8 Best Recruiting Software for Small Businesses in 2023
This article is part of a larger series on Hiring.
The best recruitment software helps businesses find top employees by posting open positions to job boards and keeping track of applicants through the hiring process. These systems may have full applicant tracking systems (ATS) or a few tools but integrate with outside systems. We considered a wide sampling of recruiting software to meet your needs and selected the eight best.
- Zoho Recruit: Best overall
- Workable: Best for ease of use
- Manatal: Best for startups
- Indeed: Best for hiring to fill occasional slots
- ZipRecruiter: Best for high-turnover businesses
- ApplicantPro: Best for expert recruiting assistance
- Recruitee: Best for growing businesses
- Vultus Recruit: Best for tracking applicants from multiple job boards
Since Our Last Update:
We’ve added two new products (Workable and Manatal), and Monster fell off our list. If you’re interested in what Monster offers, check out our full Monster review. Also, our previous No. 2 pick, Freshteam, is no longer available. Per the website: Freshteam, in its current form, will remain in our product portfolio only for customers who are currently using it. New signups will be paused until the re-imagination of our employee experience solution suite is complete.
Recruiting Software for Small Business Compared
Free plan | Starting price (monthly) | Job boards | Resume harvesting | Applicant tracking | Skills tests | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
✓ | $30 | 300+ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | |
✕ | $129 | 200+ | ✓ | ✓ | Via integrations | |
✕ | $19 | 2,500+ | ✓ | ✓ | Via integrations | |
✓ | Job posting: varies; resume search: $120 | 2 | ✓ | Limited | ✓ | |
✕ | $16 per job OR $299 per month | 100+ | ✓ | Limited | ✕ | |
✕ | $60 | 4,000+ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | |
✕ | $269 | 1,250+ | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | |
✕ | $18.99 per user | 5 pay-for + some free | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | |
*Resume harvesting means accessing resumes posted online by job seekers who have not applied for your jobs.
If you need a basic recruiting system with powerful onboarding and HR management, we recommend Rippling. While it only earned 3.96 out of 5 in our evaluation (not making the list), it’s a good choice if you need those post-hire features. Its employee management core runs $8 per employee per month, and you can add the talent management tool that allows you to post jobs, track applicants, and onboard employees with ease. It even has background checks. Contact Rippling for a quote. But hurry! Sign up before December 1, 2023, and you get your first month FREE.
Zoho Recruit: Best Overall Recruiting Software for Small Businesses
Pros
- Forever-free plan
- Unlimited users
- Workflow automations
Cons
- Most popular job boards cost extra
- Limited support
- Steeper learning curve than others on the list
What we like:
Zoho Recruit is a highly customizable recruiting software that works great for staffing agencies or small businesses in a hiring surge. Its temp plan, Workerly, is terrific for hiring temp workers from a pool of candidates. The free plan only works with one applicant and has basic tools. The paid plans offer excellent tools not just for collaboration but also balancing multiple jobs and candidates at the same time.
With 4.78 out of 5 on our evaluation, Zoho Recruit ranks top on our list with perfect scores for pricing, functionality, and reporting. It also scored very highly in all areas. Further, users rated it an average of 4.4 out of 5 on various review sites. Nonetheless, its size and complexity make it better suited for companies that do a lot of hiring.
Do you manage a large temp workforce?
Consider Zoho Workerly. It specifically manages the hiring of temporary workers from your existing pool of temps. While different from Zoho Recruit, we discuss it in this review.
Since Our Last Update:
Zoho Recruit has removed some of its paid add-ons.
Zoho is one of the few on the list that provides a forever-free plan, which works for a single job ad at a time with candidate management. (Indeed allows more job ads at once.) It also has a 15-day free trial for its paid plans.
Zoho is unique in that it not only lets you cancel at any time but offers a 45-day money-back guarantee. Others will allow you to cancel, but rather than refund partial payments, they let you finish out your month.
