What is recruiting software?
Recruiting software encompasses tools for the entire hiring process, from sourcing and screening to interviewing and onboarding. It helps hiring teams optimize their processes through automated workflows, real-time collaboration, data analytics, and other advanced features. It also improves the candidate experience by simplifying the job application process and facilitating clear communication with the hiring team.
Most full-service talent acquisition suites offer all these capabilities in one place to streamline information. However, you can leverage standalone recruitment solutions like applicant tracking systems (ATS), candidate relationship management (CRM) systems, and pre-employment testing software to handle more specific recruitment functions. Many standalone platforms integrate with larger recruitment suites and human resources (HR) software to enhance the hiring process.
I reviewed 10 top recruitment software solutions and narrowed my list of recommendations to the best of the best:
- Teamtailor is the best recruitment software overall.
- Breezy HR is best for startups.
- Workable is best for small businesses.
- Jobvite is best for midsize businesses.
- iCIMS Talent Cloud is best for enterprises.
- Honorable mentions:
- LeverTRM is best for candidate screening.
- Zoho Recruit is the best budget-friendly recruiting software.
- Greenhouse is best for DEI-focused hiring.
Featured partners
What is the best recruiting software?
This guide focuses exclusively on comprehensive recruitment tools that support candidate engagement, sourcing, and tracking in one place. Explore the table below for a quick overview of my favorite platforms’ scores, use cases, and pricing.
Overall score
Use case
Starting price*
Learn more
LeverTRM
3.32
Best for candidate screening
Contact sales
Zoho Recruit
3.17
Best budget-friendly recruiting software
$25/recruiter/mo.
*Starting prices based on annual contracts (if applicable).
**Based on third-party sources.
Teamtailor: Best for overall recruitment software
Overall score
3.96/5
User reviews
3.69/5
Pricing
1.56/5
Support
3.73/5
Platform and interface
4.71/5
Reporting and analytics
3.56/5
Candidate relationship management
3.88/5
Applicant tracking features
5.00/5
Assessments and interviews
4.13/5
Pros
- Co-pilot generative AI for faster job descriptions, interview questions, and résumé summaries.
- Platform localization is available in 24 languages.
- Built-in video meeting support.
- Connect profiles for candidates to engage with company news, monitor application progress, and collect reference checks.
Cons
- Lacks an intuitive talent pool feature for re-engaging silver medalists.
- Pricing is not transparent.
- Cannot create and share analytics dashboards among recruitment teams.
Why I chose Teamtailor
Teamtailor’s versatile feature set and easy-to-use interface make it the best recruiting software on my shortlist. You can adapt Teamtailor’s various feature sets to meet your shifting recruitment needs as your company grows — whether that’s filling roles as fast as possible through automations, minimizing unconscious hiring bias by anonymizing candidates, or improving candidate experience through timely communication.
While Teamtailor does well with most tactical recruiting features, it falls short on some bigger-picture strategies. Custom reporting is cumbersome, you can’t create knockout questions, and onboarding management is nonexistent. As a result, Teamtailor may be too limited if you need advanced capabilities like headcount and hiring strategy planning.
Teamtailor offers a unique blend of recruitment features targeting candidate experience and hiring efficiency. Because it balances features for applicants and recruiters, Teamtailor supports your team’s hiring goals whether you’re looking to hire quickly or grow your brand’s reach.
Many of Teamtailor’s features enhance the candidate experience and speed up critical recruitment metrics like time-to-hire. For example, its customizable career site allows your employees to post content about what it’s like to work at your company and encourage prospects to apply — ensuring a steady stream of interested candidates even before you post a job opening.
Teamtailor’s modern appearance, drag-and-drop hiring pipeline, and in-module customization options make it accessible to new and seasoned recruitment teams. It even natively supports functions like video interviewing and generative AI, compared to other recruiting software, like Greenhouse, which relies on integrations.
However, enterprise hiring teams will likely find Teamtailor too simple. Customizing reports and analytics visualizations is rather rudimentary since you must start from one of Teamtailor’s base reports. You also can’t sort candidates into specific talent pools; instead, all candidates enter your ATS in one large list, which you have to filter and “segment.” If you need more granular options like benchmarking to evaluate your recruitment team’s effectiveness, look to Jobvite instead.
Candidate experience
Many of Teamtailor’s features aim to improve your passive recruiting initiatives even though it is not a full-fledged candidate relationship management (CRM) like iCIMS. Staple CRM features like email nurturing campaigns, career site content creation, and external sourcing capabilities are available and straightforward to use in Teamtailor.
