6 Best Free Applicant Tracking Systems in 2023

Multichannel job posting

You can create, manage, and publish job postings from your ATS within minutes. Also, you’ll have the option to choose where and how you want to publish them—externally or internally. If you do not have templates for posting an open position, you can choose from Freshteam’s 100-plus prebuilt job description templates or customize your own—similar to what MightyRecruiter offers.

Hiring team and archived resumes

Compared with the other solutions, you can select and set up your hiring team using Freshteam. A rep will work closely with you to find your job postings’ matches and modify your hiring process depending on your requirements. Also, you can access Freshteam’s database of passive candidates that can be tapped easily when similar job opportunities open up in the future.

Smart candidate sourcing

Unlike Homebase, Freshteam allows you to customize your mobile career site with your own branding. To reach a wider talent base, Freshteam allows you to post jobs on free job boards like Adzuna, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Glassdoor or share it on social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can even add a custom tab on your Facebook brand page to source candidates.

External recruiters

You can tap your vendors to increase the number of applicants using Freshteam. Vendors get exclusive access to your applicant tracking software through the vendor portal, where they can add candidates and track them without having to depend on you. You’ll just have to sync your career email inbox with Freshteam and convert every email you receive into an application.

Resume screening

Freshteam parses the uploaded resume immediately and populates the candidate profile with it automatically. The profile contains every applicant detail plus interaction history, feedback, and interview scores. You can also archive them if the candidate doesn’t fit your criteria at the moment and for future reference. Your selected hiring team can make their opinions count through comments and ratings.

Preassessment

During technical rounds, Freshteam is the only provider that offers pre-assessment test integrations with HackerEarth, HackerRank, or Codility to screen a high volume of applicants.

Candidate engagement

Instead of waiting for your applicants’ feedback, you can sync your email with Freshteam to correspond with candidates from your ATS. Simultaneously, you can keep all hiring stakeholders automatically informed by sending out notifications for any updates. You can even create canned responses, schedule emails, communicate with applicants and your hiring team in bulk, use tasks and reminders to manage workloads, and assign tasks.

Recruitment

Freshteam allows you to collect feedback from the hiring team using scorecards. Once you decide to hire a candidate, you can make and manage offers, configure offer fields, generate offer letters, and even record candidate decisions.

Mobile application

Freshteam’s Android and iOS apps help you keep up with your recruiting pipeline from anywhere. You can email candidates, submit feedback, get complete context on a candidate or the interview process, and advance candidates through the recruitment stages with just a few taps.

Powerful integration

The platform works well with Skype and Google Hangouts. These integrations allow you to communicate with your top leads faster. You can schedule interviews easily with its Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 integration.

Flexible customer support

Freshteam has 24/7 free email, unlike the other providers on our list, and a 24/5 chat and call support.

Job posting and distribution

You can post job openings to leading job boards and sites simultaneously—something that Freshteam and SmartRecruiters also do. Also, it integrates well with social media accounts like LinkedIn and Facebook, so you can schedule your posts easily, and MightyRecruiter will post your open jobs for you.

JobPromote

If you need help finding qualified applicants in highly competitive job markets, MightyRecruiter’s JobPromote can help. It gets your work opportunities in front of the right candidates and fills your position in no time—a unique function that only MightyRecruiter offers.

Customizable career site

Similar to all solutions on this list, MightyRecruiter lets you easily customize and let your company culture attract potential talent using a career page. You can place your company logo, advertise your company culture, use your own accent colors, and upload custom images and videos to get qualified candidates’ attention. If you have an existing career page, copy and paste the widget code into your site where you would like it to appear, and the software will update it for you.

Searchable resume database

MightyRecruiter has a database of more than 22 million resumes that can help you find employees from those unique, opted-in candidates.

Prescreening

For the application process, you can include screening questions from MightyRecruiter’s Question Library or customized ones to eliminate applicants who fail to meet predetermined requirements, such as location or age requirements and certifications and essential skills.

Reporting and analytics

You can generate reports for job postings, candidate sourcing, job advertising costs, and even data to comply with the EEOC and OFCCP in the case of an audit, which is a function JobScore also offers.

Customer support

Only MightyRecruiter has a dedicated account manager available for all customers. You can also contact MightyRecruiter’s support team via chat, phone, and email for basic troubleshooting and quick questions from Monday until Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central time.

Per-location pricing

While other providers charge monthly fees on a per-employee basis, only Homebase bills you based on the number of business locations you have. This is optimal for employers with plans to grow their workforce in one location.

