Who Is Greenlight?
Greenlight Financial’s mission is to help parents raise financially smart kids, providing them with a platform to track allowances, chores, and kid-focused budgeting. Greenlight’s user-friendly app helps kids track their spending and incentivizes them to save their money.
The Hire Ventures team loves Greenlight, and the parents among us have been customers for several years. We’ve also had the great pleasure to be a part of this amazing company’s story, from startup to tech unicorn!
The Challenge
Greenlight Financial, an Atlanta financial tech start-up, began in the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC). After receiving seed funding, they moved out of the ATDC into their own space in downtown Atlanta prepared to grow!
Hire Ventures first connected with Greenlight in mid-2018 as they were moving from Atlanta’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) and into their own offices downtown. They faced similar challenges to other early staged ventures—specifically, how to attract and hire those first few key employees and how to establish a solid HR foundation that would enable the company to scale.
The Solution – Finding & Keeping Talent
Bringing recruiting in-house
Many early-stage tech companies are unsure how to hire after exhausting their immediate referral network, and we all know that reliance on contingency recruiting is not sustainable.
To be able to find talent, companies need an in-house recruiting solution and process. We implemented an applicant tracking system to establish that process for Greenlight, it also allowed them to have a branded and hosted career page, custom job postings, and a hiring process that could be automated and easily repeatable.
Our scalable and hourly recruiting services were ideal for Greenlight in these early stages, and those first few hires were exciting. This work led naturally to the next challenge—how to onboard, retain, and manage the HR function without a dedicated in house, HR person.
Custom New Employee Handbook
Partnering with Ashley Bacher, Greenlight’s Controller, we began the process of laying the HR foundation and thinking through HR processes and policies to craft an employee Handbook. It was important that this document also speak to their newly forming culture and values as they grew.
Employee handbooks should be crafted with the unique organization in mind and should cover all areas of the employee lifecycle, from hiring and onboarding through performance management, employee benefits and leave policies and also the commitment to security and compliance.
Working closely with leadership to craft employee policies can be overwhelming. Often, decisions must be made that never crossed their minds, such as how much bereavement should be offered, and there may be a learning curve for companies (what is employment at-will? What do you mean by progressive discipline?) We strive to make this process easy as we work to craft policies and programs that are not only competitive but in alignment with the culture and growth plans.
Conclusion
Since helping Greenlight create in-house recruiting programs and laying a solid HR foundation, the company has soared, becoming a true unicorn in the technology space. At last valuation, Greenlight was valued at more than $1B. This is an amazing triumph for Atlanta’s startup community.
We are so proud that we could be part of Greenlight’s early momentum, and we look forward to supporting them again in the future!