But the most surprising feature that even many CRMs lack is Teamtailor’s candidate-facing profiles. Available for candidates to create once they choose to “connect” with your company’s career site, these profiles market your open opportunities and allow candidates to keep tabs on their application progress.
According to 2023 data from Criteria, 54% of candidates have walked away from a job due to poor communication from the potential employer. Teamtailor’s Connect profiles can reduce the likelihood of top talent dropping out of the process since its automatic notifications and company content keep them invested without extra work from your recruitment team.
Pipeline management
Teamtailor uses a combination of customizable automations and AI to manage your recruitment pipeline. Some of these include:
- Smart moves: Automatically moves candidates to different stages of your hiring funnel based on answers to questions or job offer status.
- Qualifying questions: Prevents applicants from continuing their job application if they answer a mandatory application question unsatisfactorily.
- Smart schedule: Automatically chooses interview times based on your hiring team’s schedule and sends these times to candidates.
- AI recommendations: AI parses applications and résumés and identifies top contenders for a role.
Most other vendors in this roundup offer only one or two of these capabilities. LeverTRM’s advanced automations, for example, are an add-on feature. These features are also beneficial if you have high-volume needs with few recruiters since Teamtailor progresses and identifies top candidates according to your unique criteria. That way, your recruiters focus on evaluating and nurturing the candidates with the greatest chance of hiring success.
A word of caution:
Automations and AI candidate scoring are great ways to improve hiring efficiency. However, they can promote candidates from majority groups who frequently benefit from unfair societal systems. Learn more about AI in recruiting and diversity hiring so your teams understand how to use these tools responsibly.
Employee dashboard
Teamtailor’s employee dashboards allow your workforce to monitor and apply for internal opportunities. Employees can also use the dashboard to refer candidates to jobs and monitor their referral’s progress in your recruitment pipeline.
Although Teamtailor lacks referral incentive management tools similar to Workable’s rewards programs, it does gamify the experience. A referral leaderboard widget displays who refers the most talent and whose referrals the company ultimately hires. Besides fostering friendly workplace competition, Teamtailor’s employee dashboard enables you to find the best talent from both external and internal sources.
Teamtailor does not reveal its pricing, so you must contact its sales team for a custom quote. All Teamtailor subscriptions come with unlimited job postings, unlimited users, and live chat support 24 hours a day during the weekdays. Beyond that, pricing depends on the specific features you need and your employee headcount.
Teamtailor’s lack of transparency heavily impacted its overall pricing score. Earning only a 1.56 out of 5, Teamtailor only beat Jobvite and iCIMS with similarly hidden pricing because of its 14-day free trial. Some review sites note that Teamtailor pricing starts at $1,250 annually, but this is likely an underestimate.
If budget is an issue, Breezy HR has several of the same features as Teamtailor, plus transparent pricing. You can also visit our How Much Does HR Software Cost? page for a deep dive into average prices for different types of recruitment software, including recruitment platforms.
Add-on features:
- Job offer approvals.
- SMS text messaging.
- BI-Connector.
- Requisition flow.
- Enterprise calendar.
Breezy HR: Best for startups
Overall score
3.83/5
User reviews
4.15/5
Pricing
4.31/5
Support
2.48/5
Platform and interface
4.23/5
Reporting and analytics
3.00/5
Candidate relationship management
3.94/5
Applicant tracking features
4.54/5
Assessments and interviews
3.35/5
Pros
- Free plan includes unlimited users and a customizable career site.
- Native e-signature and offer management.
- Access to more than 800 recruiting templates, including job descriptions, interview questions, and offer letters.
- Native video assessments and reference-checking capabilities.
Cons
- Need to subscribe to the Growth plan or higher to invite external recruiters.
- Email nurture campaigns are limited to the Business plan and higher.
- Data import and export are limited to the Pro plan.
- The free plan limits information to candidates to only 30 days.
Why I chose Breezy HR
With an overall score of 3.83, Breezy HR’s free plan, stage action automations, and Slack integrations make it one of the most startup-friendly recruitment platforms. For $0, you can syndicate a job post, collect candidates, parse résumés, schedule interviews, and hire a candidate. You’ll only need to pay once your recruitment needs become more complex and you need access to features like approval workflows and nurture campaigns.
Breezy HR also includes multiple features to accommodate workers new to recruiting. Its free guides lay out recruitment best practices for beginners, while its mobile app allows your teams to manage the recruitment pipeline and message candidates even when away from their desks. Many other contenders on this list, including Lever, are only accessible by internet browser.
Although Breezy offers a Pro subscription plan with advanced reporting features and a dedicated account manager, its inability to customize the homepage can make managing high-volume hiring time-consuming. Try iCIMS or Zoho Recruit to craft stakeholder-specific dashboard views for more strategic hiring planning and task management.
