When you buy Greenhouse, Lever, or Pinpoint, you get a careers page included. It works. Jobs appear. Candidates apply. And yet, most TA teams we speak to know, somewhere, that theirs could be better. The question is whether that instinct is worth acting on, and what acting on it involves.
This isn't a piece about why your ATS careers page is terrible. For a lot of teams, it isn't. It's a piece about understanding exactly what you have, where it starts to cost you, and what your genuine options are when you decide to do something about it.
What your ATS gives you
Greenhouse offers the clearest taxonomy. Their five integration options run from a simple redirect to a fully API-driven custom build — and most other ATS platforms follow the same spectrum, whether they document it as clearly or not.
At one end: a link from your website that sends candidates to boards.greenhouse.io/yourcompany. Fast to set up, zero developer time, “Powered by Greenhouse” in the footer. At the other: a fully custom careers experience built on the API, where you control every element: the job listings, the application form, the confirmation page, the analytics. Lever calls their equivalent Option 6. Pinpoint calls it Option 4. Workable calls it custom API. They all mean the same thing: full control, significant developer investment.
Between those extremes sit varying degrees of embedded widgets, iFrame embeds, and API-driven job boards that live on your own domain but still hand off to the ATS for applications.
Be honest with yourself about where you are. For a company hiring 20 people a year with a lean TA team and no dedicated employer brand function, Option 1 or 2 is probably fine. It's functional. Candidates can find your jobs and apply. The default exists for a reason.
Where the default starts to cost you
The case for doing more isn't abstract. It shows up in four specific places.
First impressions at scale. A candidate who searches “jobs at [your company]” and lands on boards.greenhouse.io/yourcompany sees a URL, a layout, and a footer that tells them something: that their experience as a candidate wasn't worth investing in. For an early-stage startup competing for engineers, or an enterprise brand competing for senior commercial talent, that signal lands. It's not fatal. But it's a signal that compounds across every candidate who sees it.
Rich media going unused. Most companies at a certain scale have employer brand assets. Photography. Culture video. Hiring manager content. Employee testimonials. Those assets live in Dropbox folders or on the marketing website, and they never reach a candidate at the moment they're evaluating whether to apply. The default ATS careers page has nowhere to put them. The investment in employer brand content stops at the job listing.
No template flexibility. An Early Careers hire and a VP-level appointment are looking for fundamentally different things. A distribution centre role in France shouldn't look identical to a head office appointment in London. The default ATS careers page treats every role the same — same template, same structure, same content. That uniformity costs you relevance, and relevance is what converts a candidate who's on the fence into one who applies.
Analytics you can't act on. Most ATS default careers pages tell you how many applications came in. They don't tell you where candidates dropped off before applying, which roles are converting at 8% and which at 32%, what content candidates engaged with before they clicked apply, or why your Early Careers pages have consistently higher bounce rates than your Tech roles. You can't improve what you can't measure. And without role-level conversion data, most TA teams are optimising by instinct rather than evidence.
What your options are
When teams decide the default isn't enough, there are three realistic routes.
Build it yourself, or commission an agency. Full design control, built exactly to your spec. The catch is cost: a properly built careers site from a web agency typically runs £20,000–£80,000 depending on complexity, and that's before ongoing maintenance. Every content update needs a developer. Every new template for a new hiring campaign needs a ticket. For large enterprise teams with dedicated web resource and the budget to match, this works. Most TA teams have neither.
Use a website builder with an ATS embed. Webflow, WordPress, and similar platforms can be configured to pull jobs from your ATS via embed code or API, giving you more control over the surrounding content and design while keeping costs lower. This works reasonably well for companies that already have a Webflow setup and a marketing team who can manage it. The limitations are the handoff points — candidates often leave your site to complete an application on the ATS, and the live connection between your website and your job feed requires ongoing maintenance as both systems update.
Use an ATS-connected careers site platform. A purpose-built category that sits between “build it yourself” and “accept the default.” Full design control, live API connection to your ATS, TA team manages content without developer involvement. Deployment takes days for a standard setup, 6–8 weeks for an enterprise build with multiple templates and approval rounds. Voyse operates in this space — if you want to understand what that looks like in practice, the careers sites page covers it.
How to decide
There's no universal answer. Here's an honest framework.
Stick with your ATS default if:
- You're hiring fewer than 30 roles a year and your TA team is lean
- You don't yet have employer brand content worth surfacing
- You're pre-Series A and speed and simplicity matter more than brand polish
- Your ATS is Ashby — a platform that signals premium quality in itself, and whose default experience is cleaner than most
Consider a custom or platform solution if:
- Your careers page is a significant first brand touchpoint for candidates
- You have rich media assets that aren't reaching candidates at the point of application
- You're hiring across multiple brands, regions, or role types that deserve distinct experiences
- You have data — or a strong instinct — that your current careers page is losing candidates before they apply
- You're competing in a talent market where employer brand is differentiating
The middle ground is real. Many teams know they need more than the default but assume the alternative is a six-figure build project. It isn't always.
The honest summary
The ATS careers page isn't broken. It does what it was designed to do — track applicants. The question is whether applicant tracking is all you need your careers presence to do, or whether you're asking it to do something more: attract, engage, and convert candidates who weren't already sold on applying.
If you're at the point where the default isn't cutting it, Voyse builds ATS-connected careers sites for teams in exactly that position — connected live to Greenhouse, Lever, Pinpoint, Ashby, Workable, and others, managed by your TA team without developer involvement.
