Greenhouse vs Lever vs Ashby: how the three biggest startup ATSs rank you

TL;DR Greenhouse rewards referrals and clean parsing. Lever rewards keyword density in the top third of your resume. Ashby weights your most recent role at ~60% of the initial ranking. All three punish two-column layouts.

How to tell which one a company uses Check the URL of the job posting. boards.greenhouse.io = Greenhouse. jobs.lever.co = Lever. jobs.ashbyhq.com = Ashby. If you're applying to 20 companies, sort them by ATS and batch-tune your resume.

Greenhouse specifics Referral source is the single biggest signal. If you have a warm intro, that person's referral tag beats every cold applicant with a stronger resume. Beyond that, Greenhouse leans on the recruiter's scorecard — which is built from the JD. Mirror the JD's exact terms in your bullets.

Lever specifics Lever's 'strong match' auto-tag is driven by keyword density in the top third of the document. That means your Summary and your most recent role's bullets carry disproportionate weight. Front-load your JD-relevant keywords.

Ashby specifics Ashby's ranking model weights recency heavily — your latest role's bullets are roughly 60% of the initial score. That's great news if you're at a strong current company; brutal if your recent role is a poor fit for the target JD. Consider a targeted summary block that reframes recent work in the target field's vocabulary.

Common ground All three still fail on two-column layouts, image-embedded text, and non-standard section headers. Format for the strictest common denominator (Workday-clean) and you'll pass all three.