Breezy HR targets small and medium-sized businesses with infrequent to moderate hiring needs. Its features focus heavily on the operational side of recruitment, like organizing candidates, scheduling interviews, and collecting new hire information to centralize and create an auditable record of your hiring efforts.
Like Teamtailor, Breezy HR is beginner-friendly since most of its features are plug-and-play. Out-of-the-box recruiting pipelines, email templates, talent pools, and report options allow your teams to create, post, and analyze hiring progress quickly with little need for customization. This is essential if you’re a startup where employees perform multiple functions, including hiring.
More seasoned recruiters may find customizing Breezy HR to their liking frustrating and slow. For example, you must navigate a series of dropdown menus to find and modify your recruitment settings. Breezy HR also forces you to create new jobs by following its step-by-step workflow instead of saving job requisition templates and approval workflows ahead of time.
But if you’re on a budget and have immediate hiring needs, Breezy HR’s free plan and flat monthly fees are relatively affordable, especially if your employee headcount is inconsistent. Optional add-ons, like incognito apply and candidate text messaging, are also available if diversity hiring and candidate experience are top concerns.
Need performance management?
If you’re in the market for performance management software alongside recruitment, Breezy HR recently launched its Perform product line, including a free-forever plan for 1–10 employees.
Scalable plans
Breezy HR has five different subscription plans, more than any other vendor in my roundup. It is also the only platform to offer a free plan, making it the most accessible platform for startups with limited budgets but urgent hiring needs.
One of Breezy HR’s most attractive aspects is that it allows unlimited users and has a flat monthly rate pricing model, unlike competitors like Greenhouse. This means that as your headcount increases and decreases, your monthly costs will not change, allowing you to budget more effectively in the early days of your new business.
Another benefit of Breezy’s scalable plans is that you get access to features, like external recruiter and multi-location support, that align with your business growth. Plus, its many tiers make it easier to stay with one platform without the need to migrate data or switch platforms as your hiring needs evolve.
Team collaboration
Breezy HR facilitates collaboration between hiring stakeholders through @mentions, task assignments, and user roles. You can create various recruitment teams, assign permissions levels, and create multi-stakeholder approval workflows so open positions and hiring documents align with your recruitment strategy.
Stakeholders in a position can also interact directly with each other in each candidate profile, including sharing feedback, attachments, assessment results, and interview schedules. As a result, the candidate profile becomes a single source of truth that keeps everyone aligned on a candidate’s progress without resorting to multiple modes of communication.
Breezy HR offers five subscription tiers: Bootstrap, Startup, Growth, Business, and Pro. Breezy’s multiple subscription plans, 14-day free trial, free tier, discount annual pricing, and lack of long-term contract made it the top-scoring platform for pricing at 4.31 — behind only my honorable mention, Zoho Recruit.
While Breezy HR certainly wins the day in cost savings, there are a few catches. First, there is a major cost jump from Breezy’s free plan to one of its paid tiers. Its Startup tier, for example, starts at $157 per month, which can be a huge additional expense for small teams. In comparison, JazzHR’s lowest-paid tier, Hero, starts at $75 per month.
Breezy is also best if you’re starting your recruitment journey from scratch since employers switching from another platform must pay for its Pro plan for data import and export. Even so, Breezy’s plan variety is attractive if you’re growing fast and need more advanced features to accommodate you at reasonable prices.
Breezy HR subscription tiers
Bootstrap
Startup
Growth
Business
Pro
Forever free.
Includes:
- Unlimited users.
- Access to candidate information for 30 days.
- Career site.
- Job post syndication to more than 50 job boards.
- GDPR compliance controls and automations.
- Résumé parsing.
Annual: $157 per month.
Monthly: $189 per month.
Includes everything in Boostrap, plus:
- Unlimited candidates, positions, and talent pools.
- Background check integrations.
- Customizable automations, questionnaires, and pipeline stages.
- EEO/OFCCP reporting.
- Calendar, video, and Slack integrations.
- Mobile app.
- Interview self-scheduling.
- Analytics and reporting.
- Task management.
- Video assessments.
Annual: $273 per month.
Monthly: $329 per month.
Includes everything in Startup, plus:
- Reference checking.
- Interview guides.
- Employee referrals.
- E-signatures.
- External recruiter support.
- Hello Messenger AI chatbot (for career site).
- Multiple position locations and recruiting pipelines.
Annual: $439 per month.
Monthly: $529 per month.
Includes everything in Growth, plus:
- Multi-path questionnaires.
- Assessment and HR system integrations.
- Candidate comparison.
- Nurture campaigns.
- Custom roles and permissions.