Corporate Plans (for HR teams)
- Free plan: One active job, free posting, candidate management, email management, interview scheduling, 24/5 support
- Standard plan ($30/recruiter per month): 100 active jobs, Free plus candidate sourcing, branded career site, employee referrals, social recruiting, assessments, hiring pipeline, standard reports, department hierarchy, integrations
- Enterprise plan ($60/recruiter per month): Standard plus AI candidate matching, candidate and staff portals, layout rules, advanced customization, territory management, automations, advanced analytics, custom reports, SMS and phonebridge, autoresponders
Staffing Agencies
- Free plan: One active job, free posting, candidate management, email management, interview scheduling, 24/5 support
- Standard plan ($30/recruiter per month): 100 active jobs, Free plus candidate sourcing, premium job boards, social recruiting, resume management, applicant tracking, talent pipeline, standard reports, integrations
- Professional plan ($60/recruiter per month): 250 active jobs, Standard plus AI candidate matching, candidate portals, screening and assessments, background checks, assignment rules, advanced analytics, custom reports
- Enterprise plan ($90/recruiter per month): 750 active jobs, Professional plan plus custom roles and profiles, custom functions and buttons, client portals, staffing portals, web tabs, layout rules, territory management, advanced assignment rules, autoresponders
Zoho Workerly (for Temp staffing)
One plan at $59 per month for 25 temps. Includes unlimited recruiters, unlimited jobs, invoice generation, interactive temp portal, temp engagement channels, and more.
Add more temps:
- 26–500: $1.50 per temp
- 500+ temps: $1 per temp
Add-ons
- Additional licenses: $10/month
- Vendor portal: $6/month
- Video interview: $12/job slot
- Client portal: $6/license/month
Zoho Recruit makes it easy to reuse previous jobs or post existing jobs to additional boards. (Source: Zoho Recruit)
- Job recruiting: Zoho posts to over 300 job boards. In addition, Zoho lets you create your own recruiting campaigns by emailing past applicants about new jobs they may qualify for. Only ZipRecruiter, Monster, and Indeed offer a similar function.
- Assessment assistance: Zoho Recruit has a resume parser and background checks to help you find the best candidate. In addition, its AI, Zia, can rate candidates and provide you with a list ranked by how they match job requirements. Manatal’s AI also scores candidates by suitability.
- Temp job searches: Temp agencies can benefit from Zoho’s Workerly plan. It searches your database of temps based on your criteria, then handles the assignment, time sheet tracking, and invoices. No other recruiting software on our list has a similar feature.
- Candidate portal: Zoho Recruit’s higher-tier plans include a candidate portal where applicants can see what jobs they’ve applied to and the status of their application. This is a great feature for large companies. Only ZipRecruiter and Indeed offer a similar service to applicants, and they are not company-specific.
- Customizable reports: Of all the recruiting software we evaluated, Zoho has the most complete report builder. It lets you create a report from the ground up, choosing up to 25 data points, setting up in-depth filters, and choosing how the reports are displayed. Once you’ve created reports, you can save them to re-run or modify.
Workable: Best for New or Busy Recruiters Needing Easy-to-Use Software
Pros
- Super easy to use
- Applicants can schedule own interviews
- Mobile app
- 700+ job description and interview templates
Cons
- Pricing not fully transparent
- No free plan
- Standard and Premier prices change by the size of your company
What we like:
Workable’s automations, self-scheduling, and e-signature tools take a lot of back-and-forth out of the recruiting process. Its wide range of templates, ability to create a unique job application, included background checks, and in-app collaboration tools also set it ahead of many on our list. With an intuitive interface real-world users say is easy to learn and use, it’s a great choice for new recruiters or harried HR officers who don’t have time to learn one more complicated software.
It earned 4.75 out of 5 on our rubric. It had perfect scores for functionality and reporting, and a high score for ease of use. It was our top ranker for recruiting tools, missing a perfect score only because it requires an integration for background checks. The one drawback is pricing, which varies by the size of your company.
Workable lacks a free plan but has a 15-day free trial.
Its pricing structure is unique, in that the larger your company, the more you pay for the Standard and Premier plans. The Paygo plan is a flat rate.
- Paygo ($129/month): Post to 200 boards, career page, 200 AI-sourced profile views per month, automated actions, self-scheduling, e-signatures and offer letters, compliances, background checks (via integration), email communication, reporting, self-guided onboarding.
