Leveris more honest than most ATS platforms about what their default careers page is. Option 1 in their documentation is called “Link to Lever” — not “your branded careers experience” or “the fastest path to candidate engagement.” Just a link. That transparency is useful. It sets expectations correctly, which is more than most ATS documentation does.
What Lever's docs don't tell you is what each option costs a TA team in practice — not in developer hours, but in employer brand capability. And they don't give you a frank view of where their paid Career Site Builder add-on sits in that spectrum. This piece does both.
Lever's six options, translated
Lever documents six ways to connect a careers site. Here's what they mean for the person responsible for candidate experience:
Options 1 and 2 are the fast routes. Option 1 sends candidates to a Lever-hosted jobs page — your company on Lever's servers, Lever's template, Lever's URL. Option 2 embeds a JavaScript snippet on your existing website, pulling in a list of jobs that inherits your site's CSS. Both are quick to implement. Neither gives you meaningful employer brand capability. Both are reasonable choices for teams who need jobs visible and applications flowing before anything else is ready.
Option 3 is Lever's Career Site Builder, a paid add-on that lets you create a custom career site connected to your Lever instance. More on this below, because it deserves its own honest assessment.
Options 4 and 5 use Lever's API to customise your job listing and job descriptions, with applications either hosted by Lever (Option 4) or on your own site (Option 5). Both require developer time — roughly one day for Option 4, and variable depending on scope for Option 5. Both give you substantially more control than the embed options.
Option 6 is the full API build — custom job listings, custom descriptions, custom application forms, all hosted by you. Lever's documentation estimates two weeks of web developer time. That's the build. It doesn't include design, employer brand content, copy, testing, or launch. It also comes with specific limitations: no automatic resume parsing to pre-populate applications, no social referrals tracking, and no source tracking at the careers site layer. Those aren't Voyse limitations — they're constraints of Lever's API for this integration type.
This is what Spotify built. They have engineers. Most TA teams don't.
Is Lever's Career Site Builder worth it?
Option 3 — the Career Site Builder add-on — sits in an interesting position. It's more than a template, less than a custom build. You get control over the look and feel of your career site, you can maintain it without a developer, and it connects live to your Lever instance. For smaller teams without complex multi-brand or multi-region requirements, it's a legitimate option.
The honest limitations: the Career Site Builder is template-constrained. You're working within Lever's structure — you can change what's in the template, not the template itself. There's no proper CMS for employer brand content, limited SEO control over page structure and meta elements, and no ability to apply different visual treatments to different job types based on ATS data.
If your needs fit within those constraints, the Career Site Builder is a reasonable choice. If you've already tried it and found yourself working around its limits, or if you know you need something it doesn't offer, it's a ceiling rather than a foundation.
The Option 6 problem
Two weeks of developer time is the starting point for Option 6, not the finish line. Add discovery, design, employer brand content production, stakeholder review rounds, testing, and launch — and you're looking at a project that runs months and costs significantly more than most TA teams have available to spend on a careers site build.
There's also the maintenance question. A custom Option 6 build doesn't manage itself. When Lever updates their API, someone needs to handle the integration. When you want a new template for an Early Careers campaign, someone needs to build it. Option 6 is a product you build and then own indefinitely.
For teams with a dedicated web platform function and the budget to match, that's fine. For most Lever customers, it's the theoretically right answer that's practically out of reach.
For a broader view of how to think through this trade-off, see our guide to ATS careers pages vs custom careers sites.
What Option 6 without the build looks like
The gap between “Option 3 isn't enough” and “Option 6 is too expensive to build” is where most ambitious Lever customers sit. Voyse closes that gap.
We connect directly to Lever and deliver Option 6 capability — fully custom job listings, job descriptions, and application forms, on your domain, built around your brand — without the two-week build and without ongoing engineering dependency. Your TA team manages the content. New roles sync from Lever automatically. Different job families or regions can have different templates, mapped automatically by your ATS data.
If the Career Site Builder isn't cutting it, or if Option 6 has been on your roadmap for a year without moving forward, see how the Lever integration works.