- Job and offer approval workflows.
- Offer management.
Contact sales for a quote.
Includes everything in Business, plus:
- Dedicated account manager.
- Advanced reporting.
- Custom domains.
- Data export/import.
Breezy HR add-ons
- SMS/Text Messaging: $165 per month.
- Candidate Match Score: $165 per month.
- Incognito Apply: $165 per month.
Note: Annual pricing subscriptions include two months free.
Workable: Best for small businesses
Overall score
3.48/5
User reviews
3.91/5
Pricing
3.50/5
Support
4.20/5
Platform and interface
3.96/5
Reporting and analytics
2.63/5
Candidate relationship management
2.94/5
Applicant tracking features
4.10/5
Assessments and interviews
2.83/5
Pros
- HR features, like employee directories and organizational charts, are included in all plans
- Access to time-off management, onboarding, and document management features on the Standard plan and above.
- Anonymous candidate screening to reduce hiring bias in all plans.
- All customers can access customer support by email, chat, and phone.
- Integrates with nearly 20 HR platforms, including popular vendors like BambooHR, Bob, Deel, Rippling, and Paylocity.
Cons
- Video interviews, assessments, and texting features are add-ons.
- Salary estimator is an extra cost and is only available in annual subscription plans.
- Limit of two active jobs on its Standard plan.
- Lacks a drag-and-drop visual hiring pipeline for easier candidate management.
Why I chose Workable
With a total score of 3.48, Workable offers a user-friendly interface for first-time recruitment software users. In particular, small businesses in high-turnover industries like retail can benefit from its AI-generated job descriptions, candidate self-scheduling, and AI candidate recommendations to increase pipeline efficiency and backfill roles faster.
Other elements, like Workable’s optional salary estimator for budgeting compensation and its free HR tools, including e-signatures and document management, can help you control labor costs and consolidate your HR tech stack. This also makes it easier on new recruits since they continue to use the same system during their hiring process for HR processes like onboarding and requesting time off.
One major Workable drawback for small companies is that you can only integrate with payroll software if you purchase its most expensive Premier plan. As a result, expect more manual work to import newly hired candidates into your payroll system to ensure they receive their first paycheck on time. I’d go with JazzHR since you can integrate with human resources information systems (HRIS) and payroll solutions or leverage its open API on all tiers.
Although it’s a basic ATS at its core, Workable includes elements like email nurture campaigns, a Chrome browser sourcing extension, and referral portals for more strategic hiring. Features like anonymized screening and e-signatures on all subscription tiers mean you don’t have to rely on third-party solutions for employee document management and compliance control.
Workable’s interface is particularly suited for small businesses that need quick implementation and setup. You can start creating and posting a job with just one click from its homepage and jobs dashboards. Many features follow step-by-step workflows with instructions to accommodate new users. And unlike Teamtailor, you can save multiple hiring pipeline workflows without starting them from scratch when you create a new job.
However, because of Workable’s plug-and-play feature set, it does lack some of the more granular capabilities of platforms like Jobvite and iCIMS. You can’t change or rearrange the widgets on your homepage to access the information most meaningful to you. You also can’t create personalized data reports and visualizations to share with your team members, making it difficult to plan and collaborate on long-term recruitment strategies in the platform.
Onboarding support
Workable includes a built-in onboarding module that allows you to preboard new recruits as soon as you hire them. You can set up a workflow with specific data you want to collect from employees, such as offer letters, employee handbook acknowledgments, personal demographics, and emergency contacts. New employees can also complete this information without creating an account login.
Workable’s onboarding module works best if you don’t use other document management or onboarding software. Although you can create fillable documents for collecting employee e-signatures, Workable does not automatically update critical federal and state forms like the I-9 and W-4. This means your company is responsible for ensuring that you use the correct forms and that they are properly completed and stored.Workable also can’t assign new hire onboarding training or collect critical payroll data, like direct deposits and benefits enrollment data. That said, it’s better to use Workable to manage employee electronic data if you do payroll yourself and lack an HRIS.
Automated candidate sourcing
One of Workable’s biggest differentiators is its AI-powered candidate sourcing capabilities. Workable’s AI uses your job descriptions and skills to search millions of online candidate profiles to find the most promising prospects to fill your position.
You can use Workable automated candidate sourcing in one of two ways. The first way involves searching for best-match candidates directly from your open job post and adding top candidates to your “sourced” stage. Alternatively, you can use Workable’s People Search to find and add passive candidates to Workable’s Talent Pool for future engagement.
Even cooler is Workable’s targeted outreach capabilities, which allow you to display your open job post in some of your top passive candidates’ social media feeds to entice them to apply.
