Research Date: February 2026 Data Source: IndustryLabs database — 67 AI-native HR tools Last Updated: February 21, 2026
Lever is a Talent Relationship Management (TRM) platform that combines an applicant tracking system with a built-in talent CRM — enabling recruiting teams to manage both reactive, requisition-driven hiring and proactive, pipeline-building sourcing from a single tool. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Lever was built on the premise that the best recruiting organisations do not simply respond to open roles with applications — they build and maintain ongoing relationships with the talent community before roles open. Its differentiation from conventional ATS platforms lies in elevating candidate relationship management to a first-class workflow within the hiring system, rather than treating it as a secondary function handled in spreadsheets or separate CRM tools.
What is Lever?
Quick Answer
Lever is a Talent Relationship Management platform that combines an ATS and a talent CRM in a single product, marketed as LeverTRM. It supports both reactive hiring (managing applications, interviews, and offers for open requisitions) and proactive sourcing (building candidate pipelines, nurturing relationships over time, and engaging talent communities before roles open). Founded in 2012 in San Francisco, it primarily serves mid-market companies with 100 to 5,000 employees. According to IndustryLabs analysis of 67 AI-native HR tools, Lever's native ATS plus CRM architecture is shared by fewer than 25% of platforms in the database — most ATS tools require a separate CRM integration to match Lever's pipeline management capabilities.
Lever was founded by Sarah Nahm and Randal Truong on the observation that great recruiting is fundamentally a relationship discipline — the best hires come from warm relationships built over months or years, not cold applications submitted to job board postings. The traditional ATS architecture — optimised for processing inbound applications through a workflow — was not designed for relationship management, which requires a different data model: one that tracks touchpoints over time, supports personalised communication at scale, and allows recruiters to stay visible to passive candidates through multiple interactions before a relevant role opens.
LeverTRM combines both models within a single platform. The ATS layer handles all the standard applicant tracking workflows: job creation, job board distribution, application review, interview scheduling, structured feedback collection, and offer management. The CRM layer adds pipeline organisation, candidate nurturing sequences, tag-based segmentation, and engagement tracking. Because both layers share the same candidate record, recruiters can transition a nurtured pipeline candidate into an active applicant workflow without data migration or duplicate record management.
Who is Lever best for?
Quick Answer
Lever is best for recruiting teams at mid-market companies with 100 to 5,000 employees that conduct a mix of reactive (application-driven) and proactive (sourcing-driven) hiring and want both managed within a single platform. It is particularly strong for technology companies, professional services firms, and other organisations where recruiting teams maintain ongoing relationships with a specialist talent community and need a CRM that sits natively within their ATS workflow rather than as a separate tool.
Lever is less well-suited for very small companies where ATS overhead is disproportionate to hiring volume, or for very large enterprise organisations with complex global compliance requirements that benefit from the more established enterprise-grade infrastructure of platforms like Workday Recruiting or SAP SuccessFactors.
The ideal Lever buyer is a Head of Talent, Recruiting Manager, or VP of People at a Series B to Series D technology company, or a professional services firm of comparable size, that is building out its recruiting function and wants a platform that supports both structured hiring and proactive sourcing without requiring separate tools. According to IndustryLabs analysis of 67 AI-native HR tools, Lever's target company size of 100 to 5,000 employees places it in the most competitive segment of the ATS market — a segment that includes Greenhouse and Ashby as direct competitors with distinct positioning.
What are Lever's key features?
Quick Answer
Lever's key features include a combined ATS and CRM (LeverTRM) for managing both applicant workflows and passive candidate pipelines, visual pipeline views that display candidate progression across all open roles simultaneously, candidate nurturing with automated outreach sequences and engagement tracking, structured interview feedback collection with configurable scoring, offer management with approval workflows, sourcing integrations with LinkedIn and other platforms, and analytics covering pipeline health, time-to-hire, source quality, and DE&I funnel metrics.
LeverTRM's visual pipeline interface is the product's most distinctive user experience feature. Recruiters see all open roles and their candidate pipelines in a single view — organised by stage, with candidate cards showing engagement history, tags, and sourcing attribution. This overview makes it easy to manage multiple concurrent requisitions and spot pipeline imbalances (too few candidates at early stages, bottlenecks at specific review stages) without switching between role-specific views.
Candidate nurturing allows recruiting teams to build and manage ongoing relationships with passive candidates in structured ways. Recruiters can tag candidates with attributes (skill area, seniority level, location preference, referral source), segment those tags into pipeline groups, and run automated outreach sequences — personalised email campaigns that maintain visibility with the talent community between active searches. When a relevant role opens, the recruiter already has a warm, engaged pipeline rather than starting from scratch with cold outreach.
Structured interview feedback uses configurable scorecards to standardise evaluation criteria across all interviewers on a panel. Offer management supports multi-level approval workflows, compensation range benchmarking integrations, and electronic offer delivery and acceptance. The reporting suite covers standard ATS metrics (time-to-fill, offer acceptance rates, source quality) alongside pipeline health metrics specific to the CRM layer — engagement rates by outreach sequence, pipeline growth by talent community, and stage-by-stage conversion for both active requisitions and passive nurture. You can view Lever's full profile at /tools/lever.
How much does Lever cost?
