Lever and Greenhouse are keeping your HR/People Ops teams captive.
It’s no secret, or at least I hope it’s not, that we’re trying to fix the god awful state of hiring for smaller companies. Now one of the things that I personally find jarring across the whole industry is lack of customer alignment.
Think about it. Just as recruiters might prioritize placement fees over candidate fit, traditional ATS platforms like Lever and Greenhouse employ dark patterns to trap HR managers in gilded cages. They’re selling you a prison disguised as productivity software.
Lever and Greenhouse force the gradual surrender of control over your recruitment process, which undoubtedly results in sub par processes, inefficient and expensive usage costs and sup par product.
The Vendor Lock-in Trap
When you sign up for these closed platforms, you’re not just choosing software — you’re surrendering your entire recruitment ecosystem to a single vendor. The cost? Your freedom to innovate and adapt.
Here’s what they don’t tell you:
- Your Data is Held Hostage Sure, they’ll let you export basic CSVs and JSON files. But try moving your historical data or customized workflows. That’s when you’ll hit the wall.
- Innovation Dies in Captivity Want to integrate AI resume screening? Looking to automate interviews? Too bad. You’re restricted to their ecosystem, their timeline, their vision of what your recruitment should look like.
- Quality Suffers, Because It Can When switching costs are prohibitively high, there’s little incentive to innovate. Your HR team falls behind while competitors leverage cutting-edge tools.
- The Real Cost is Opportunity Every month you stay locked in is another month of inefficiency, missed talent, and competitive disadvantage.
You see, closed platforms, by their nature, stifle innovation. While they may release new features periodically, these updates are dictated by the vendor’s roadmap rather than your specific needs. The lack of open APIs and limited integration capabilities means you’re restricted to the ecosystem of tools they choose to support, not what you need to be successful.
NoFUD is building an Open Platform.
We are building on a fundamentally different philosophy: your recruitment data and processes should belong to you, not your vendor. By being open and giving you back your access to your data, we’re also forcing ourselves to innovate, to listen to our customers, and to provide you with the best customer service.
You see, we must compete on merit alone. Without the ability to trap customers through vendor lock-in, we are forced to innovate continuously and provide superior customer service. This competition drives rapid improvement and ensures that our platform remains responsive to user needs.
Send us your HR Managers, your Recruiters, your beaten and wounded.
We believe that the future of recruitment technology is verifiable, open, and interoperable, and while we have ideas, we want to hear first hand from the people who are in the trenches. HR Managers, Recruiters, Operations Professionals, we are building our platform for you and if you have any frustrations with your current ATS / HRIS software suite we want to know what they are.
After our platform launch later this month we will be launching two AI Agents for recruitment teams, each is set to provide you with direct value and save you hours of work monthly. So come talk to us and …
Take Action …. Now.
For Companies Not Yet Trapped:
- Calculate the true cost of ownership (include migration costs and opportunity costs)
- Review API documentation and integration limitations
- Evaluate data export capabilities
- Consider open alternatives that grow with you
For Those Already in the System:
- Start documenting your workflows
- Export all available data regularly (remember, historical access is limited)
- Identify critical integrations
- Plan your escape strategy
The recruitment technology landscape is evolving, and the future belongs to those who maintain control over their tools and data. Don’t let brand name recognition and startup perks of closed platforms compromise your organization’s long-term recruitment, operations and HR/People Ops department productivity.
Break free from the gilded cage. You and your recruitment process deserve better.
