What Greenhouse is and who it suits
Greenhouse is a hosted applicant tracking system. On its own site it describes a single platform for hiring: structured interviews, scorecards, sourcing, a candidate portal, onboarding after an accepted offer, and reporting on the whole funnel. It also presents AI interviewing at the top of the funnel and tools for catching candidate fraud.
That is a serious product, and it is built for a particular kind of company. The buyer is usually a hiring team with a recruiter or two, several interviewers per role, and a wish to make every candidate go through the same steps so decisions are fair and comparable. If that is you, we say so plainly: stay with a system like this.
WP Career Board answers a different question. It is a job board plugin for WordPress, and the hiring side of it is deliberately smaller. We think the honest comparison is between an enterprise hiring process and a careers page that you own, rather than between two applicant tracking systems.
The real difference
The difference is who the product is organised around. Greenhouse is organised around the hiring process: a role is defined, interview plans are attached, interviewers fill in scorecards and a decision is made from that evidence. WP Career Board is organised around the page: a public board, a job, an application form, and a place to see who applied.
That changes what you manage day to day. In a process-first system you maintain interview kits, permissions and reporting. In a page-first system you maintain a WordPress site that happens to take applications. Neither is better in the abstract, and which one fits depends on how many people you hire and how formal the decision is.
What WP Career Board does not include
We would rather you hear this from us than find it out after installing. WP Career Board does not include structured interview kits, candidate scorecards, interview scheduling, offer letters, background checks, onboarding workflows or posting to many outside job sites at once. It also has no webhook layer, so there is no built-in way to push events to other tools.
What it does include is the record of an application, a status, notes your team can leave, and in Pro a pipeline you drag candidates through. Interviews themselves happen in your own calendar and email.
How hiring runs in WP Career Board
Here is the flow for a small team, with the plan each step belongs to.
- An employer or a member of your team posts a job through a four-step form on the front end, with a preview before it goes live. Guest posting is available if you allow it. This is in the free plugin.
- If you want review before anything is public, you set moderation so a job waits as pending until someone approves it. Reviewers can also act on reported jobs. This is free as well.
- A candidate applies through a drawer on the job page, attaching a CV of up to 20MB. Guests can apply without an account. The application is stored in your site and notification emails go out.
- The employer opens their dashboard to see received applications, change a status, leave a note and export the list to CSV. Candidates see their own applications in a dashboard of their own. Both are free.
- With Pro, the same applications appear on a Kanban board. You define the stages per board, and the defaults include Screening, Interview, Offer, Hired and Rejected. You drag a card to move someone along.
- Also with Pro, AI scores each application from 0 to 100 with a reason and writes a summary, and it can score automatically when an application arrives.
What Pro adds and what it does not
Pro is where the pipeline, the resume builder with a public resume search, AI screening, credits for paid listings and the custom field builder live. The pipeline is a view of where people stand. It is not an interview programme, and you should not buy Pro expecting scorecards.
If you want to see the shape of this before deciding, the applicant tracking pipeline feature page and our guide to a hiring pipeline without a SaaS show it in more detail.
When a simple pipeline is enough
Most small employers do not run a formal interview programme, even if they would like to say they do. A founder reads the applications, a manager does one or two conversations, and somebody sends an offer. For that rhythm the useful questions are modest: who applied, which of them look right, who have we spoken to, and who did we turn down.
A Kanban board answers those four questions at a glance. A card in Screening has not been spoken to. A card in Interview is in progress. Offer, Hired and Rejected close the loop. Because you set the stages per board, a company with a quick process can use three columns and a company with a longer one can use six.
Signs you are still in that zone
- Fewer people than you can count on two hands take part in each hiring decision.
- Feedback is a conversation or a short message, not a written form that has to be compared.
- You do not need to prove to an auditor or a board how a candidate was assessed.
- Nobody is asking for hiring dashboards that cut across departments.
- Your careers page matters as part of your site, not as a separate branded portal.
If two or more of those are false for you, take that seriously. It is the point where a dedicated system starts earning its keep, and our post on signs your job board has outgrown its plugin describes the same moment from the other side.
Agencies and site owners
There is a second group for whom this page is written. If you build sites for clients, or you run a niche site that has its own audience, a hiring system run by a vendor is the wrong shape. You want the jobs to be part of the site you already built, in its design, under its domain, with its search and its analytics.
An agency can also install the same plugin across client sites. Pro has a licence tier for an unlimited number of sites, so the licence does not multiply with each client. Each client then has their own database, so one client’s applicants never sit alongside another’s. That separation is simply how WordPress installs work, and it is a reasonable answer to a client who asks where their candidates’ data is kept.
What it costs you to run each
For Greenhouse, we will not quote a figure. Its pricing is not something we should guess at and it changes, so ask the vendor and read the contract terms on seats and modules.
