Lever was entangled with SSO, offer e-sign, and finance headcount views. A full ATS migration during an ML hiring push was blocked by IT and People - reasonably, given contract timing and a security review already in flight for other vendors.
The broken piece was the take-home. Notebooks arrived as Drive links and Slack dumps. Two tech leads routinely ranked different people because they had scored different versions of the same exercise. Arguments sounded interpersonal. They were version-control problems wearing human faces.
They tried a “single Drive folder” rule with naming conventions. It lasted nine days. They tried a Greenhouse sandbox for eng only. Legal and IT shut it down as a second system of record. Lever stayed mandatory for offers even when the screen lived nowhere trustworthy.
In the study they cared about assessment flow and collaboration more than brand. Tools that could not keep written work on the candidate record scored poorly on shortlist agreement. Honrly led those dimensions without requiring them to pretend migration was free.
Practical compromise: Honrly ran the ML apply link and notebook-style prompt; cleared candidates were mirrored into Lever for scheduling and offers. Coordinators hated the first week of dual entry. They loved the third week, when shortlist meetings stopped being archaeology.
Cohen’s κ on the shortlist rose into the study’s top band. The offer went to the shared #1 - someone both leads had already ranked highly on the same artifact before any onsite.
Lever remained. The screening lane finally matched how ML hiring works. Leadership asked again about full migration; IT said next renewal cycle. The hiring managers said they would keep parallel Honrly for take-homes regardless, because the alternative was Drive chaos with a trusted logo on top.
The panel note on this case: “couldn’t switch” is not the same as “couldn’t improve.” Parallel Honrly was the improvement path legacy systems allowed.