- Standard ($360–$1,500/month): Paygo plus unlimited jobs, 10,000 AI-sourced profile views, onboarding assistance
- Premier ($720–$2,340/month): Standard plus hiring plan, requisition approvals, 20,000 AI-sourced profile views per month, native language options, single sign-on, dedicated account manager, custom onboarding.
In addition, you can get video interviewing for $99 per month, texting for $79 per month, and assessment tools for $59 per month.
Workable has a clean and bright interface and is easy to use. (Source: Workable)
- Automations: While several products on our list include automated emails, Workable takes it further with automated invitations to self-schedule interviews. It also has e-signatures for NDAs, offer letters, and more.
- Templates and forms: Workable has over 700 templates for jobs and emails. Even more, however, it lets you build a mobile-friendly job application.
- AI candidate sourcing: Workable says that in just minutes, it can scan its database of over 85 million resumes to provide a list of 50 candidates that match your job description. This handy tool is available with all plans. Some software only offers this service in higher-tier plans.
- Collaborate on the app: Like Manatal, Workable lets your entire hiring team communicate about a candidate on the app, making it easier to hold discussions and keep organized.
- Pre-screening tests: Workable offers integrations with several services that provide not only skills tests, but also personality assessments, something we didn’t find in others on our list. (Applicant Pro has behavioral and cognitive tests, however.)
- Mobile app: Like Zoho Recruit, Workable has a mobile app that lets managers do their work from anywhere. It’s not rated as highly as the other two, but is nonetheless a good choice. (3 out of 5 on Android and 3.3 out of 5 for iOS)
Interested only in recruiting? Check out these articles for more recruiter-focused reviews:
Manatal: Best Recruiting Software for Startups
Pros
- User-friendly
- AI-based candidate recommendations
- Highly rated by real-world users
- Candidate referral program tools
Cons
- No free plan
- No integrations aside from an API
- No mobile apps
What we like:
Manatal offers an excellent feature set not only for finding candidates but also for evaluating and tracking applicants. You can post to multiple boards in over 100 countries, use AI to parse resumes, and collaborate with your hiring team. Manatal even scours social media to give you a fuller impression of your candidate. Along with reasonable pricing, its feature set makes it an excellent choice, especially for startups. Highly rated and easy to use, it has live chat support 24/5.
Manatal scored 4.55 out of 5 on our list. It took a small hit on pricing for not having a free plan, and lack of integrations hurt its ease of use. However, it scored perfectly on functionality.
Manatal lacks a free plan but does have a 14-day free trial. However, its pricing is among the cheapest on our list, making it a great choice for startups and small businesses on a budget. It has three plans:
- Professional ($19/month): 15 jobs per account, 10,000 candidates. Candidate enrichment, AI recommendations, a complete applicant tracking system, career page, email communications, job posting, team collaboration, reports, and 24/5 chat and email support.
- Enterprise ($39/month): Basic tools, but unlimited jobs and candidates.
- Custom (Call for quote): Premium + integrations, text messaging, custom compliance reports, phone support, single sign-on, and a dedicated account manager.
Once you enable your Careers Page, you can start posting to job boards. (Source: Manatal)
- Post to over 2,500 job sites: Manatal offers one of the widest ranges of free and paid job posting sites, including some on our list, like Indeed. Even more, you can import resumes directly from LinkedIn. (Workable has something similar.) Regardless of the number of boards you use, you manage all the campaigns from Manatal’s ATS.
- Modern ATS: Manatal uses a Kanban board to track applicants through their process, with each board holding all the candidate’s information.
- Advanced AI: Manatal uses artificial intelligence to filter and score candidates and parse resumes. It can suggest candidates based on your job requirements.
- Social media enrichment: Manatal was the only recruitment software for small businesses that included social media enhancement of candidate profiles. It searched for data on over 20 social media and public platforms to give you information not found in a dry resume or application.
- Resume branding: If you are a hiring agency using Manatal, the software lets you watermark and even change resume contact information, so your clients go to you about a candidate rather than straight to the applicant themselves. We didn’t find another recruitment software with this hiring tool.