For WP Career Board the core is free and Pro starts at $69 a year. The rest of the cost is the ordinary cost of a WordPress site: hosting, backups, updates and someone who is comfortable doing them. If you already run a company site on WordPress, adding a board is a small addition. If you do not, a hosted system takes that work off your hands, and that is a legitimate reason to choose one.
One more cost is worth naming: time spent setting up. A formal hiring process in a hosted system takes configuration, and a WordPress board takes a different kind, such as choosing a theme, placing blocks and setting up emails. Neither is zero.
Candidate data and privacy
With WP Career Board, applications, CVs and candidate profiles live in your WordPress database and your uploads folder, on the hosting you chose. You decide the region, the backup schedule and who has server access.
The free plugin handles the main privacy requests itself. A candidate can request an export of their data or ask for it to be erased, and each action is written to an audit log. The log gives you evidence of what you did and when.
AI screening needs a decision from you. Pro supports Claude, OpenAI and Ollama. With Claude or OpenAI, application text goes to that provider, so you should cover it in your privacy notice and agreement. With Ollama, the model runs on your own server and CVs are not sent to a third party. The AI reads the cover letter, the answers to your screening questions and the candidate’s structured resume, and an uploaded PDF is not read by it. For a hosted system, read the vendor’s data processing terms, since they hold the data.
Moving over from Greenhouse
Be realistic about what transfers. WP Career Board has an importer for WP Job Manager, and a CSV importer is included in Pro. It has no Greenhouse importer.
Your options are these:
- Export open roles and rebuild them with a CSV import into the board.
- Recreate a small number of live roles by hand, which is often quicker than it sounds.
- Have a developer write a one-off script against the REST API or WP-CLI for anything unusual.
- Keep an export of past applicants from your current system as an archive instead of importing it.
Do not plan to move interview feedback or scorecards, because there is nowhere to put them. Our post on migrating from WP Job Manager explains the one built-in route, and the same thinking applies to any move.
A launch checklist
- Decide which roles will live on your site, and which closed ones you will only archive.
- Install the free plugin, run the setup, and place the board block on a page called Careers or Jobs.
- Set your moderation preference, edit the notification emails, and turn on a spam check for forms.
- Post one real role, apply to it yourself, and watch the email and the dashboard.
- Add Pro only if you need the pipeline, resumes or AI, then set the stages you will really use.
- Test a listing with Google’s Rich Results Test and add the page to your navigation.
If you are building a board from scratch, the guide to creating a job board website on WordPress covers the steps in order.
One site, one login, other plugins when you want them
WP Career Board is one of several separate, optional plugins from the same team, and they run on one WordPress site and one login. With BuddyNext Pro, a Career Board bridge shows published jobs in the community feed and search. It carries jobs only, never resumes, and notifications collect in the BuddyNext bell and are not emailed from there.
Beyond that, the same team makes Jetonomy for forums and Q&A, Learnomy for courses, Listora for directories, Eventonomy for events, WPMediaVerse for member media and WB Gamification for points and badges. There are also two themes, BuddyX Pro and Reign. We make no integration claims for any of these with WP Career Board. They simply run on the same site if you want them.
In practice, running on one site means one set of user accounts. A person who is already a member of your community does not need a second login to apply for a role, and your team does not need a second system to remember. That is the upside. The downside is that each plugin is its own piece of software with its own update cycle, so a busy site needs someone who will keep all of them current and test them together before a release goes live. None of this is required: you can run WP Career Board by itself and add nothing.
The trade is plain. A hosted suite is one bill and one vendor, and when something breaks there is one place to ask. These are separate plugins that you install, host and update yourself, and each has its own licence. For a small team that already runs WordPress, that is often fine. If you would rather not be your own integrator, a single hosted platform is the more comfortable choice, and the features overview shows what each piece does.
Other alternatives worth a look
- Workable is the one to read if you want your roles pushed out to many job sites and candidates sourced for you.
- Lever fits teams who think of hiring as ongoing relationships with candidates, not single requisitions.
- Hosted job-board services win when you want a monetised board without running any WordPress.
- WP Job Manager is a long-established free board plugin, and it wins when you want the largest add-on ecosystem and simple listings.
- WP Job Openings is a lighter careers-page plugin for a company with a few open roles.
- All alternatives lists the rest.
Who should stay with Greenhouse
Stay if your hiring is a structured programme. That means more than a handful of interviewers per role, written scorecards that feed the decision, reporting that leadership reads, and integrations with other systems you already run. Stay if compliance or governance in hiring is someone’s job. And stay if no one in your organisation wants to maintain a WordPress site.
Choose WP Career Board if your reality is simpler: a careers page that looks like part of your site, applications arriving in one place, a pipeline you can see at a glance, and data you can export and keep. Start with the free plugin, see whether it covers the work, and add Pro only when something specific is missing. The pricing page shows what each tier holds, and the WordPress job board plugin overview explains the whole product.