State of ATS Ingestion: Auditing 460,000+ Live Tech Roles

# Executive Summary & Audit Methodology

Over a 24-hour observation window in October 2026, the Employed by Guaq AI ingestion engine polled 14,814 verified career endpoints across 17 distinct Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Our telemetry captured 460,687 active postings and ingested 15,994 newly published positions within a single calendar day.

Traditional job aggregation platforms suffer from "ghost postings", stale listings, and phantom index bloat because they scrape third-party job boards rather than primary employer endpoints. In contrast, Employed queries first-party employer APIs directly, eliminating intermediary latency and verifying open requisitions directly against the employer's canonical database.

# The 17-Platform ATS Landscape

Modern corporate recruitment relies on specialized ATS infrastructure. Each vendor exposes unique API characteristics, pagination behaviors, and rate-limiting thresholds:

# Greenhouse vs. Workday Architectural Nuances

Greenhouse continues to serve as the default ATS for venture-backed technology startups and mid-market innovators. Its public API (https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/{board_token}/jobs) returns full job definitions, department taxonomies, and office locations in a single unauthenticated HTTP GET call.

Workday, conversely, powers Fortune 500 enterprises. It utilizes enterprise CXS endpoints (https://{tenant}.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/wday/cxs/{tenant}/{career_site}/jobs) requiring dynamic payload negotiation, POST requests, and 20-item paginated windows.

# Signal Extraction & Field Inference

Raw job descriptions often conceal critical eligibility parameters inside unstructured text. Employed applies deterministic parsing and hierarchical classification to resolve these attributes:

{
  "title": "Staff Distributed Systems Engineer",
  "company": "Acme Cloud",
  "location": "Bengaluru, India",
  "yoe_min": 6,
  "work_arrangement": "hybrid",
  "visa_supported": true,
  "education_req": "bachelors",
  "tech_stack": ["Go", "Kubernetes", "gRPC", "PostgreSQL"]
}

Key classification outcomes across our audited 460k dataset:

• Work Arrangement Stated: 42.1% of postings explicitly declare remote, hybrid, or on-site status. For the remaining 57.9%, our geographic heuristics infer placement based on office headquarters.
• Visa Sponsorship Transparency: Only 8.4% of postings explicitly state visa sponsorship eligibility in the requisition header. However, deep-text parsing reveals sponsor willingness in an additional 14.2% of engineering postings.
• Experience Requirement Floors: 68.3% of postings state an explicit minimum Years of Experience (YOE) threshold, with 0-2 YOE comprising just 12.8% of tech postings.

# Frequently Asked Questions

# How often are ATS endpoints polled?

Target career endpoints are polled continuously in priority tiers, refreshing every 4 to 24 hours depending on historical board posting velocity and hiring volume.

# Does Employed charge candidates to apply?

No. Employed indexes open roles and links every role directly to the employer's official application page. Candidates never pay to view or submit applications.

# How does Employed prevent duplicate listings?

Every requisition is fingerprinted using a canonical hash of employer identifier, normalized title, location scope, and internal ATS requisition ID, preventing cross-board duplication.