What Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby Are, and Why Jobs Appear There First

If you've applied to tech companies, you've almost certainly filled in a form hosted by Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, even if you didn't notice the name at the bottom of the page. These are applicant-tracking systems, and they explain a lot about where job postings appear first and why applying directly often makes sense. Here's what they are and how to use that knowledge in your search.

What an applicant-tracking system is

An applicant-tracking system (ATS) is the software a company's recruiting team uses to run hiring. Inside it, they:

• create a job opening and write the description;
• publish it to the company's careers page;
• collect applications and CVs;
• move candidates through stages such as screening, interviews and offer;
• schedule interviews and gather feedback from interviewers.

Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby are three applicant-tracking systems widely used by tech companies. Companies such as Figma, Linear, Datadog, GitLab, Spotify, Cloudflare, Monzo, N26, SumUp, Vercel, Supabase, PostHog, JetBrains and Miro publish their openings through one of these three.

How to recognise them

You can usually tell which system a company uses by looking at the address of the job page or the application form. Typical patterns look like this:

• Greenhouse: addresses containing greenhouse.io, often with the company name after a slash.
• Lever: addresses on jobs.lever.co/companyname.
• Ashby: addresses on jobs.ashbyhq.com/companyname.

Many companies embed the board into their own site, so the address may be on the company's domain. Even then, the form often mentions the provider in small print at the bottom.

Why bother? Once you know the pattern, you can bookmark a company's job board directly, and you'll recognise that you're on the original posting rather than a copy.

Why jobs appear on career pages first

When a recruiter creates a role in the ATS, publishing it to the company's own careers page is typically the default, immediate step. Everything else is extra:

1. Job boards and networks. Posting to large platforms may need a paid slot, a separate integration or someone doing it manually. Some roles go out the same day, some later, some never.
2. Aggregators. Sites that collect jobs from many sources pick up postings on their own schedule. A listing can reach them hours or days after it went live, and it can stay there after the original has closed.
3. Remote-job boards. Boards like Remotive and Himalayas list remote roles, sometimes posted by the company and sometimes collected. They're very useful for discovery, but the original application page still lives in the company's ATS.

So the careers page is the source, and other listings are copies with some delay. If you want to see roles early (we explain why that matters in why applying in the first 24 hours matters), the source is the place to watch.

Why applying directly is usually better

• Your application lands where the recruiter works. Applying on the company's ATS page puts you straight into their pipeline, in the format they expect.
• You see the full, current posting. Copies can be shortened, out of date or missing the location details.
• You avoid dead listings. If the ATS page is gone, the role is probably closed, whatever a copy elsewhere says.

This is why, for postings found on the remote boards, Hot Jobs looks up the company's own careers page. In practice, roughly a quarter resolve all the way to a direct application link; for the rest, it gives you the careers page or the board listing, so you can still find the original.

What to expect from the forms

The three systems look different, but the forms ask for similar things:

• a CV upload, usually PDF or DOCX, which the system may try to parse into fields;
• contact details and links (LinkedIn, GitHub, portfolio);
• an optional cover letter;
• custom questions set by the company, such as work authorisation, location, notice period or salary expectations;
• sometimes voluntary demographic questions, which are common on US postings and usually optional.

A few practical tips:

• Use a clean, text-based PDF. Simple layouts parse better. If the auto-filled fields come out garbled, fix them by hand.
• Take the custom questions seriously. A question like "Are you able to work from the United States?" is often how a company screens for location, so answer it honestly.
• Don't panic about robots. You'll read claims that an ATS silently rejects most CVs. In these systems, the main job is organising applications so people can review them. Automatic filtering does exist, but it's usually based on explicit questions the company chose to ask, like the location question above.

How to watch career pages yourself

1. Make a list of 10 to 30 companies you'd genuinely like to work for.
2. Find each one's job board and note which ATS it uses.
3. Bookmark the boards in one folder and open them on a fixed schedule, or set up an automatic alert.
4. When something fits, apply on that page, not on a copy.

Doing this by hand works for a handful of companies but gets tedious quickly. For a comparison of alert options, see Telegram bot vs LinkedIn job alerts.

Hot Jobs checks the Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby boards of 390+ tech companies, plus Remotive and Himalayas, every 30 minutes and sends matching roles to Telegram, with a link to the company's own application page whenever it can be found. It costs €3, paid once. Connect the bot