How to apply for a job on Greenhouse

Greenhouse is an applicant tracking system: software an employer uses to publish its openings, collect applications and move candidates through interviews. When you apply to a company that uses it, you are filling in the company's form inside Greenhouse, and your application lands in the hiring team's Greenhouse account.

You will meet its forms in two places.

• On Greenhouse's own job boards, at addresses that start with job-boards.greenhouse.io or boards.greenhouse.io (and their .eu versions for employers that keep their data in Europe), followed by the company's name and the job's number. The posting and its form sit on the same page.
• Embedded on the company's own careers site. Many employers show their Greenhouse board inside their own pages. The address stays on the company's domain and carries a gh_jid parameter, the Greenhouse job's number, and the form loads in a frame inside the page. It is the same form either way.

Knowing this helps when something looks odd. If a careers page shows only a list of jobs, look for the gh_jid in the address after you click one: that is the posting you are applying to, and the form below it is Greenhouse's.

Every employer builds its own form from Greenhouse's parts, so no two are exactly alike, but most share the same skeleton.

Your details

First name, last name, email and phone are standard and almost always required. Some forms add a location field, typed as a city with suggestions to pick from; pick the suggestion that matches where you live rather than leaving your own spelling, because a typed value the list did not offer may not save. When the phone field has a country-code picker beside it, choose the country there and type the number without its calling code.

Resume and cover letter

The resume field takes a file. Once a file is attached, the form shows its name with a remove button; to change it, remove the old one first. Send a PDF with a real text layer, one column and standard headings, so the hiring team's copy of Greenhouse reads it cleanly (our guide to how an ATS parses a resume explains why). Many forms have a cover letter field beside it, either a file or a text box. When it is optional, a short letter written for this posting still helps; when it is required, it has to be there.

Links

LinkedIn, a personal website, GitHub or a portfolio are common optional fields. Fill the ones that show your work for this job. A LinkedIn profile or a GitHub account helps an engineering application; an empty optional box costs you nothing, while a link to an abandoned page does.

The employer's own questions

Below the standard part come the questions this employer added: whether you are authorized to work in the country, whether you will need visa sponsorship, your salary expectations, your notice period, how you heard about the job, whether you have worked there before, and open questions such as “Why do you want to work here?”. They come as yes or no lists, menus, check boxes and text boxes, and the required ones carry an asterisk. Our guide to answering application questions goes through each kind.

Voluntary self-identification

Employers in the United States often add a section asking about gender, race and ethnicity, veteran status and disability. It is voluntary: every question has an option such as “I don't wish to answer”, and the employer states that your answers are kept apart from the hiring decision. Answer or decline as you prefer.

1. Read the posting first. Note the required skills, the location or work model, and any pay range it states. They decide which resume you send and how you answer the salary question.
2. Make the resume for this posting. Put the posting's required skills into the lines of your experience that show them, and nothing your work does not support. See how to tailor your resume to a job description.
3. Fill your details exactly as on your resume. The same name, the same email, the same phone. A recruiter who searches for you should find one person.
4. Attach the resume, then the letter. Check that the file name the form shows is the file you meant to send.
5. Answer the required questions with facts. Work authorization, sponsorship, notice and relocation are facts about you; answer them the same way on every form.
6. Read the page once from the top. Look for a red message under any field, a menu still on “Select”, or a box you meant to tick.
7. Press Submit. Greenhouse shows a confirmation, and most employers also send one by email. Some ask you to type a code they email you before the application goes through; keep the tab open until you have entered it.

An application cannot be taken back once it is submitted. Read the page before the press, not after.

• The wrong file. A resume from an earlier application, or one named after another company, is the most common slip. Name every file Resume.pdf and keep one per posting in its own folder.
• Facts that disagree across forms. Saying yes to sponsorship on one form and no on the next, for the same country, is visible to any employer that sees both. Write your answers down once.
• A salary figure below the posting's own range. When the posting states a range, your expectation belongs inside it, usually in its upper half if your experience fits.
• Optional boxes filled with filler. “N/A” in an optional open question reads worse than an empty box.

The Jobapplier browser extension opens a panel beside a Greenhouse form, on Greenhouse's own board or embedded on a company's careers page. Greenhouse publishes each form's questions, so the extension knows the fields before it types anything.

• First name, last name, email and phone go in straight from your profile, without asking an AI. The phone goes in without its calling code where the form has a code picker.
• The employer's questions are answered from your Application answers card first (right to work, sponsorship, salary, notice, relocation and the rest), then your profile, and only then by the AI, which writes the most plausible answer for you. Every answer the AI wrote is marked so you can find it.
• The resume. Autofill attaches your resume. “Apply with tailored resume” opens the Tailor screen over the page while the answers are prepared; when you press Apply Now, or close the screen, the extension fills the form in one pass and attaches this posting's own resume in place of the file Greenhouse holds.
• The cover letter goes where the form has a place for one, as text within the box's limit or as a file, on the plans that include letters.
• Voluntary self-identification takes the answers stored on your card. Where the card leaves one open, the extension follows “Let AI give its best answer”: on, the default, the AI picks; off, the form's declining or most neutral option.

Then you check the panel's Review, which lists every field with its answer, and press Submit Application in the panel or the form's own Submit. The extension never submits by itself, its Submit waits while a required field is empty, and it takes a picture of the filled form before the press. A CAPTCHA, an emailed code and your own passwords stay yours. The extension is for Chrome and is not in the Chrome Web Store yet.

Greenhouse is one of the single-page forms that Jobapplier's cloud Agent can fill and send without you at the keyboard. It applies only to jobs that fit one of your Apply rules and none of your Skip rules, a few at a time within a daily limit. It never applies to a closed posting or to a job you marked applied on your Tracker.

Each application gets its own resume, tailored at the level the rule chose, and the same answers the extension would give. Before it presses Submit the Agent takes a picture of the form, and Review later shows each question with the answer that went. When Greenhouse asks for an emailed code after Submit, or a CAPTCHA appears, the Agent stops and hands that application to you.