Which applicant tracking systems employers use

The short answer

of employers in our data post through Greenhouse (577 of 1,508)

38.3%

post through Workday (387), the most postings per employer outside Greenhouse

25.7%

post through Ashby (404), mostly small employers with a median of 6 postings

26.8%

Inside that scope, three patterns are solid. Greenhouse is the broadest, with employers of every size. Workday is the choice of large enterprises: 34% of its employers have 50 to 199 postings, against 11% on Ashby. Ashby is where small, young companies sit: 57% of its employers have fewer than 10 open roles.

Employers and postings by system

Greenhouse leads on both counts, but the gap is wider in postings than in employers because it hosts the biggest posters. Ashby has more employers than Workday yet fewer postings, which is the signature of startups: many companies, few roles each. The seven smaller systems are in the data through only a handful of employers each. They are too thin to rank, so we group them.

Which size of employer uses which system

Postings are a stand-in for company size, and an imperfect one: a large company can post few roles on a board we only partly crawl. Even so the contrast is clear. Only 1% of Workday employers post 200 or more roles, but 34% sit in the 50 to 199 band, the profile of a big enterprise with a steady flow of openings. Greenhouse is the only system with real weight at both ends, 38% under 10 and 8% over 200.

Who posts the most on each system

The lists match the size split. Workday's top spots go to established enterprises, and Ashby's go to AI and fast-growing software companies. Lever's list leans toward defense and autonomy. Each company posts on the system it uses, and a board that changes hands later will show up in our next snapshot, not this one.

Where the postings are

The US share is high everywhere because we crawled US-hiring employers on purpose. The remote column is the more informative one: more than half of Ashby postings are flagged remote, against 3.7% on Workday. That is the startup versus enterprise split again, seen from a different angle.

What we counted

1. An applicant tracking system (ATS): software where employers publish openings and receive applications. We kept 11 sources that are true ATS or hosted careers platforms: Greenhouse, Workday, Ashby, Lever, Eightfold, Gem, Workable, SmartRecruiters, iCIMS, Oracle Recruiting and Teamtailor.
2. Left out: job boards and aggregators (YC Work at a Startup, Hacker News, LinkedIn, MoAI Jobs, Collective, Free-Work, Crème de la Crème) and single-employer career sites we read directly (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Tesla). Those are one site per company, not an ATS choice.
3. An employer: one distinct company name, lowercased and trimmed. A company on two systems is counted once in the totals and once in each system's row (this happened for one employer).
4. A posting: one distinct job URL our crawlers first saw between 19 September and 30 October 2026, whatever its later status.
5. Set aside: Anduril, SpaceX and Carvana, 8,243 postings or 10.9% of the 75,307 on these systems, so a handful of big posters do not drive the shares.

What to do with this

1. Do not pick jobs by ATS. The system changes the form you fill in, not the odds that someone reads it.
2. Expect a different form by system. Workday usually asks you to create an account per employer. Greenhouse and Ashby are usually one page with a resume upload and a few questions. Allow more time for Workday.
3. Use the system to guess the employer. Ashby-hosted postings skew toward small, remote-friendly companies. Workday postings skew toward large US enterprises.
4. Keep one resume file that parses cleanly. Plain headings, no tables or text boxes, and standard section names work on every system listed here.
5. Check the posting date before you apply. Our counts are a snapshot from 19 September to 30 October. A role may have closed since.