Greenhouse vs Lever vs Workday: Which ATS Do Top Companies Use?

Why the ATS matters to you

Every job application you submit passes through an applicant tracking system (ATS) before a human sees it. The ATS parses your resume, stores it in a database, and decides whether to surface it to recruiters. Different systems do this differently — and understanding them gives you an edge.

Three platforms dominate the market: Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday. Together they power career pages at thousands of companies, from 50-person startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Greenhouse

Greenhouse is the most popular ATS among tech companies, mid-market firms, and high-growth startups. Companies like Airbnb, HubSpot, Datadog, and Cloudflare use it.

What you'll see as a candidate

• Career pages hosted on boards.greenhouse.io/companyname or embedded on the company site
• Clean, structured application forms — usually name, email, resume upload, and a few custom questions
• Confirmation emails that come quickly after applying

Tips for Greenhouse applications

• Greenhouse does parse resumes, so use standard section headers (Experience, Education, Skills)
• Many Greenhouse jobs support Easy Apply via LinkedIn — but applying directly on the career page often gets more visibility
• Greenhouse career pages are well-structured, making them easy for tools like Gurify to monitor automatically

Lever

Lever is popular with mid-size tech companies and startups that prioritize candidate experience. Companies like Netflix, Shopify, and KPMG use it.

What you'll see as a candidate

• Career pages hosted on jobs.lever.co/companyname
• Simple, minimal application forms — often just resume, name, email, and a cover letter field
• Job descriptions tend to be well-written with clear requirements sections

Tips for Lever applications

• Lever's parsing is decent but not perfect — use a clean, single-column resume format
• The cover letter field is optional but visible to recruiters — a 2-3 sentence note explaining your fit can help
• Lever career pages are public and indexable, so new postings are quickly discoverable by automated tools

Workday

Workday dominates enterprise hiring. Companies like Amazon, Walmart, Bank of America, Salesforce, and most Fortune 500 firms use it.

What you'll see as a candidate

• Career pages on companyname.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com or embedded — the URL format varies
• Long, multi-step application forms requiring account creation
• Resume parsing that often requires manual correction after upload

Tips for Workday applications

• Create a Workday account once — many companies share the same platform, so your profile carries over
• Always review the parsed fields. Workday's parser frequently misreads dates, job titles, and company names
• Workday sites are often slower to update, so automated monitoring catches new postings before you'd find them manually

Which companies use which?

A rough guide by company type:

• Startups and growth-stage tech — Greenhouse or Lever
• Enterprise and Fortune 500 — Workday
• Consulting, finance, pharma — Workday or legacy systems (Taleo, iCIMS)
• European companies — Mix of all three plus SmartRecruiters and Personio

Other systems you'll encounter: Ashby (popular with modern startups), BreezyHR (small businesses), Comeet (Israeli tech), and SmartRecruiters (international companies).

Why this matters for your search

If you're only searching on LinkedIn, you're missing jobs that are only posted on these career pages. Many companies post roles on their ATS weeks before syndicating to LinkedIn — or never syndicate at all.

Gurify monitors career pages across Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Ashby, and hundreds of other ATS platforms. Every new posting is automatically discovered, scored against your resume, and matched to your criteria — regardless of which system the company uses.

Start monitoring career pages

Sign up for Gurify and set up an ATS search. We'll scan 1,000+ company career pages and surface the jobs that match your profile — from platforms you'd never check manually.