Greenhouse ATS: how to get your application through

Who uses Greenhouse in the UK?

Greenhouse is the standard ATS at tech companies and well-funded scale-ups hiring in the UK. If you're applying to a software company through a clean job board page with a short application form, Greenhouse (or its close rival Lever) is probably behind it.

What happens to your application

Greenhouse's philosophy is structured hiring: defined scorecards, consistent interview stages, recorded feedback. For candidates, the important myth to kill is the "keyword robot": Greenhouse does not auto-reject CVs on keyword matching by default. What does reject you automatically is a knockout question — right to work, location, salary — answered the wrong way.

Recruiters do, however, keyword-search the candidate database and skim CVs against the role's scorecard attributes — so the advert's language still matters, just via human eyes.

How to prepare your CV for Greenhouse

• Answer application questions with care — they're the only automated filter, and the free-text ones are read against the scorecard.
• Map your bullets to the job advert's requirements — recruiters skim for scorecard evidence; make each requirement findable in your CV.
• Quantify ruthlessly. Tech screening moves fast; "cut deploy time 40%" survives a skim, "responsible for CI/CD" doesn't.
• Referrals carry real weight in Greenhouse pipelines — a referral flag changes how your application is routed and read. Worth one LinkedIn message before applying cold.

Frequently asked questions