think about what are the societal norms? What will people expect? What will they tolerate? Right. And what will we expect of technology in terms of transparency and trust? And so, you know, to that end, we are trying to steer where talent is going. We are trying to be a leader in reimagining hiring.

[00:28:19] So there's going to be a lot of prescriptiveness there, but we've got to bring everybody along. So to your point about the candidate, you know, not everyone has to be videoed. Right. And we've got regulations across the globe in different states and countries that protect that. Right. Not everyone wants to be recorded. People are on their own societal journey of what they tolerate and how open and social they are with the world. You know, so I think we have to understand that.

[00:28:42] And so we've built solutions that are pushing, I hope, you know, pushing companies and pushing job seekers toward new ways of thinking about connecting. So that's what this really is. Right. This is creating authentic, well-matched connections between a need and a person. Right. And we've seen those recommendation engines be really successful in commercial spaces and in other ways that communities connect. So why not talent?

[00:29:07] I think talent is actually behind. And so I want to be a part of, you know, leapfrogging with technology to a place that can be really helpful for what I think is one of the most important things in the world, which is great people doing great work. Right. But we got it. We have to do it in a way that brings people along. And that's the that's the tough part. Right. And that's the tough part for product teams to make the choices of how are they going to build and how much flexibility will they or will they not allow in their solutions.

[00:29:30] But right now we have that flexibility for job seekers. And I'm really excited about what we're doing with my greenhouse because it's creating a very unique space where true job seeking people can put their best foot forward and can find jobs and connect with opportunities in a way that is super transparent and user friendly. And nobody's done that yet. Yeah. I'm glad you went to my greenhouse because I was thinking, you know, where I could talk to you for another hour and a half about any of these topics.

[00:29:57] But because we're almost out of time, I wanted to let you tee up. Is there anything that we didn't dig into any of the recent announcements or my greenhouse that you really think it's important to to focus on before we close out? Yeah, there's probably two things. You know, I can give just a quick update on where we are with my greenhouse and then maybe even come back to one of the technologies we glossed over for a minute, which is just the MCP.

[00:30:19] Yeah, I think it it's not an end all be all solution, but it's a really critical example of how we're thinking differently about orchestration versus kind of systems of record. So, you know, maybe we can touch on those two topics and jump in here with a couple good questions. But I think the one thing I would share on my greenhouse is, you know, we're excited about the signal we're starting to see and the interest we're starting to see. We've got nearly five million job seekers now. And so to me, it's no longer a portal. Right.

[00:30:44] We're really starting to build this this network in this community and this ecosystem where people can go and they can and they can have an experience that's different than anything they've had before. And the signal that we're getting with the dream job feature is also really exciting. We've got nearly 400000 people that have submitted a dream job application, which is their way of saying this is my top choice.

[00:31:06] This is the job I would love to have. And the data shows that candidates who submit those dream job applications, they are five point eight times more likely to be hired. So it's really starting to prove these concepts around, you know, what signal do we have as hiring companies and what's meaningful and what's valuable? And if we have better signal and we have better connection and we can bring structure earlier into the process, what does that mean for more confident matching and decision making? And that's what's really exciting. So I think that's been really important.

[00:31:36] And then I don't know if you have a question there, but I'll give a I'll share something about the MCP because I think it ties into this idea of meeting people where they are. OK, you know, back to your comment of people are everyone's launching the thing, you know, like I did that, too. And I did that, too. We've been we've been working on the MCP since last year. And I think it's a really great example of how we're starting to think about how people can work and want to work differently with technology.

[00:32:03] Right. We're not over prescribing how you use AI, but we're meeting companies and customers where they are. And that distinction matters because it's not just about giving open data access. It's about, you know, creating a governed layer within a system that they already have that's built for that structure, that's that protects those permissions, that is auditable and that keeps safe. The thing that is so precious, which is all of that candidate data and candidate information and disposition data. And so, you know, we're really excited that that's out.

[00:32:32] We're getting great feedback from customers about new workflows. Those they never imagined that they can do with the MCP, how they can connect external tools that they use with structure and with governance to their greenhouse system and all of their hiring data. And, you know, we're really excited about that. So these moves are really important and really strategic choices that we've made to solve problems that are real. And they're real right now for our customers. Yeah.

[00:32:59] So it sounds like the governance and structure and sort of access that is built into, you know, at a greenhouse user level follows. If I go to work with the MCP and make connections, that governance follows. But then it's in the hands of the customer. Is that that's what I'm hearing? Like this is now something that the customer can build out.

[00:33:23] It's not like a studio that greenhouse is working in taking customer requests. That's right. Yeah. And it makes it easier to connect multiple data sources. It makes it easy to use AI tools of choice that we all have. We all have them all or we all have one. We all, you know, choose something that we're using, whether it's a, you know, a copilot or another tool.

[00:33:45] And so, you know, you can think of, you know, you can think of someone maybe using the MCP and a conversational AI agent to say, you know, which recruiters have stalled in, you know, in the pipeline this week. Right. And it'll, and the MCP connection, that layer, that orchestration layer can help pull the greenhouse data with the permissions intact. That's really, really important. With that audibility, you know, auditability built in and like that workflow didn't exist 12, 18 months ago. Right.

[00:34:13] And that's, what's really fun is just, you know, being committed to the purpose built solutions that, you know, we're trying to bring to market, but also lifting our head enough and working with our customers and our advisors on what else is coming and what might be. And how could we solve that problem differently? And so it's kind of crazy. I mean, even when I started this job, that wasn't on the roadmap. Right. That technology didn't exist. Just those co-pilots weren't embedded in our daily work.

[00:34:37] And so, you know, we're, you know, we really lean heavily into quarterly planning because we have to just based on the pace of, you know, technology innovation. Yeah. Yeah. And my greenhouse, you made a comment there, you know, it's not just a portal. I feel like there's more strategy around how my greenhouse is evolving and what that might mean. And I know I can't ask the questions I want to ask about the company's strategy on a podcast, but. Yeah.

[00:35:04] But it's, I'm impressed with the success that you've had there. And yeah, this is, this has been great. So, you know, I'll, I'll put the website in the show notes, but Meredith, I want to thank you. I, I always enjoy our conversations and I'm really glad that we get to share one with, with the market. Yeah. You know, congrats on your successful, you know, your fingerprints are all over greenhouse right now. You were saying that earlier.

[00:35:31] So I, I see a very different product culture that's been emerging. And so, you know, having conversations like this, it's really exciting. So thanks for being here and sharing your, your story. Yeah. Well, I appreciate the time. And listen, I, we love what we do. So I love solving problems. I've done it my whole life and I hold myself and my team to a very high standard. We love the feedback we get from our customers. We love the feedback we get from the talent community.

[00:35:57] It makes us work stronger and better for the whole network, which is really important. And, you know, my hope is when we look back, we won't just say that we had a hand in automating hiring, but we really were the people that helped reimagine it. And that's what brings a smile to my face and makes me love the work we do. So I appreciate the time with you and the time to connect. Well, let's do this again in a while and see how things have been reimagined. Okay. And yeah. So thanks. And thanks to everybody, wherever you're watching or listening on the Work Defined Network

[00:36:26] or at WorkTech or YouTube. And until next time. Thanks.