Quick Answer
Lever pricing is based on company headcount and the tier of features required. Based on publicly available market data, annual contracts typically range from £15,000 to £80,000 for mid-market companies, with pricing scaling based on employee count and whether the organisation requires advanced CRM nurturing, analytics, and sourcing automation features included in higher tiers. Lever does not publish a public pricing page; buyers receive custom quotes following a discovery conversation.
Pricing is estimated based on public information and may not reflect current vendor pricing. Verify directly with the vendor.
Lever's pricing structure includes a base tier covering core ATS functionality and a higher tier adding the full CRM nurturing, advanced analytics, and automation capabilities that represent Lever's primary differentiation from simpler ATS tools. Organisations evaluating Lever primarily for its CRM capabilities should confirm that the features most relevant to their use case — automated nurturing sequences, segmentation, pipeline analytics — are included in the tier they are being quoted. Implementation is typically self-managed with support from Lever's onboarding team, with implementation complexity scaling based on the number of ATS integrations required. According to IndustryLabs analysis of 67 AI-native HR tools, Lever falls in the £10–25K annual pricing band for smaller mid-market deployments and £25–50K for larger organisations.
What does Lever integrate with?
Quick Answer
Lever integrates natively with Workday, BambooHR, and ADP for HRIS synchronisation, with LinkedIn Recruiter for sourcing and candidate profile import, with Slack and Microsoft Teams for notifications and hiring manager workflows, with DocuSign and Adobe Sign for e-signature, with Zoom for video interviewing, and with background check providers including Checkr and Sterling. Over 300 integrations are available through the Lever Partner Ecosystem.
Lever's integration ecosystem covers the core categories of adjacent HR technology without matching the breadth of Greenhouse's 400+ integration marketplace. The LinkedIn Recruiter integration is strategically important: recruiters can push candidates sourced on LinkedIn directly into Lever pipelines with full profile data, attributing the sourcing to LinkedIn in Lever's source analytics. The Workday and BambooHR integrations support HRIS data synchronisation — new hires in Lever are pushed to the HRIS on acceptance, reducing post-hire data entry.
Slack integration delivers hiring decision request notifications, interview feedback reminders, and offer approval prompts within Slack — the collaboration platform where most of Lever's target technology company customers work. Zoom integration enables one-click video interview links within Lever's scheduled interview workflow, reducing the friction of video interview coordination. For context on the applicant tracking systems category and how Lever's integration depth compares to Greenhouse, Ashby, and other ATS platforms, the IndustryLabs category page provides verified data across the full market.
Is Lever GDPR / SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compliant?
Quick Answer
Lever claims GDPR compliance and SOC 2 Type II certification. For UK and EU employers, GDPR compliance is critical given the volumes of personal candidate data Lever processes — applications, CVs, interview notes, outreach engagement data, and offer documents. The CRM layer's long-term storage of candidate relationship data creates specific GDPR considerations around data retention periods and the lawful basis for holding data on passive candidates who have not explicitly applied for a role.
Compliance certifications are vendor-supplied. IndustryLabs has not independently audited these claims. Verify current certification status directly with the vendor.
The CRM dimension of Lever's GDPR posture is worth particular attention. Unlike a pure ATS that processes candidate data within the scope of a specific job application, Lever's CRM holds candidate data over extended periods for relationship management purposes — a use case that requires legitimate interest as the lawful basis and a clearly documented retention policy that balances the recruiter's business interest in maintaining a warm pipeline against the candidate's right to have their data deleted. UK and EU buyers should request Lever's data processing agreement, confirm the retention and deletion controls available for CRM-held candidate records, and validate the opt-out and data subject request mechanisms that Lever provides for passive candidates who have been added to talent pipelines without having applied for a specific role.
How does Lever compare to alternatives?
Quick Answer
Lever's closest alternatives in the mid-market ATS and TRM space are Greenhouse, Ashby, and SmartRecruiters. Greenhouse is stronger in structured interviewing methodology and integration breadth but has a less developed native CRM. Ashby is stronger in analytics and offers an all-in-one scheduling and CRM model popular with data-driven recruiting operations teams. SmartRecruiters is better suited to high-volume and multinational hiring at larger enterprise scale. Each addresses a distinct point on the product and buyer spectrum.
Greenhouse is the most direct competitor to Lever in the mid-market ATS space. The primary difference is emphasis: Greenhouse's strength is in structured interviewing methodology, scorecard-based evaluation, and the breadth of its integration marketplace. Lever's strength is in the native CRM and pipeline management capability. Organisations that prioritise structured interviewing consistency over proactive pipeline management often choose Greenhouse; those that prioritise relationship-driven sourcing and pipeline visibility often choose Lever.
Ashby is a more recent ATS entrant that has attracted significant adoption among analytics-focused recruiting operations teams. Ashby includes native scheduling, CRM, ATS, and analytics in a single product — similar in scope to Lever's LeverTRM model — but with a particular emphasis on data-driven recruiting metrics and reporting that goes beyond Lever's analytics depth. The choice between Lever and Ashby often comes down to whether a team prioritises relationship management (Lever) or operational analytics (Ashby).
SmartRecruiters targets the enterprise and global hiring market more directly than Lever — it is a better fit for organisations with hundreds of open roles, multiple geographies, and compliance requirements across different jurisdictions. For mid-market companies that want a polished, opinionated ATS plus CRM without enterprise-scale complexity or cost, Lever typically remains the more precisely sized option.
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