Greenhouse vs Workday vs Ashby: what the applicant sees

Short answer: Greenhouse hands you one short form and forgets you unless you go looking; Workday hands you an account that remembers everything, including the applications you abandoned two years ago; Ashby hands you a small number of boxes that want typed words rather than an uploaded file. Same resume, three different amounts of work.

That difference is not decoration. Each vendor decided where your data lives — attached to one application, or held in an account that belongs to a single employer — and how long the form runs, whether an abandoned draft survives, and whether you can check on it afterwards all fall out of that one decision.

Which one am I looking at?

The address bar usually settles it before the form does. A Greenhouse-hosted board sits at https://boards.greenhouse.io/[job board token], where the front of the URL is always boards.greenhouse.io and the company's token is the last path segment. An Ashby-hosted board sits at https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/[jobs page name] — same shape, different word for the last segment. Workday is the exception: its customers get one internal career site and multiple external ones, hosted for them, so the domain varies from employer to employer even though the form behaves identically.

For a Product Designer, the tell is the portfolio. Greenhouse asks for it as an optional attachment or a website field on the same page as everything else. Ashby usually gives it a field of its own. Workday buries it in a section called something like "Websites" three pages in, after you have already typed your last three jobs by hand.

Greenhouse: the form is short because the file does the work

Greenhouse accepts candidate uploads in doc, docx, pdf, rtf and txt, up to 100 MB. It cannot parse a resume larger than 2.5 MB. Those two numbers come from different support pages and they do not agree in spirit, which is exactly the trap: a 6 MB file uploads cleanly, attaches to your application, and produces no extracted fields at all.

A Product Designer is more exposed to this than almost anyone. A resume with a full-bleed cover image, an embedded process diagram and a logo strip crosses 2.5 MB without looking large. Greenhouse's own list of parse failures also names graphics, photos and word art, columned layouts, and contact details placed in a header or footer — which is a fair description of most designer resume templates in circulation. The upload succeeds. The candidate record arrives with a blank name.

The demographic block at the bottom of a Greenhouse form is a separate system and worth understanding before you skip it. The U.S. standard set is six questions — gender identity, racial and ethnic background, sexual orientation, transgender identity, disability, and veteran or active service status. Greenhouse states plainly that demographic data cannot be linked to specific candidates in the standard demographic reports shown in Greenhouse Recruiting. The recruiter reading your application does not see your answer next to your name.

Afterwards, there is MyGreenhouse, a candidate portal that gathers applications to companies using Greenhouse in one place. Two limits matter. It "only shows the updates a hiring company chooses to share," so a blank status means the employer publishes nothing, not that nothing happened. And applications you submitted more than 24 hours before you created the account will not appear — the portal does not reach backwards.

Workday: the account is the product

Workday's external career site is built around Candidate Home, an account you create with that one employer. Inside it you can view pending and completed tasks, view draft and submitted applications, view scheduled events, and update your contact information. It is the only one of the three that reliably tells you where you stand, and the interface uses red and green highlighted text to signal task and application statuses.

The draft behaviour is the part most applicants never find out about.

What Workday keeps for you, per employer

200Draft applications per candidate

2 yearsHow long a draft is retained

8Subprocesses in the Job Application business process

Workday saves your application when you press Next, and it saves an abandoned draft once you have reached the information page. Drafts are held for up to two years, capped at 200 per candidate, and are visible only to you. If the form is Workday, make the account before you start filling anything in — it is worth more than any resume rewrite you will do this month. Without it, a timeout on page four costs you the whole session; with it, the half-finished Product Designer application you gave up on in March is still sitting there when the same company reposts the role in September.

The account changes your identity in the system too. Workday merges two candidate records automatically when the first and last name match exactly and at least one of phone number, email address, LinkedIn URL, X user name, Facebook URL or Google+ URL also matches exactly. It does not merge when at least one of the profiles has an active Candidate Home account. So the account is what stops "Sam Ortiz" the prospect and "Sam Ortiz" the applicant from being quietly folded together on someone else's terms.

Quick Apply populates fields from your resume, CV, or a previous application. Two exceptions are documented and both are ones people trip over: resume parsing does not auto-fill hidden fields, and it does not fill Languages or Skills. Workday instead assesses the application and resume after you apply and suggests skills, which you can keep or remove. That is a step you have to actually perform — a Product Designer whose resume says Figma, design systems and usability testing will still have an empty skills section unless they accept the suggestions.

What the status in Candidate Home is actually tracking

When Workday shows you a status, it is reporting a position in a configured business process, not a human's opinion of you. The Job Application business process has eight subprocesses, and Workday's own course material is blunt about the ends of it: "Review is the Initiation step, and Ready for Hire is the Completion step." The stages the documentation names in between are Screen, Interview, Reference Check, Background Check, Offer and Employment Agreement. When you apply, Workday initiates the business process and all of its subprocesses as of the date of the application.

