How to Apply on Lever and Ashby Faster

Spend enough time applying to startups and scaleups and you’ll start recognizing two application forms on sight: the clean, single-column layout of Lever, and the slightly more modern, card-based feel of Ashby. Between them, these two applicant tracking systems power a large share of hiring at companies past the earliest seed stage and before they’ve grown into the kind of enterprise that runs Workday. If you’re job hunting anywhere near tech, you’ll be filling these out a lot — which makes it worth knowing exactly what they ask for and where the actual effort should go.

What these forms usually ask

Both Lever and Ashby follow a similar shape, and it’s a shape built for speed compared with heavier enterprise portals. You upload a resume, the system parses it to prefill your name, contact details, and work history, and you spend a few seconds checking that the parse actually got things right — it’s not always perfect, especially with unusual formatting. From there you’ll typically see a short set of custom questions, often two to four of them: something role-specific, occasionally a “why this company” prompt, and sometimes a request for links — a GitHub profile, a portfolio, a personal site. Ashby in particular tends to lean into these link fields, since a lot of the roles it’s used for (engineering, design, and other portfolio-driven work) benefit from a reviewer being able to click through to actual work.

What you generally won’t see is the multi-page, account-required gauntlet that heavier enterprise systems put you through. There’s no separate login step, no re-entering your address on four different pages, no unrelated compliance forms bolted onto the flow. That’s the appeal of both platforms — and also why racing through them without thinking is a bigger risk than it looks. A five-minute form is deceptively easy to treat as a low-stakes five minutes.

How Lever and Ashby differ from legacy systems

The biggest practical difference is how much these platforms lean on resume parsing to do the heavy lifting. Legacy enterprise ATSs frequently ask you to retype your entire work history into structured fields regardless of what’s on your resume — tedious, but at least predictable. Lever and Ashby instead trust the parser, which means the actual document you upload carries more weight than it would elsewhere. A resume that parses cleanly gets your information into the system correctly on the first pass; a resume with columns, tables, text boxes, or graphics can come out scrambled, with your most recent role landing in the wrong field or your dates disappearing entirely. Our ATS resume format guide covers exactly how to build something that survives this kind of parsing intact — worth doing once, since the same resume will hit dozens of Lever and Ashby forms over the course of a search.

The other difference is more about tone than mechanics. Custom questions on Lever and Ashby tend to be short and specific rather than long-form essays — a sentence or two of “why this role” rather than a 500-word cover-letter substitute. That’s good news if you’ve got a reusable answer ready, and bad news if you’re improvising each one from scratch.

How to move faster without getting sloppy

The fastest way through either platform is to stop treating every application as a blank page. Build yourself a master profile once — your work history, your standard bullet points, the exact phrasing you use for your last few roles — and every form after that becomes a matter of pulling from it rather than reconstructing it. Do the same with your links: keep your GitHub and portfolio URLs current and copy-ready, since both platforms ask for them often enough that retyping them each time is pure waste.

The custom questions are where a little preparation pays off the most. Write two or three strong, reusable answer blocks for the prompts you see repeatedly — “why this role,” “a project you’re proud of,” “why this company” — and adapt them per posting rather than starting cold each time. A tailored version of a strong answer takes thirty seconds; a generic answer written from scratch under time pressure usually reads exactly like what it is.

One thing worth knowing if you’re using any kind of automated tool to help with this: Lever runs an invisible hCaptcha on its application forms. You won’t see a puzzle to solve — it works silently in the background — but it’s specifically designed to catch and reject submissions that look automated. This is why some autofill tools stall or fail outright on Lever forms even when they work fine everywhere else; the platform is built to stop exactly that kind of traffic. Ashby doesn’t run the same check, which is part of why it tends to be friendlier to tooling in general.

Where BestApply fits in

BestApply’s autofill and Auto Apply agent both support Lever and Ashby among the dozens of ATS platforms they work across, so the parsed fields and repeat questions get filled automatically rather than retyped for the hundredth time. On Ashby, that mostly just works end to end. On Lever, where the invisible hCaptcha blocks automated submission, a human assistant takes over that specific application and submits it by hand — so the form still gets completed properly instead of silently failing behind the scenes. You can read more about how that split between automation and human handling works across many platforms, and what autofill is actually doing under the hood.

Lever and Ashby are about as friendly as application forms get — short, parser-driven, and mercifully free of the account walls that make bigger portals such a slog. Treat that speed as an opportunity to spend your saved time on the two or three sentences that actually get read, not as an excuse to submit something generic just because you could.