Feature-rich free tier

Compared to all of the applicant tracking software we reviewed, only Homebase has a robust offering of free-to-use hiring, scheduling, and time tracking tools. You even get a built-in team messenger and a self-service portal where employees can manage their own information.

Intuitive interface

It has an easy-to-use platform with intuitive controls that enable users to create and post jobs to multiple online job boards and social media platforms, such as Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn—similar to how Freshteam reaches a wider database. Applicants can also send their resumes through the job boards and go directly to the Homebase Hiring dashboard, where you can message, interview, and hire applicants all in one place.

Screening questions

Like Indeed and MightyRecruiter, you can use screening questions to make the vetting process even easier with Homebase. You get up to three questions that can be attached to a job post. Applicants can respond to these questions when they apply.

Premium boost

To get your job post in front of more applicants, you can purchase Homebase’s Premium Boost, which lasts for 30 days and increases the number of applicants you’ll receive.

Applicant management

Aside from reaching out to applicants via job boards and social media platforms, Homebase offers different ways you can find applicants:

• Referrals: You can send a link to your job post to your team members.
• QR code: Applicants can download a QR code that they can scan on their phones.
• Text-to-apply: To capture walk-ins, you can send applicants a text message with a link to your job post—a unique feature that only Homebase offers.
• Career page: Customize your career page and use it to describe your business and advertise your company culture. You can also send the career page’s link to applicants.
• Manual: Add applicants directly to Homebase through its Hiring page.

Multiple filters

Only Homebase narrows the number of applicants down using different filters—Status, Distance, Application Quality, Source, and Availability.

Automated onboarding process

New employees hired using Homebase will receive a welcome packet and can e-sign direct deposit, W-4, W-9, and I-9 forms.

Careers page and employer branding

Your free Indeed company page informs job seekers what it’s like to work for your company. You can add photos, and employees can leave reviews about your company. Unlike Freshteam, you don’t have to upgrade to customize your careers page.

Sponsored job postings

Indeed’s Sponsored Jobs is the only PPC plan to boost your job postings in this guide. You can post jobs directly on its platform for free, but you can also pay a small fee (starts at $5 per day) to sponsor jobs. Sponsoring your ad is one way to maximize your job post on Indeed. If you have an existing company career site, you can post a job for free in the general search results or pay to advertise.

Mobile recruiting

Like Freshteam and SmartRecruiters, you can cast a wider net for qualified applicants since Indeed job postings automatically receive applications via Indeed Apply, even on mobile. Indeed Apply is a feature that allows job seekers to quickly send their applications using an Indeed Resume or a traditional resume file.

Applicant screening

Like MightyRecruiter and Homebase, you can add screening questions to the job application form, such as “How many years of experience do you have?” You can also ask job seekers to complete online exams to verify their skills, like customer support, typing, or Excel.

Candidate communications

Like all the other providers, Indeed lets you and members of the hiring team send messages to candidates or schedule an interview from its platform. It also stores all messages, allowing you to track applicant communications easily.

Email templates

You can create templates for common messages, such as “Thank you for applying” or “We’ll be contacting you for an interview.” This lets you correspond using standardized communications to keep job seekers in the loop.

Third-party integration

Only Indeed works seamlessly with more than 200 third-party platforms, such as Applicant Pro, Breezy HR, Greenhouse, Hirebridge, JazzHR, TalentReef, Workable, and Zoho Recruit.

Customizable career page and application forms

JobScore allows you to configure your career page using videos, pictures, and team profiles that showcase your company, environment, and products. Similar to SmartRecruiters, you can use pre-built or customizable short or long application forms to build a better candidate profile.

Automated job posting

Users can automatically post jobs to free job boards or have them posted on paid job board sites at negotiated rates. In case your niche job board doesn’t integrate with JobScore, you can create a custom tracking link and insert it in your job posting. The solution also keeps track of your job postings.

Social recruiting

JobScore promotes jobs via social media. However, instead of cross-posting the open jobs to social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you’ll have to send a referral campaign email to prompt your employees to share open positions through their social media networks.

Overdue reports

With JobScore’s Scale and Enterprise plans, you can set the maximum time a candidate should be in each workflow stage—or else their status will be “overdue.” The Overdue Report shows how many people are overdue in each stage and prompts you to take action.

Employee referral portal

Like Freshteam, JobScore lets your employees take part in your hiring process by using their networks for referrals. There will be an employee referral portal so your team can easily send resumes and track their referrals in the hiring process.

Reward referral

To motivate your employees more, you can make rewards available when they have a successful referral.