One major drawback is that Workable’s anonymized candidate screening anti-bias control does not work when sourcing passive candidates. This could potentially give the candidates you source through Workable’s recommendations an unfair advantage over traditional applicants.
Nevertheless, these functions can help find candidates faster, especially if you’re a small business without a dedicated recruitment team
Workable offers three pricing tiers: Starter, Standard, and Premier. Unlike Breezy HR, pricing changes depending on employee headcount. The Starter plan costs $149 per month for up to 50 employees.
However, if you have more than 50 employees, you must purchase Workable’s Standard plan, which costs a minimum of $639 per month for 51 to 100 employees. This is comparable to all-in-one HR and payroll platforms with built-in ATS.That said, Workable earned a score of 3.5 for its 15-day free trial, discounted annual pricing, and lack of long-term contracts. Plus, because users can access all of Workable’s recruitment features in every plan, small businesses with fewer than 50 employees can source, automate, and nurture candidates without paying enterprise-grade prices.
Workable subscription tiers
Starter
Standard
Premier
- $149 per month.
- Monthly billing only.
- Core recruiting features.
- Up to 50 employees.
- Up to 2 active jobs.
- Free HR features (employee profiles, directory, and organizational chart).
- Pricing:
- 1–20 employees: $299 per month.
- 21–50 employees: $409 per month.
- 51–100 employees: $639 per month.
- 101–250 employees: $999 per month.
- 251–500 employees: $1,339 per month.
- More than 500 employees: Call for a quote.
- Monthly or annual billing.
- Core recruiting features.
- Unlimited active jobs.
- Free HR features.
- Pricing:
- 1–20 employees: $599 per month.
- 21–50 employees: $809 per month.
- 51–100 employees: $1,169 per month.
- 101–250 employees: $1,529 per month.
- 251–500 employees: $2,099 per month.
- More than 500 employees: Call for a quote.
- Annual billing only.
- Core recruiting features.
- Unlimited active jobs.
- Free HR features.
- Hiring plan and requisition approvals.
- Five language options.
- Single sign-on support.
- Premium support.
- Custom account implementation.
- Video, texting, and assessment add-ons are included.
Workable add-ons
Starter plan
Standard plan
Premier plan
Video interviews
Video interviews
Video interviews
$49/mo.
- 1–20 employees: $99
- 21–50 employees: $149
- 51–100 employees: $269
- 101–250 employees: $389
- 251–500 employees: $529
- More than 500 employees: Call for a quote
Included with plan.
Texting
Texting
Texting
$39/mo.
- 1–20 employees: $79
- 21–50 employees: $119
- 51–100 employees: $179
- 101–250 employees: $249
- 251–500 employees: $329
- More than 500 employees: Call for a quote
Included with plan.
Assessments
Assessments
Assessments
$29/mo.
- 1–20 employees: $59
- 21–50 employees: $99
- 51–100 employees: $159
- 101–250 employees: $209
- 251–500 employees: $279
- More than 500 employees: Call for quote
Included with plan.
Note: All prices are based on annual billing subscriptions and do not include add-on prices for time off management, employee onboarding, and e-signatures for company files.
Jobvite: Best for midsize businesses
Overall score
3.68/5
User reviews
3.97/5
Pricing
0.50/5
Support
2.78/5
Platform and interface
3.93/5
Reporting and analytics
5.00/5
Candidate relationship management
4.63/5
Applicant tracking features
4.34/5
Assessments and interviews
2.78/5
Pros
- Access to NXTThing RPO for consulting and outsourcing services.
- Benchmark reporting to compare your recruiting performance to competitors in the same industry and size.
- Gamified referral programs, including employee leaderboards and rewards, to encourage current talent participation in recruitment efforts.
- Bias blocker and inclusive job description writing tool to support DEI hiring strategies.
Cons
- You must designate support contacts, limiting who can contact customer service for platform troubleshooting.
- Chatbots are limited to pre-populated question lists.
- Must pay extra for access to API keys.
- Must pay extra for premium support.
Why I chose Jobvite
With an overall score of 3.68, Jobvite is a step up from traditional ATS platforms since its features focus more on recruitment strategy than managing day-to-day operations. For midsize businesses, this means the ability to combine hiring workflow automations with search-engine-optimized career sites, platform white-labeling, and support for multiple business entities from the same place.
Jobvite’s more granular customization features make it easier to support varying recruitment strategies as you add new departments, locations, and brands. Jobvite’s AI-powered chatbots also advance or disqualify candidates based on their experience and skill sets, so recruiters only focus on building relationships with top prospects.
This customization does come at the cost of overall ease of use. If you want a user-friendly entry point to managing brand content generation alongside applicant tracking, I recommend platforms like Teamtailor instead.
