You bought Greenhouse. It's a solid ATS, well-documented and well-supported, and in wide use among larger TA teams. The hiring workflow is good. The reporting is decent. And then you look at your careers page.
It's fine. It works. But it looks nothing like your brand, and you know it. You've probably found Greenhouse's documentation on their five integration options. You've read through them. Option 5 sounds like exactly what you need — full control, fully custom, fully on-brand. And then you hit the line that says it requires “5–8 days of developer time” to build, plus ongoing engineering support to maintain. Your TA team doesn't have a developer. The web team has a six-week backlog. So the default stays.
This piece is for that situation.
What Greenhouse's five options mean for a TA team
Greenhouse's documentation is thorough, but it's written for developers. Here's what each option means for the person who owns talent attraction:
Options 1 and 2 put candidates on Greenhouse's servers. Option 1 is a redirect — your careers link sends people to boards.greenhouse.io/yourcompany. Option 2 embeds that board on your site via iFrame. Either way, you're working within Greenhouse's template. You can add your logo and format job descriptions with rich text. That's about it. The “Powered by Greenhouse” footer stays.
Options 3 and 4 give you more. Your job board lives on your domain, and you use Greenhouse's API to control how roles are presented. Option 3 keeps applications on Greenhouse's servers; Option 4 brings applications onto your site as well. Both require a developer to set up and maintain. Both give you meaningfully more brand control than Options 1 and 2.
Option 5 is the full API build: complete control over the job listing, the application form, the confirmation page, the analytics. Greenhouse calls it the most advanced option. It's also the only one that supports tracking pixels for Google Analytics and ADA compliance level AA or higher. The catch: it's the most complex to build, and the most expensive to maintain. This is what enterprise companies with dedicated engineering teams build. The teams who get here usually have a web platform team or a significant agency budget.
If you're somewhere between Options 1 and 5, you're in good company. Most Greenhouse customers are.
Four things that help within the default
Not every improvement requires a platform change. If you're staying on Options 1–3 for now, four things will make a meaningful difference:
Write job descriptions as if the layout can't help you. On Greenhouse's default templates, the job description is the brand. Use the rich text formatting Greenhouse gives you — headers, bullet points, short paragraphs. A well-structured description reads better on any template. An unstructured wall of text looks bad everywhere.
Create a consistent structure across every role. The best Greenhouse job boards have a recognisable rhythm — same section order, same tone markers, similar length. That consistency signals that someone thought carefully about the candidate experience. Inconsistency signals the opposite.
Use department and office segmentation. From Option 3 onwards, Greenhouse gives you JSON data for offices and departments. Use it. Segmented job boards where candidates can filter by team or location convert better than undifferentiated lists. Even a simple department filter reduces the work a candidate has to do to find something relevant.
Add UTM parameters to your job board links. This one costs nothing. Tag your job board link with UTM source and medium parameters so you can see in Google Analytics which channels are actually sending candidates. Most TA teams have no idea whether LinkedIn, their website, or direct search is driving the most qualified applications. UTM tracking tells you.
Three signals that the default isn't enough
None of the above fixes a fundamental mismatch between what your employer brand promises and what your careers page delivers. There are three signals worth paying attention to:
Employer brand content that never reaches candidates. You have photography. You have culture video. You have hiring manager content. And none of it appears anywhere on your careers page because the default template has nowhere to put it. The investment in employer brand stops at the job listing.
Conversion rates you can't explain. If you've looked at your Greenhouse data and noticed that some roles get plenty of views but few applications, and you can't tell whether that's a job description problem, a template problem, or a sourcing problem — you're missing the analytics layer that would tell you. The default careers page doesn't give you role-level conversion insight.
Feedback from candidates. If people who've interviewed with you have mentioned the careers page — even in passing, even positively — it means they noticed it as a distinct thing, separate from the company. That's worth paying attention to. A careers site that disappears into the brand experience is the goal. One that candidates consciously clock usually means something is off.
For a broader view of how to think through this decision across all ATS platforms, our guide to ATS careers pages vs custom careers sites covers the full picture.
Option 5 capability, without the Option 5 build
The reason most TA teams don't reach Option 5 isn't that they don't want full control. It's that the route to full control runs through a development project their team can't resource.
Voyse is built for exactly that gap. We connect directly to Greenhouse via our marketplace partnership — the same API infrastructure as Option 5 — and build a fully branded careers site that your TA team manages without developer involvement. New roles sync from Greenhouse automatically. You can map different job types to different templates. Rich media sits alongside job descriptions. Role-level analytics are built in.
If the default is holding your employer brand back, see how the Greenhouse integration works.
