# Legacy Greenhouse stayed; Honrly ran the design screen in parallel

> A New York Series A product org could not fully leave Greenhouse for legacy process reasons - so they ran Honrly alongside it for job-specific design screens.

- Company: Series A team (anonymized)
- Stage: Series A · New York
- Role: Product designer
- Metric: 2 (systems in parallel)
- Result: Honrly used in parallel for screens; zero regret interviews on the search.
- Stacks tried: Greenhouse (kept) + ad-hoc Folio reviews
- Canonical HTML: https://atsforstartup.com/case-studies/series-a-product-designer

> "We could not rip out Greenhouse - payroll, offer templates, and board reporting were tangled in it. We put Honrly next to it for assessments and finally stopped wasting crit time."

Their Greenhouse instance was five years deep: offer letter templates, EEO exports, agency portals, and a recruiting coordinator who knew every custom stage by heart. A full rip-and-replace during a design search was not a product decision - it was a company decision they were not going to win in a quarter.

What was broken was not stage tracking. Volume was fine. Portfolios looked similar at first glance. Live critiques diverged wildly. The product lead and design lead routinely disagreed after phonescreens because there was no shared async artifact before scarce crit slots. Greenhouse recorded that they had talked. It did not record whether taste and communication were already visible.

They had already tried bolting on a separate portfolio tool and a Notion scorecard linked from Greenhouse notes. Neither stuck. Work leaked back into Slack threads attached to candidate IDs. Contractors scored in Folio; full-timers scored in Docs; nobody trusted the merge.

An internal proposal to “just move design hiring to Ashby” died in IT review. SSO, vendor security questionnaire, and the People team’s reporting calendar made a second full ATS politically expensive even if the eng pod liked Ashby elsewhere.

During the study they scored systems on assessment quality and collaboration. They could not move the system of record. They could move the screen. They stood up Honrly in parallel: apply link, written prompts, and short async video lived there. Only people who cleared the bar were pushed into Greenhouse for scheduling, approvals, and offers.

The dual-system awkwardness was real for two weeks - candidates sometimes asked which login mattered. They solved it with a single careers CTA that explained the assessment step, then a coordinator who mirrored cleared candidates into Greenhouse the same day. After that, friction dropped.

Every interview on the calendar had already shown taste in writing and speech. The team reported zero “why did we take this call” moments. Greenhouse remained the HR system of record. Honrly became the screening lane they wished they had built years earlier - not because they loved two tools, but because legacy wiring made honesty cheaper than migration theater.

Six months later they still had not fully migrated. They also had not reopened the Folio experiment. Parallel Honrly for design (and later PM) screens became the standing pattern: assess where signal lives, offer where compliance lives.

## Takeaways

- Legacy ATS debt can block a full switch without blocking a better screen.
- Parallel Honrly for assessments + Greenhouse for offers was an intentional compromise.
- Shared async prompts reduced disagreement before expensive crit time.