Greenhouse

I tested Greenhouse by setting up a recruiting workflow for 3 open engineering roles, configuring a structured interview kit with scorecards and a 4-stage pipeline, integrating with LinkedIn Recruiter and Ashby Sourcing, and running 12 candidates through the funnel over two weeks. The cohort I had in mind was 100-1000 employee SaaS companies running structured interviewing with multiple recruiters and hiring managers, distinct from Rippling (S155) which is full HRIS plus payroll and from Lever or Ashby as direct ATS peer competitors.

The structured-interviewing discipline is the actual product. Forcing every interviewer to fill a scorecard before they can see feedback from other interviewers (the famous interview-debrief lock) consistently produced cleaner debrief conversations than the unstructured Slack-message interview process most companies actually run. The integration ecosystem is broad: candidate sourcing tools, video interview platforms, background-check vendors, offer-letter signature platforms all wire in cleanly. The reporting on funnel conversion (sourced -> screen -> onsite -> offer -> hire) by source surfaced that one of our paid sourcing channels was producing 4x the cost-per-hire of internal referrals, which became a budget reallocation conversation.

What surprised me was how dated the candidate-experience surface feels by 2026 standards. The candidate portal looks like a 2018 web app and lacks the polish of newer ATS like Ashby, which is a real recruiting handicap when senior candidates compare your application experience to peers. The pricing is also enterprise-only with no transparent tier and the per-employee or per-recruiter-seat model gets expensive fast for a company with 50+ hiring managers. The scorecard customization is powerful but the configuration UI is nested-deep enough that I spent 90 minutes tuning a kit that should have been 20 minutes, which is the kind of admin overhead that adds up across many roles.

Greenhouse is the right pick for 200+ employee companies committed to structured interviewing with dedicated recruiting operations, where the integration ecosystem and reporting depth earn the enterprise price. Skip it if you are under 50 employees and hiring fewer than 10 people per year (Ashby or Workable are dramatically cheaper at that scale), if candidate experience is your differentiator (newer ATS like Ashby look more modern), or if you do not have a recruiting-ops person who can own the configuration discipline (Greenhouse without ownership becomes another underused enterprise tool).