Jobvite is Employ Inc.’s talent acquisition suite designed to improve a company’s passive recruiting methods for a steady stream of qualified candidates. In particular, Jobvite can help you create and distribute recruitment marketing to the best potential candidates to align with the increasingly diverse goals of your midsize business.
Jobvite’s career site module, for example, comes with SEO tools to understand your site’s visibility and engagement, plus RSS feeds for managing content syndication. You can even market roles for your multiple brands on the same site while its AI chatbot suggests top positions to site visitors based on their interests, skills, and location.
Unlike Breezy HR and Workable, you can buy Jobvite’s full Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite or separate modules to supplement existing HR and recruitment tools you already use. For instance, Jobvite’s career sites and referral programs are also available as standalone products. This flexibility allows you to fill current software gaps without migrating data to a new product.
However, Jobvite’s many capabilities make it a poor choice if you have a small hiring team or infrequent hiring needs. Its interface takes time to get used to, especially when switching between different modules.Even worse for startups and small businesses is Jobvite’s support policies, which require a customer success plan subscription. Standard support functions, like access to software troubleshooting by phone and personal product training, cost more. Expect longer product ramp-up times due to self-led training and implementation on lower customer success subscription plans.
Reporting and analytics
One of Jobvite’s standout features is its reports and analytics, which received a perfect 5 score in my evaluation. This is because Jobvite comes with out-of-the-box reports and interactive dashboards for monitoring critical metrics like time-to-hire, pipeline conversion, and application source. Plus, you can create and share custom dashboards and reports for easier collaboration and alignment among stakeholders on the data important to you.
Jobvite also includes benchmarking, DEI hiring dashboards, and Data Exchange, which links raw recruitment data with business intelligence platforms. This feature also allows you to combine data points, like new hire performance, to better understand more difficult-to-calculate metrics like quality of hire and ramp-up time.
Along with dashboards to understand job post costs, Jobvite enables effective budget management so that you spend time and money only on recruitment processes that yield the best candidates.
Recruitment campaigns
As both an ATS and CRM, Jobvite offers many candidate engagement features to reduce candidate drop-off rates. Compared to candidate nurture options available in Breezy and Workable, Jobvite’s omnichannel nurture campaigns allow you to automatically engage with candidates in bulk through various mediums, like email, text, web, and social media. Jobvite consolidates these interactions in the candidate profile so you can track the prospect’s likelihood of applying for a critical role in one place.
Jobvite’s AI-powered algorithms also dynamically change recruitment content based on candidate data. If you’re hiring internationally, Jobvite adjusts the content, including your company brand and language, based on the candidate’s location. These can be critical for attracting talent in new regions where cultural differences and language barriers impede successful hiring efforts.
Like most medium-to-large recruitment platforms, Jobvite does not reveal its pricing. Its lack of free trials, discounts, and transparent contract practices tied it with iCIMS for the lowest pricing score in my roundup at 0.5. Some user reviews also indicate that its high price is a major turn-off, especially for long-term contract commitments. Third-party sites also estimate that Jobvite costs around $4,500 annually for between 1 and 50 employees.
However, because Jobvite is quote-based, you likely can mix and match features to create a recruitment platform that fits your needs and budget. Plus, most vendors with non-transparent pricing are willing to negotiate, especially if you come prepared to these meetings with more affordable quotes from competitor solutions.
iCIMS Talent Cloud: Best for enterprises
Overall score
3.91/5
User reviews
4.12/5
Pricing
0.50/5
Support
3.83/5
Platform and interface
3.93/5
Reporting and analytics
4.63/5
Candidate relationship management
4.63/5
Applicant tracking features
4.54/5
Assessments and interviews
4.00/5
Pros
- Support for diversified candidate sourcing, including career fairs.
- Built-in SEO career page tips to aid in organic ranking in search engines.
- Tools to capture candidate consent to use AI in compliance with ATS AI laws like NY’s Local Law 144.
- Digital assistant for engaging with candidates on your career site and opportunities marketplace.
- Maturity model assessment to help develop personalized recruitment plans.
Cons
- Uses separate mobile applications to handle various recruitment functions instead of an all-in-one solution.
- Candidate Experience Management (CXM) platform is separate from its ATS platform and requires a data sync integration.
- Languages supported vary by product and add-ons.
Why I chose iCIMS Talent Cloud
If you need a full range of recruiting capabilities in one platform, then iCIMS Talent Cloud is your best bet. Talent Cloud is a particularly smart investment if you’re an enterprise since you can manage your recruitment strategies across multiple entities and locations to support macro-level company priorities.
iCIMS also offers the most versatility when it comes to candidate engagement opportunities and managing volume-hiring needs. Its candidate match scoring, for instance, increases hiring speed by designating top candidates for a role so you save time during candidate screening. It also allows you to source candidates from in-person and virtual job fairs to widen your sourcing networks.
