The Standardization of Hiring: Adapting to the Greenhouse/Ashby Duopoly

The hiring process is no longer run by human whims. It is a highly engineered funnel, fundamentally dictated by the software architecture of three massive software systems. Welcome to the invisible oligopoly of hiring.

If you are applying to tech jobs in 2026, you are not applying to a company; you are submitting an API payload to Greenhouse, Ashby, or Lever. The "Workday Generation" of bloated, enterprise HR systems is actively bleeding out in the tech sector, completely replaced by these modern, highly automated pipelines.

Why the ATS Monopoly Matters To You

You cannot brute-force your way into a modern tech company with a "creative" PDF. Greenhouse and Ashby process millions of resumes an hour. They strip the PDF, run OCR (Optical Character Recognition), parse the extracted text into JSON schemas, and serve the recruiter a standardized, machine-readable profile.

If your resume does not parse cleanly into their specific schemas, you are an invisible applicant.

How to Exploit the Duopoly

Since 80% of tech companies use the exact same underlying systems (Greenhouse or Ashby), you can exploit the standardization. If you format your resume perfectly for one of these systems, you are automatically formatted perfectly for thousands of companies.

1. The "Boring Standard" Format: Abandon columns. Abandon sidebars. Abandon progress bars for your skills. Use standard, single-column document flow (the "Harvard Standard"). Put your Contact Info at the top, Experience next, and Skills at the bottom. The parser scripts run linearly from top to bottom. Don't confuse them.

2. Exact Keyword Mirroing: Ashby's matching algorithms don't understand nuance. If the job description asks for "AWS Data Pipelines," and your resume says "Built remote servers in Amazon," you score a 0%. You must inject the exact, verbatim string matches.

3. The Date Anchor: The most common parsing failure is date extraction, which calculates your total years of experience. Always use standard formatting for experience blocks: Company Name - Job Title (Month YYYY - Month YYYY). Do not get creative.

Don't fight the algorithm. Format your resume precisely for the Machine, and let the Machine deliver you to the Recruiter.