Lever: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Category: labor-market and HR software
Pandemic-layoff role: Deepest-cut ranking company
Last updated: 2026-09-25
Related article: The Pandemic Layoff Stress Test

Pandemic-role map

Reader shorthand: recruiting-software provider hit by hiring freezes.
What Lever did for customers: sold applicant-tracking and candidate-relationship software to employers.
What changed in the pandemic: customers paused hiring, and recruiting software became easy to cut or delay.
Relief role: not a lender, referral agent or public-support vendor. Its pandemic offer to customers was free remote-interviewing tools.
Data/tool role: labor-market infrastructure tied to growth hiring, exposed when growth stopped.

Founders, Executives, and Investors

Sarah Nahm was Lever's chief executive in March 2020. By August 2020 the company was quoting Nate Smith as "Lever CEO and Cofounder." Lever had offices in San Francisco and Toronto.

Business Before the Pandemic

Lever sold applicant-tracking and candidate-relationship software, and described itself in 2020 as "the leader in talent sourcing and relationship management software." In the fall of 2019 it launched a Zoom integration that let recruiters schedule and join video interviews from inside Lever.

What the Pandemic Changed

The first response was a giveaway. On March 24, 2020 Lever made its Remote Interviewing product, upgraded the week before with Zoom, free to all customers through May 31, 2020. "We made this decision to help our customers and other organizations adjust to a new reality in light of COVID-19," Nahm said. The company said scheduled Zoom interviews had been rising 50% week over week for a month, and that the number of customers using the integration doubled within days of the new release.

Free tools did not protect revenue once customers stopped hiring. In the week before April 13, 2020 Lever laid off about 40% of its employees across all departments in San Francisco and Toronto. Business Insider first estimated the number at 109. Layoffs.fyi later updated its entry after a Lever employee said 86 people had been laid off. Layoffs.fyi placed the cut among others at recruiting startups, including ZipRecruiter, AngelList and Triplebyte. About a week later Lever's rival Greenhouse cut 28% of its staff, and Business Insider counted more than 2,000 startup employees in HR and recruiting laid off because of the pandemic.

Business After the First Shock

Lever's August 4, 2020 State of Recruiting report surveyed 700 talent and HR decision-makers in the U.S. and Canada. Only 14% of their companies were on a total hiring freeze, and 40% expected to come out of the pandemic stronger. Among recruiters, 85% were leaning more on video interviews and 84% on phone interviews. Smith said the pandemic had "transformed businesses in nearly every industry."

Where the Company Is Now

Lever is sold by Employ Inc. alongside JazzHR and Jobvite. Lever's 2026 blog runs under Employ branding and listed a spring 2026 product release.

Lever Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status