- Excellent collaboration tools: Unlike several on our list (such as Indeed), Manatal lets you have multiple users so your hiring teams can collaborate in-app. This makes it much easier to evaluate and decide on candidates.
Indeed: Best for Occasional Hires
Pros
- Free posting
- Free unlimited resume search
- Unlimited resume views
- 250 million applicants
Cons
- Mobile app for job seekers only
- Free job ads are quickly lost in the crowd
- No specialized job ad templates
What we like:
Indeed serves more than 63.6 million job seekers a month and has over 250 million resumes on file. Free to use, Indeed makes it easy to post a job and has basic but functional applicant tracking. It features screening questions and basic skills tests, plus automated email tools to make evaluating your candidate easy. You can boost your ads, reach out to passive job seekers, or purchase resume scraping to find a qualified candidate even if they don’t apply. Indeed ranks first on our list of the best free job posting sites.
It earned 4.48 out of 5 on our list. Like ZipRecruiter, its focus is on the job board, so it does not have as many features as other software on our list, which brought its score down. However, it is an extremely popular job board with a real-world user rating of 4.47 out of 5, averaged over several user review sites. It also earned perfect scores for reporting and ease of use.
Since our last update:
Indeed has changed its pricing. It’s now highly dependent on job and area and is paid by application rather than by click.
Indeed offers free job posting and limited ATS tools. (Source: Indeed)
- Cooperation with Glassdoor: If you use Glassdoor, you can work through it to get premium branding on Indeed and Glassdoor, have your open jobs on Indeed pushed to your Glassdoor page, and target competitors on Glassdoor to post jobs on their page as well.
- Campaign management: If you have several sponsored jobs in Indeed, you can now combine them into one campaign with a single overall budget, plus you benefit from reports that track the performance of the campaign as a whole.
- Job posting: Indeed is a job search engine, which means it aggregates jobs from thousands of boards. Unlike other recruiting apps on the list, it does not post to other job boards, with the exception of Glassdoor (see our Glassdoor vs Indeed guide). It is represented in 60+ countries. (ZipRecruiter, while more popular, is only in four countries.) Like ZipRecruiter, it sends job ad alerts to interested applicants.
- Pay-per-application promotion: Indeed lets you advertise your ad by giving it premium space on its newsletters, website, and mobile app. You pay for this by the application, and you can set a limit to how many applications you want to pay for before stopping the promotion. This pricing is unique to Indeed and ensures you pay for serious applicants.
- Free resume search: Not every recruiting software on our list has resume harvesting, which lets you view, download, and review resumes submitted by job seekers who have not applied for your job. Indeed lets you view as many of its over 245 million resumes as you wish. (ZipRecruiter set limits.) However, it charges you if you wish to contact them through the system.
Looking for something similar to Indeed? Check out our alternatives to Indeed.
ZipRecruiter: Best for High-turnover Industries
Pros
- Reaches 10+ million job seekers
- Automatically reaches out to candidates for you
- 500+ job templates
- AI learns your preferences to make better candidate recommendations
Cons
- No free plan
- Limited applicant evaluation, tracking tools
- Only in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK
- Lacks EEO reports
What we like:
According to ZipRecruiter, 80% of employers who use it to post jobs get a quality candidate on the first day. With an AI that learns from your preferences to give you even better matches over time and the ability to swap out job ads at any time (with higher subscription plans), it’s a great recruiting service for restaurants and other high-turnover industries. It posts on over 100 other job boards, plus social media or your own careers website, and has some applicant evaluation and tracking capability.
ZipRecruiter earned 4.34 out of 5 on our rubric. It excels in reach of candidates (serving over 10 million job seekers weekly), job templates, and general applicant tracking. However, it does not have the extensive applicant evaluation and communication tools that others like Zoho Recruit offer. It also lost points because it does not list pricing on its website.
ZipRecruiter has a four-day free trial, the shortest trial on our list; however, it says most businesses get candidates within a day, so it may be enough.