Because of this, iCIMS received an overall score of 3.91 in my roundup, losing points only for its non-transparent pricing scheme and ease of use. It also uses multiple desktop and mobile applications to manage various recruitment features effectively, making it a better tool if you have a dedicated recruitment team to manage it.
iCIMS Talent Cloud is an all-in-one recruitment product that unites talent attraction, sourcing, and assessment in one place. Through its strategic partnership with enterprise-grade software vendors like ADP, Microsoft, and UKG, the platform aims to support hiring as an aspect of bigger-picture company objectives, such as headcount planning, succession planning, and expansion goals.
For example, features like advanced approval chains ensure newly posted positions align with your overall recruitment strategy, including departmental needs and total compensation budgets. iCIMS’ customizable talent pools can also have you sort candidates into specific pools based on location, department, job function, skillset, position level, or silver medalist status. This guarantees you always have lists of qualified talent to tap for key roles at a moment’s notice.
The iCIMS opportunity marketplace helps prepare and respond to employee exits by allowing you to market open roles to existing internal talent. Employees can even take an active role in their career mobility by inputting their skills to automatically receive best-match opportunity recommendations. Managers can even use the space to encourage direct reports to apply for special projects and roles as a part of employee retention and development efforts.
iCIMS Talent Coud is the most capable platform on my shortlist for handling complicated hiring needs, like internal, external, and global recruitment marketing management, but it is a legacy platform. The platform has an overall outdated appearance compared to more modern systems like Teamtailor. So, if you’re moving over from another system, don’t be surprised if it takes longer to configure iCIMS to your specifications.
You should also be prepared for some functions to occur in multiple systems. For example, its ATS and CRM are separate products, so you’ll need to be mindful of how your recruitment data flow between them.
iCIMS and generative AI
For an enterprise-grade platform, iCIMS is surprisingly behind on the generative AI bandwagon. While generative AI elements exist in its CRM and text messaging products, they do not exist in its ATS.
However, iCIMS expects to implement its Copilot generative AI experience sometime in 2024. Existing customers can demo some of Copliot’s capabilities, including auto-generating job descriptions and interview question guides. If access to generative AI features is critical to speeding up your internal hiring processes, check out Teamtailor and Workable instead.
Automated marketing campaigns
iCIMS Marketing Automation product allows you to tailor when, where, and how your recruitment campaigns engage with your curated lists of potential candidates. Its visual automation builder lets you choose specific triggers, like “if content clicked,” and actions, like “move to another stage,” to automatically engage with prospects.
Even cooler is its ability to start and stop candidate outreach based on candidate interactions with your content. The system eases or ramps up outreach after determining if leads are “cold” or “hot.” As a result, your recruiters can focus their time on engaging with the candidates with the highest interest and hire likelihood.
iCIMS’ Marketing Automation does not help you create content for advertising and distribution—you’ll need to already have the marketing materials and strategy before using the tool. While this makes it a valuable tool for managing recruitment marketing distribution, reach, and engagement at a high level, you’ll need the content management system (CMS) in iCIMS’ career site product to create the content.
Soft-skill assessments
iCIMS offers its SkillSurvey feature as part of its Talent Cloud suite. Unlike others on my shortlist, SkillSurvey allows you to issue standard candidate reference checks and surveys as part of your hiring process.
These surveys allow you to collect information on a candidate’s soft skills, like problem-solving, from their reference’s perspective. You can then compare survey scores to targeted percentiles to understand the candidate’s strengths and areas for improvement before making the job offer.
The platform itself is unintuitive to navigate, so you’ll need thorough training on its capabilities before sending out your first reference check. This also makes it a better tool to screen candidates in specialized or highly compensated positions, where it is critical to understand their likelihood of success before hiring. Otherwise, I would use a third-party integration or Teamtailor to facilitate more basic reference checks, like checking dates of employment.
iCIMS does not disclose pricing, similar to Jobvite and Teamtailor. It’s also unclear exactly what modules are included in iCIMS’ Talent Cloud suite compared to optional add-ons. Like Jobvite, iCIMS offers standalone products to enhance recruitment efforts, such as automated candidate SMS texting, without requiring you to purchase the entire suite.
That said, iCIMS tied with Jobvite for the lowest pricing criteria score at 0.5. It lost points score since it doesn’t offer a free trial or any information regarding discounts and contract requirements. Most users note that iCIMS is one of the most expensive talent acquisition products. As an enterprise-grade product, you should also be prepared to budget for a one-time implementation fee that is usually a percentage of your annual subscription cost.
