How Toast Transformed Interviewing With BrightHire

The Challenge: Scaling high-quality interviewing

Toast hires people each year across engineering, product, marketing, customer success, sales, and general and administrative functions. As hiring volume grew, so did the number of people conducting interviews, and the team needed a way to ensure that the quality and consistency of those conversations kept pace.

One of the clearest opportunities was in scorecard completion. Interviewers would finish a conversation, return to their day, and come back hours later trying to reconstruct what had been said from memory and/or incomplete notes. The feedback that made it into the system varied in depth and timeliness, which made it harder to calibrate, align on decisions, and move with confidence. Engineers and product managers in particular, who made up a large portion of Toast’s interviewing population, had plenty of motivation to interview well but wanted a lighter path to documenting what they had discussed.

There was also a training challenge. Getting new interviewers ready to contribute required scheduling shadow interviews, which meant two people needed to be available for the same conversation at the same time. That created a bottleneck in interviewer capacity, which in turn limited how many candidates the team could move through the process at once.

“We needed to remove the friction from the interview process so our teams could focus on the conversation and scale interviewing more effectively.”

— Lori Busch, Senior Director, Talent Operations, People Technology, and Analytics, Toast

The Solution: Building faster, more consistent hiring with BrightHire

Lori Busch, Senior Director, Talent Operations, People Technology, and Analytics at Toast, had been familiar with BrightHire since its earliest days. She had seen the product take shape around real hiring challenges and understood the thinking behind how it was built.

When the timing was right, she didn’t need to run an extensive tool evaluation. She already had conviction that BrightHire was the right solution to address a specific operational challenge: improving the speed, quality, and consistency of interview feedback.

Rather than introducing a new tool to address a single point in the hiring journey, the team approached BrightHire as a way to improve how interviews were captured and how decisions were made across the hiring process.

They started with a pilot in the R&D organization. Engineers and product managers were already comfortable operating in beta environments, which made it a natural place to test, gather feedback, and refine the rollout before expanding.

After a successful pilot, BrightHire rolled out company-wide. The team approached adoption thoughtfully, focusing on enablement, communication, and embedding the tool into existing workflows rather than introducing it as something new to manage.

Recruiting leaders led the rollout within their own functions, tailoring communication to how each team operates. Recruiters introduced BrightHire during hiring manager kickoffs, and it was built directly into scheduling workflows and candidate communication from the start.

The team also created lightweight but effective enablement, including a five-to-ten minute training, dedicated support channels, and ongoing office hours. Adoption was reinforced through consistent communication at every stage of the hiring process, from kickoff conversations to interview scheduling.

What the team hadn’t fully anticipated was how quickly enthusiasm would spread on its own. People who had used BrightHire on R&D panels started asking why it wasn’t available on cross-functional panels. 

Debriefs were more grounded. Scorecards were coming in faster and with more substance. The change management happened largely from within.

“We actually saw the organization itself do the change management effort largely for us. There was an appetite for it rather than people feeling like something was being pushed on them. They were pulling for it.”

— Lori Busch, Senior Director, Talent Operations, People Technology, and Analytics, Toast

Why BrightHire Works: Visibility into every conversation 

Toast builds AI into its own products, and the team wanted the hiring process to reflect that. 

Introducing a purpose-built interview intelligence tool sent a clear signal to candidates about how the company approaches technology and uses it responsibly. Getting internal stakeholders aligned required one key principle: BrightHire doesn’t make decisions. It gives people better information to make decisions themselves.

For interviewers, the shift was practical and immediate. 

• Having a transcript and summary to reference meant scorecards could be completed with specificity, not reconstructed from memory. 
• Hiring managers could pull up a specific moment from an interview before a debrief and have a conversation grounded in evidence rather than impression. 

Access to recorded interviews also changed how interviewer training works. Rather than coordinating shadow interviews, new interviewers can watch a set of strong recorded conversations on their own schedule and get up to speed without adding extra calendar pressure to the rest of the team.

“BrightHire isn’t saying yes or no. We’re getting all this rich insight and really understanding what happened. It gives us visibility into what’s happening in our interviews so we can make those interviews better.”

— Lori Busch, Senior Director, Talent Operations, People Technology, and Analytics, Toast

The Impact: Faster feedback, better decisions, and a hiring process built to scale

Five months into a company-wide rollout, BrightHire is part of how Toast interviews across every function.

• Company-wide adoption more than doubled in one year. In 2025, 37% of interviews were captured on BrightHire. In 2026, that number grew to 76%, driven by the company-wide rollout and the organic enthusiasm that spread from the R&D pilot outward.
• Scorecards are now submitted in an average of 18 hours, and Toast’s internal 24-hour SLA is met consistently across the organization.

For Toast, the shift wasn’t just about capturing interviews—it was about building a process that could scale without losing clarity. Interviewer training now runs asynchronously, expanding capacity without adding coordination overhead. Debriefs have changed too — hiring managers are showing up with clips and transcripts, not just impressions. 

Toast is also beginning to use BrightHire’s Insights Explorer to better understand hiring trends across the organization. By asking natural language questions across interview data, the team can quickly uncover patterns, explore themes across candidates and interviews, and get deeper insights from thousands of hiring conversations. It’s become another meaningful unlock as BrightHire continues to evolve alongside their hiring strategy.

The team has created a hiring process that is more consistent, more efficient, and better aligned with how they build across the rest of the company.

“What we’re seeing is hiring managers grounding their feedback in evidence. Instead of relying on memory or impressions, they’re able to reference what was actually said in the interview. That’s what great interviewing looks like.”

— Lori Busch, Senior Director, Talent Operations, People Technology, and Analytics, Toast