ZipRecruiter’s daily pricing options ($16 to $24 per job post) make it more accessible for businesses needing to make an affordable hire in a short period of time. Indeed, by comparison, lets you place ads for any amount of time and pay for promotion on a daily basis.
Daily pricing:
- $16 per job post—one reusable job slot, unlimited applications, access to partner job boards
- $24 per job post—premium job distribution, 25 resume views
Monthly pricing is complex, based on the number of ads, users, and resume searches. Contact Sales for an exact quote. Below is a sample subscription plan for a single ad per month:
- $299—one ad with no switching, one user, no resume access
- $349—one ad, but can switch, two users, 25 resume views
- $599—one ad with switching, eight users, 200 resume views
Traffic boost: $120/month per ad
Read our article about ZipRecruiter’s pricing and features.
ZipRecruiter has a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system for assessing candidates. (Source: ZipRecruiter)
- Job boards: ZipRecruiter has its own highly popular job board. In fact, most of the recruiting software on our list will post to it. In addition, it automatically posts to over 100 other job sites. Many are niche sites that have smaller but more focused job seekers. It also makes it possible to post your job ads on social media and your website and have them run through ZipRecruiter. (Learn how ZipRecruiter fares against LinkedIn.)
- Email outreach: It is also proactive in that it sends job alerts to interested job seekers, like Indeed. This means that when you post a new job ad, it gets sent to potential applicants via newsletter. If you purchase a traffic boost, you also get better placement there and on the job board. (Learn how ZipRecruiter compares to Indeed.)
- Machine learning: As you rate candidates and resumes on the app, ZipRecruiter’s AI takes that information into account and changes its algorithms to bring you better candidates. Only Indeed also has an AI that learns from your preferences to supply you with better candidates. Most depend on your search parameters.
- ATS Integrations: While ZipRecruiter does not have a strong applicant tracking system, it does integrate with a multitude of ATS software. Most of the others on our list have limited integrations in general.
ApplicantPro: Best for Assisted Recruitment
Pros
- Customized setup
- ATS system
- Pre-employment skills testing
- EEO and OFCCP reports
Cons
- Custom quotes
- Some boards cost extra
- No mobile apps
What we like:
If you are a busy HR team that hires through multiple paid job boards, then ApplicantPro’s recruiting marketing team can save you time and money by identifying the most effective job boards to get the employee you want. It also offers a feature-rich, customizable ATS system with onboarding through third-party partners, background checks, assessment tools, and an excellent reporting system that includes tax credit identification and EEO reporting.
ApplicantPro earned 4.22 out of 5 stars. It’s a feature-rich system with perfect scores in functionality and reporting. Real-world users gave it excellent ratings. The lack of a free plan and pricing transparency (you’ll need to call for a quote, but the pricing we were given is competitive) brought down its score, as did the lack of a mobile app.
Applicant Pro does not have a free plan nor does it mention a free trial. The pricing is custom, so you must call for a quote. However, we were able to get a range of pricing, and it is competitive with others on our list, especially when considering the dedicated support you get with ApplicantPro.
Number of Employees | Monthly Pricing |
---|---|
1 to 20 | $60 to $150 |
21 to 50 | $75 to $250 |
51 to 100 | $100 to $350 |
101 to 250 | $150 to $400 |
251 to 500 | $150 to $450 |
501 to 1,000 | $200 to $550 |
1,000-plus | Contact provider |
ApplicantPro offers several collaboration tools, including the ability to see where a team member is in the application. (Source: ApplicantPro)
- Recruitment marketing: Rather than a shotgun job posting that you’ll find with others on our list, ApplicantPro offers a dedicated recruiting strategist that analyzes where your ideal applicant seeks jobs so that you can target your job ad dollars to the most effective spots. If you are using multiple paid job sites, this could save you money and effort. (Recruitee uses an AI to make these recommendations.)
- Job boards: ApplicantPro posts to over 4,000 job boards (paid and free) and social media, and lets you gather recommendations in-house. This is more than most on our list.
- Custom job ads: Experts at ApplicantPro will write three job ads for you, optimizing recruiting strategies. The rest on our list only offer templates you can customize yourself.