Two things follow from that. A status can sit unchanged for a month because nobody has advanced the step, not because a decision was made and withheld from you. And a status that jumps — straight from Review Candidate to Interview on a Product Designer requisition — usually means the employer configured a shorter path for that role, not that you impressed someone unusually fast. You are watching a workflow, not a mind.

Ashby: fewer boxes, and most of them want words

Ashby's application form is assembled from a defined set of field types: String, Email, File, Date, Number, Boolean, LongText, ValueSelect, MultiValueSelect, Phone, Score and SocialLink. Twelve types, and the three fields shown as required in its own documentation are Name, Email and Resume. Everything else on the form is a deliberate choice by that employer.

The practical consequence is that Ashby forms lean on LongText and SocialLink where Greenhouse leans on File. A Product Designer applying through Ashby is more likely to be asked for a portfolio URL in a SocialLink field and a two-paragraph answer in a LongText box than to be asked for another attachment. Those boxes are not decoration; they are the fields a reviewer opens first, because they are the only part of the application written for this job.

One mechanical detail explains a failure people blame on themselves. Ashby's file uploads use a presigned URL that expires after 10 minutes. Leave a form open while you go hunting for the right PDF, and the upload can fail on submit even though the file is fine.

Ashby also documents AI-Assisted Application Review, which assesses resumes against criteria a recruiter defines and returns met, not met, or undecided for each one, with the reasoning attached, on the candidate profile and in the review stage. It supports up to 50 criteria per evaluation. Nothing in the documentation describes an automatic rejection.

Side by side

Three vendors, one row per thing an applicant actually experiences.

The same application, three systems

Drawn from each vendor's own candidate and administrator documentation.

	Greenhouse	Workday	Ashby
Account needed to apply	No	Often — Candidate Home can be required	No
Saved drafts	—	Up to 200, kept 2 years	—
Resume upload limit	100 MB accepted, 2.5 MB parsed	Not published	Not published
Autofill from resume	Standard parsing	Quick Apply, excludes Skills and Languages	Parsing on upload
Status you can see later	MyGreenhouse, if the employer shares it	Draft and submitted applications, tasks, events	Email only
Form shape	One page	Multiple pages with Next	Short form, typed fields
Documented AI review	—	—	Up to 50 criteria, met / not met / undecided

If you have applied to that company before

Each system treats the second application differently, and the differences are worth knowing before you start.

In Workday, sign in rather than starting fresh. A new record carrying the same name and the same email address is a merge candidate — Workday joins two candidates when first and last name match exactly and at least one of phone number, email address, LinkedIn URL, X user name, Facebook URL or Google+ URL matches exactly as well — and a merge you did not control is a worse outcome than reusing an account you did. Quick Apply will offer to populate the new form from a previous application; if the role differs at all from the last one, upload the current resume instead and let the parse run again.

In Ashby, the resume you upload on an application form is displayed on both that application and your candidate profile, and updating the application's resume updates both. A Product Designer who applies to two roles at one company with two differently tailored resumes should expect the second upload to become the profile resume the whole team sees.

In MyGreenhouse, the most recently uploaded resume is used by default and you can replace it at any time — so the file you last touched is the one attached to whatever you send next.

What these pages do not tell you

Vendor documentation describes what an employer can switch on, not what any particular employer did. A Greenhouse form at one company can be four fields; at the next it can carry a dozen custom questions and a knockout or two. Nothing here says how long a human takes to open your application, or whether one does — the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 939,700 human resources specialists in 2025 and projects about 73,700 openings a year across the 2025–35 decade, and not one of those pages tells you how many applications each of them reads on a Tuesday.

The other limit is the shelf life of these figures. Every vendor number in this post comes from Greenhouse's, Workday's and Ashby's own published documentation as it stood in September 2026, and any of them can change in a release note you will never see. The BLS figures are from the Occupational Outlook Handbook's 2025 base year. If a limit here matters to a decision you are making, open the linked page and check the number yourself before you rely on it.

What to write in the box that only Ashby gives you

For the LongText field on an Ashby form — the one headed something like "Why this role?" — write to the criteria, not to the company. Two short paragraphs, the first naming the work, the second naming the evidence:

I want this role because the posting describes design systems work at a scale I have done once and want to do properly. At Northwind I owned the component library for a 40-screen internal tool and cut new-screen build time roughly in half.

The part I have less of is research. I have run usability sessions but never owned a research plan, and this team appears to have a researcher, which is the reason I applied here rather than to a smaller studio.

Say the situation the answer applies to and it stops sounding like a template. A blank LongText box is an answer, and it is the wrong one.

The one thing to get right

Match your effort to the system in front of you. Greenhouse wants a clean, text-based resume under 2.5 MB and almost nothing else, so spend your time on the file. Ashby wants two well-aimed paragraphs and a working portfolio link, so spend it on the writing. Workday wants an account, and it wants it before you start, not on page four when the session drops.

If you would rather not type the same employment history into a fifth multi-page form this week, the platform fills these forms from your resume and answers the screening questions from what is already in it.