What the Greenhouse application form asks you

In the last 30 days, 8,613 postings from 147 employers put their application on Greenhouse — Stripe, GitLab, Airbnb, Mozilla and a long tail behind them. After the employer's own site it is the form you will meet most often. This is field by field, from a copy of Stripe's form captured on 29 August 2026.

The button at the top you should ignore

Above the first field sits “Autofill my application”. It leads to a Greenhouse sign-in page, and you do not need a Greenhouse account to apply. We know what that button costs: on 29 August one of our own runs clicked it on a fully filled Stripe form, opened a sign-in tab, and ended up reporting a missing email field that belonged to a different website entirely. Scroll past it.

The fields, in the order they appear

First Name	required
Last Name	required
Email	required
Phone	not required, and it is next to a menu of 244 dial codes
Country	required — the country name, never “Brazil +55”
Resume/CV	three ways to attach it, see below
Education — School	required, a searchable catalogue
Education — Degree	required, a short fixed list
“Add another”	a second, third, fourth school
The employer's own questions	as many as they want
Submit application	one button, at the end

A star means required, and a missing field is marked “This field is required.” underneath. The résumé is the exception: it is announced as “Resume/CV is required.” near the top, far from the field it means.

The résumé has three buttons, and one is a trap

The block offers Attach, Dropbox and Enter manually, and takes pdf, doc, docx, txt and rtf. “Enter manually” opens a plain text box, and whatever you leave there becomes your résumé. We once caught our own code typing a university name into it while the real PDF was already attached. Use Attach, then check that the file name appears.

Where everybody gets stuck: school and degree

School is a search against Greenhouse's own catalogue, not a text field. If your university is not in it, retyping will not help. Timed on 29 August: “Centro Universitário FIEO” returned nothing after 6.5 seconds; “Centro” returned one option, a research centre in Mexico.
The list is slow, and misleading when empty. The first options appear about half a second after you stop typing, because every keystroke asks a remote index; with nothing typed it shows 60 names all starting with A. There is an “Other”, in English only — “Outra” and “Otro” return nothing.
Degree is a short fixed list of levels. “B.S. Computer Engineering” is refused: pick the level, and put the course name somewhere else.

The questions the employer writes

Below the standard fields each employer adds its own. Stripe's asked consent to have interviews recorded and transcribed by an outside tool, and which countries you can work in — thirty checkboxes, all required. Three deserve a warning:

“How did you hear about this job?” only registers when you click the option in the list. Enter does nothing, and the field stays empty while looking filled.
Work authorization is a dropdown, not a pair of radio buttons — easy to skim past, and the one field where a wrong answer is a lie rather than a typo.
The certification is a text field: “Please type your name to electronically sign this document.” No checkbox — you type your name.

The questions nobody has to answer

The demographic block arrives in near-identical words on every board: gender, race or ethnicity, Hispanic or Latino, LGBTQ+, age group, veteran status, disability status. Every one carries a decline option — “I don't wish to answer” or “Decline To Self Identify” — and declining costs you nothing in the process. We answer none of them for anybody: a pre-filled decline is still a decision somebody else made.

After you press Submit: the eight-character code

If Greenhouse has seen your address before, the submit does not go through. A block titled “Security code” appears with eight one-character boxes — six on GitLab — and a mail arrives with the code. Measured over ten submissions on 21 August: it is sent the first time an address submits and then reused, so one arrived four minutes before the submit that needed it. Until those boxes are filled, nothing has been sent.

And if a Greenhouse link opens a list of jobs instead of a form, the posting is gone — two of twenty waiting in our queue already were. All of that is handled before a form goes out in your name, which is most of what we build. What it costs is on Plans and pricing: one application a day on the free plan, up to ten a day on Pro when there is a posting worth it. The rest is on the FAQ.