- Background checks and skills tests: Only Indeed and ApplicantPro offer both skills testing (like typing tests) and background checks. (Others require integrations, while Workerly has personality and skills tests.) ApplicantPro goes further with cognitive and behavioral assessments, and puts it all together in an employee profile that gives you insight into the whole person.
- Onboarding: ApplicantPro offers a reference checking system, online new hire paperwork with e-signatures, electronic verification that an employee can legally work, and more. It even checks to see if you qualify for tax credits such as those offered for hiring veterans, Native Americans, or ex-felons, something Zoho Recruit, out #1 choice, does not offer.
- Reports: ApplicantPro has some of the best reporting of those on the list. Not only does it collect data on your hiring pipeline, but also visitor traffic to your website, candidate sources, and more. It collects EEO and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) data, although it may charge extra for this feature.
Recruitee: Best for Growing Businesses
Pros
- 1,250+ free and paid job boards
- Candidate videos and video chat
- Multiple languages
- Unlimited users
Cons
- No free plan
- No phone support
- Minimum 10 job slots per month
- More expensive than most
What we like:
Recruitee is a talent acquisition platform great for small businesses in a hiring surge. We liked that the plans include candidate videos, a great way to get a feel for the professionalism and personality of the applicant, and that it allows unlimited users, so the whole team can get involved without paying extra for accounts. It offers an intuitive interface and tools to take you from job ad to hiring. Recruitee ranks really well against Zoho Recruit for features, but it’s more expensive and lacks a free plan.
It gained a solid 4.08 out of 5 on our rubric. Like ApplicantPro, it had perfect scores for reporting and functionality, and strong scores for user feedback. Pricing and the lack of a free plan brought the score down, and it is a more complex interface than some of the others on our list.
Recruitee does not have a free plan, but it does offer an 18-day free trial of the Scale plan. Pricing depends on the number of job slots you need each month.
- Launch ($269–$538/month, 10–20 slots): 1,450 job boards, smart campaigns, career sites, hiring management, candidate videos, mobile app, unlimited users and data, talent sourcing, quick evaluations, social media connections, team notes, API access
- Scale ($479–$959/month, 10–20 slots): Launch plus EEO compliance, multilanguage career sites, questionnaires webhoods, workflows, calendar meeting rooms, screening questions, automations, event and job schedulers
- Lead (Custom Pricing): Scale plus external data imports from ATS, tailored onboarding and rollout, regular consultations, dedicated representative, testing sandbox, referrals hub, custom contracts, SSO, business intelligence connector
Email templates are just one of its many customizations. (Source: Recruitee)
- Job boards: Recruitee posts to over 1,250 job boards, some of which must be paid for. This is typical of several products on our list. However, it alone offers discounts for bulk orders. It uses AI to recommend the best job boards. (ApplicantPro has live assistance for this.) Additionally, you can set up social sharing and social media campaigns and create a hosted career site.
- International reach: Recruitee lets you advertise and receive jobs across the world. You can set up career sites and applications in a multitude of languages. Recruitee has four installed—English, German, French, and Dutch—or you can add other languages. While others on our list can handle other languages, Recruitee is the only one with multilanguage career site management.
- Team collaboration: Recruitee makes it easy for hiring teams to work together. First, it allows unlimited users, so you don’t pay for each person who needs to comment on a candidate. It lets you create project flows, post notes, collaborate via in-app chat, and more.
- Customizations: Recruitee has a commendable number of customizations. You can start with a customizable job listing, then create a workflow by starting with its default settings and adding or subtracting as needed. It has customizable templates, editable questionnaires and evaluation forms, and more.
- Mobile app: Recruitee is one of the few on our list that has a mobile app for employers rather than job seekers. It earned 3.8 out of 5 on Android and 4 out of 5 on iOS. Unlike Zoho Recruit, which is more comprehensive, Recruitee focuses on managing to-do lists, following progress, and communicating with candidates.