Recruitment modules in all-in-one HR software
Most comprehensive HR software includes hiring modules to facilitate your talent acquisition efforts. If you’re on the hunt for an all-in-one suite with decent hiring features, explore our various HR software guides below for options:
Honorable mentions
Because every company’s needs differ, not all of my choices may be right for you. Check out my runners-up below for more options to better suit your unique recruitment strategy.
LeverTRM: Best for candidate screening
Alternative for: JazzHR
When to choose LeverTRM: LeverTRM is Employ Inc.’s mid-tier recruitment software that offers a similar level of customization and candidate outreach to JazzHR and Breezy HR. One feature I particularly like is its Fast Résumé Review, which opens up a focus window for you to screen new applicants one after another in a timed sprint fashion. This encourages more human involvement when evaluating applicants and less dependency on AI-powered candidate match scoring, which could stifle diversity hiring.
Why it didn’t make the list: Lever is easy to learn and use but needs more finesse in some features to make it stand out among others in my top five. For example, Lever does not have a native e-signature function, requiring you to subscribe and integrate with third-party tools like Adobe Sign and DocuSign for managing offer letters. You also can’t customize Lever’s homepage to show the information you need, and it doesn’t come with generative AI tools to speed up hiring efficiency.
Learn more about Lever and Greenhouse in Lever vs Greenhouse Comparison.
Overall score: 3.32/5.00
Zoho Recruit: Best budget-friendly recruitment software
Alternative for: Breezy HR and Workable
When to choose Zoho Recruit: Zoho Recruit is by far the most affordable recruitment software on the market. It offers a free plan, and its lowest-paid subscription tier, Standard, costs $25 per recruiter per month. Zoho Recruit also includes CRM features, like career sites and candidate portals, which can be especially attractive to startups on a budget that want to build up their company brand.
Why it didn’t make the list: Zoho Recruit is a confusing platform to navigate. Setting up user accounts and permissions can be time-consuming, especially for a user new to Zoho products. Zoho Recruit also expects you to implement and learn how to use the platform yourself, with onboarding assistance available only in its Premium support tier and up.
Overall score: 3.17/5.00
Greenhouse: Best for DEI-focused hiring
Alternative for: Jobvite
When to choose Greenhouse: Greenhouse is one of the best recruitment platforms if you want to be more intentional about diversity in your hiring efforts. Besides standard EEO and OFCCP diversity reporting for applicable employers, Greenhouse offers candidate-facing features like pronoun selection and name pronunciation to showcase your commitment to DEI during the hiring process.
Plus, built-in reminders to recruiters in the hiring workflow to check their biases and an emphasis on structured hiring reduce the chance that minority statuses negatively affect hiring decisions. Greenhouse also plans to launch résumé anonymization later in 2024 so stay tuned!
Why it didn’t make the list: Greenhouse does not have tools to create and publish content, like blog pages and videos, on your company career site. Instead, you can only craft a simple career page that lists your open external positions. This means larger organizations will have to leverage third-party integrations or sync Greenhouse’s career page to their existing websites if they want access to more robust content management tools for engaging potential talent.
overall score: 3.78/5.00
Find your new recruiting software
What are the benefits of recruitment software?
What are the types of recruitment software?
What is the business impact of recruitment software?
Recruitment software can drastically improve the process of finding top candidates. They give recruiters the tools to find qualified individuals faster. They also expand the reach of recruitment professionals through automation and hiring tools that standardize processes.
Companies that are reluctant to invest in recruiting software are at risk of missing out on top industry talent. With recruitment software, hiring professionals can move away from tedious tasks and focus on value-adding, strategic actions. Organizations can also monitor recruitment data, determine areas of improvement for hiring activities, and adjust future strategies with in-depth reports and analytics.
Recruiting high-quality talent is critical to the success of any business, and reliable recruiting platforms can amplify the capabilities of the HR team. From the hiring team’s perspective, the HR software can make the entire recruiting process more efficient. On top of that, it simplifies the application process for candidates, contributing to a positive experience and boosting the company’s reputation.
How much does recruiting software cost?
The cost of recruiting software depends on various factors, including:
- Employee headcount.
- Recruiter headcount (or user seat headcount).
- Recruitment goals.
- Number of open job posts.
- Type of recruiting software.
Depending on the recruiting software vendor, all or some of these criteria affect the product’s cost. However, you should generally expect to pay between $25 and $999 per month for recruiting software aimed at SMBs. Enterprises needing more specialized or advanced features could easily expect to spend thousands of dollars per month.