New candidate alerts

As an administrator, you get to control who gets notified when a new candidate applies for a specific position. You can also ask hiring managers to make a special preference for referral candidates and search firm (vendor) submissions.

Immediate candidate response

Employers and hiring managers can sort resumes using applicant scoring (1 to 10). The scores will help you decide who to contact or decline. You can create email templates, schedule when emails are sent, and decide whether you’ll respond to candidates individually or in bulk.

Search firms management

With JobScore’s Enterprise plan, you can invite search firms to submit candidates for open positions via email with detailed submission instructions. When agencies submit candidates, JobScore parses and sends the resumes to the hiring team. Search firms will be kept in the loop in every communication between you and the candidates.

Candidate review

JobScore lets you extract all pertinent information from resumes to easy-to-scan profiles. You can set scoring criteria and ask inbound questions that will filter and sort qualified candidates easily. Scale and Enterprise subscribers can use a powerful action menu to move candidates to any step in the hiring workflow, tag candidates for future roles, or re-assign candidates to different jobs that are a better fit—all in one click.

Interviews

Among the other providers, only JobScore’s Scale and Enterprise plans help you prepare interview templates that you can use at each stage of the hiring process. Scheduled interviews link to these templates, so your team can always be prepared.

Calendar integration

JobScore synchronizes with Google Calendar and Microsoft 365. So, you can view the availability of your team and every conference room in real time and add calls or interviews directly to your teams’ calendars.

Automated reminders

JobScore helps you focus on what’s important by taking care of reminders like confirmed interviews and appointments and feedback collection.

EEOC- and OFCCP-compliant

Similar to MightyRecruiter, JobScore helps you stay in compliance with state laws and regulations with its disclaimer that gives applicants the option to volunteer their gender, ethnicity, disability, and veteran status. Its self-identification form also matches the recommended OFCCP font and layout. JobScore has configurable “disposition codes” to disclose the reason for declined and withdrawn candidates.

Multiboard job posting

With one click, SmartRecruiters can post jobs on more than 300 job boards. Its SmartDistribute tracking reports and post-to-hire metrics even identify which job boards are helping you fill your talent pipeline, a function only SmartRecruiters offer.

Collaborative hiring tools

To fast-track the hiring process, SmartRecruiters allows hiring managers and other stakeholders to communicate, share resumes and notes, and collaborate on one platform. You can maintain communication records with its historical message tracking and create a consistent messaging system with SmartRecruiters’ template library.

Mobile application

This lets you stay connected with your hiring team at any time—and only SmartRecruiters, Indeed, and Freshteam offer one. Aside from staying up to date with hiring activities, you can screen, review, and approve candidates using your iOS or Android device.

Workflow management

SmartRecruiters’ unique workflow management is one of the best in the market as it’s so simple to configure, unlike other providers where inexperienced users may need guidance. This solution prevents workflow stagnation with configurable tasks and reminders, easy approvals, and real-time dashboards. You can also keep passive candidates updated with scheduled check-ins, improve candidate experience with timely feedback, and even set reminders to reduce the time you spend on each vacant job position.

Applicant screening

SmartRecruiters has customizable application forms that let you identify qualified candidates quickly—a function JobScore also has. It even has fully integrated assessments and skills tests to predict if a candidate is fit for the role and if they will stay with the company for a long time—something Freshteam and Indeed can also do.

Interview scheduling and process

You can schedule virtual interviews with multiple candidates and provide interview updates automatically. Standardized scorecards are used to get objective feedback from interviewers.

Hiring plans

You can set hiring goals and monitor and improve the hiring team’s performance during the recruitment process.

Offer management and onboarding

Only with SmartRecruiters can you extend timely offers to applicants using integrated and configurable offer letter templates and forms and automated approvals via any mobile device. You can even let candidates view, sign, and accept their offers quickly and from any device using SmartRecruiters’ DocuSign integration. It also has an automated onboarding process complete with background checks for new hires.

Applicant tracking systems come in different price ranges and features. Free applicant tracking systems come with limits but the best free ATS should at the very least help streamline job posting, manage and store resumes, and enable hiring members to communicate and collaborate.

For businesses, the primary advantage of using an ATS is to reduce the time spent on mundane data entry tasks and streamline the hiring process as a whole. It helps save time, especially if you’re regularly managing a huge volume of applicants.

While you can’t expect to get the same features of paid software, the best free ATS should at least let you:

• Create a careers website
• Sort applications
• Parse resumes
• Collaborate with other hiring members
• Communicate with candidates
• Import or export resumes
• Add screening questions
• Create basic hiring reports