Two Systems Handle 82% of the Tech Jobs You Apply To

You do not choose the software you submit your job application through. You have still filled in the same four forms a hundred times, and if you have been looking for a while you can probably recognise them from the layout of the file upload button alone.

We can now put numbers on that, because we scrape 817 hiring companies and every one of them tells us which system it runs.

The split

Across 9,247 open roles:

Greenhouse and Ashby between them carry 82% of the open roles and 72% of the companies. If you are applying to tech jobs, you are mostly applying into two products.

The "something else" bucket is mixed: a few in-house systems, a few smaller vendors, and a tail of companies whose careers page we read without being able to identify what is behind it. Take that row as a floor on custom setups rather than a precise count.

The number that surprised us

Look at companies rather than roles. Greenhouse has 324, Ashby has 268. Those are close. Now look at roles per company: Greenhouse averages 15.7, Ashby 9.5.

Ashby is nearly as widely adopted as Greenhouse and carries half the roles per customer. That is not Ashby losing, it is Ashby sitting on a different part of the market. They are in a lot of small companies. Greenhouse is in fewer, bigger ones.

Which turns the ATS into a stage signal, and a surprisingly reliable one. If you land on an Ashby application, the median company behind it has around nine open roles. On Greenhouse, closer to sixteen, with a long tail of companies running hundreds. Lever, at 53 companies and 607 roles, sits with the mid-size and older cohort.

You can read something off that before you have read a word of the job description. Nine open roles means the person reading your application probably knows the hiring manager personally and may be the hiring manager. Three hundred open roles means a recruiting org with a process, a scorecard, and a queue.

Neither is better. They want different things from you, and they respond to different approaches.

What this actually changes

The form is not the filter. The most persistent job-search myth is that these systems reject you. Greenhouse and Ashby are databases with a front end. They collect, they route, they let a recruiter search and tag. They do not read your resume and score you out, and the "beat the ATS" advice industry is largely selling a fix to a problem that lives one layer up, in whoever is doing the filtering.

Keyword stuffing your resume with invisible white text does nothing except look strange when a human opens the file. Which they will, because someone always eventually opens the file.

Consistency is worth more than optimisation. Two systems covering 82% of your applications means the same handful of fields, over and over. Have the answers ready in a text file: the work authorisation line, the pronouns dropdown, the "how did you hear about us", the salary expectation if you must. Most people rewrite these each time and it is the least valuable rewriting in a job search.

Custom careers pages deserve more attention, not less. That 149-company bucket running something else includes some of the most interesting employers we track, and they are systematically underrepresented on job boards. Boards mostly ingest via the standard ATS feeds. A company on a hand-rolled careers page is often invisible to aggregators, which means less competition and also that you have to go look directly.

That last point is a fair chunk of what we do. We read the career page, whatever is behind it.

A note on where this data comes from

We know the platform because it is visible in how a career page serves its jobs, not because anyone told us. Companies on a standard hosted board are trivially identifiable. Companies that have themed their board to look bespoke are usually still identifiable underneath. Companies that genuinely built their own are the ones we mark unknown, along with the ones where our detection simply failed, and we cannot separate those two groups.

We also only see companies we track: 1,121 of them, skewed toward product companies with engineering teams, mostly US and European. This is not the ATS market. Workable in particular is much larger in European SMEs than 30 companies suggests, and that is a fact about our sample, not about Workable.

And these shares move. Ashby's position here would have looked different eighteen months ago and will look different again.

The useful summary

Two systems, most of your applications, and neither is the thing standing between you and an interview. The form is the easy part. Getting the role in front of you inside its first week is the hard part, and that has nothing to do with which vendor a company bought.

If you want to know what a specific company is running before you start, it is generally obvious from the URL of their apply button, which is a slightly silly trick that works nearly every time.

We are curious whether the stage signal holds up for people who have actually been through both. Does an Ashby application feel like a nine-person recruiting org and a Greenhouse one feel like a machine? Come argue with us on Discord. And if you would rather have your agent watch career pages than check them yourself, that is over here.