Vultus Recruit: Best for Recruiters Tracking Candidates From Multiple Job Boards
Pros
- Customizable screening questions
- Free setup
- Resume search
- ATS system
Cons
- Minimum of 3 users
- No job ad templates
- No free plan
- No mobile app
What we like:
Vultus does not post to as many job sites as others on our list, but it does have its own job board and integrates with others through its ATS. We liked it for its affordable pricing, organizational capabilities, and bulk action tools. It works best for recruiters and those in bench sales (marketing and placing a company’s consultants on new projects). You may need to pay for some job posting sites separately, but Vultus can organize and track applicants and make it easy to pull and analyze resumes.
Vultus earned 4.04 out of 5 in our rubric. It missed a perfect mark under pricing only because it lacked a free plan. It has pre-screening questions, but not pre-employment skills testing, and it lacks job description templates. However, it has automated email, mass email, resume harvesting, applicant comparison and tracking, and more. While it lacks a large number of real-world user reviews, it did have the highest aggregate rating on this list.
Vultus Recruit does not have a free plan, but it does have a free trial. Vultus does not say how long the trial is, however.
Vultus differs from the others on our list because its pricing varies by number of users rather than feature set. All Vultus plans come with its complete set of recruiting and applicant tracking features and free configuration.
- Three to five: $18.99/month per user
- Six to 30 users: $14.99/month per user
- 30+ users: $9.99/month per user
It’s easy to post to multiple job sites. (Source: Vultus)
- Job posting: Vultus has its own job board, plus it can help you post to Dice, Monster, TechFetch, and CareerBuilder. With integrations, you can post to other boards. This is not as many job boards as others on our list, but it also allows you to post on social media and with vendors or gather employee referrals.
- Candidate sourcing: Here, Vultus really shines. Vultus parses resumes into searchable data and keeps all the candidate information, from resume and interview notes to email and feedback, all in one place—even if the same candidate applies more than once. While others store information in a single area, not all combine duplicates like this.
- Recruiter business tools: Vultus aids bench sales and recruitment businesses with candidate sourcing tools, profit margin tracking, and more. It also has bulk actions—from letting you import up to 500 resumes at a time for parsing to sending out mass emails via mobile.
- Highly rated by users: While Vultus didn’t have a large number of reviews, users did praise it highly. It has an average of 4.69 out of 5 stars from various user review sites, the highest after Manatal. Users say the interface is clean and easy to use, and that it does an excellent job managing the data. They also described customer support as responsive and reliable.
Looking for freelance workers?
If you are targeting freelance work specifically, then these job boards may be too broad for you. Check out our guides to the best freelance hiring sites for small businesses and leading gig/work-on-demand apps for hiring. Or, see our detailed reviews below:
How We Evaluated
We considered a dozen different recruiting and ATS software, choosing those with high ratings from real-world users, mobile-friendly sites (or mobile apps), and the ability to reach a diverse pool of candidates. Then we narrowed it down to those that have pricing and tools best for small businesses.
Zoho Recruit topped our list with perfect scores for pricing, functionality, and reporting plus a user review score of 4.4 out of 5, averaged over multiple review sites.
Click through the tabs below for our full evaluation criteria:
15% of Overall Score
When looking at pricing, we considered a wide range of businesses, from those needing the occasional job post to staffing companies or businesses in a growth surge. Thus, we rated for free plans, affordable monthly plans, and occasional plans for small businesses. Zoho Recruit earned a perfect score
20% of Overall Score
This score covered job boards, basic applicant tracking, background and pre-employment tests, resumes, and communication. All scored high, but Workable took the lead with 4.88 out of 5.
20% of Overall Score
These are the tools that make posting jobs and evaluating candidates easier: templates, feedback and collaboration, and extra features like social posting or video interviewing. Several earned perfect scores: Manatal, Workable, Zoho Recruit, ApplicantPro, Recruitee, and ZipRecruiter.
15% of Overall Score
Even the most thorough research cannot replace the experiences of real-world users. We turned to popular review sites like Capterra and G2 for user feedback on the application and customer support. ApplicantPro earned the top spot with 4.63 out of 5. Manatal deserves special recognition, however, for having user review scores of 4.8 out of 5 on the third-party user review sites we checked.
10% of Overall Score
All the software provided basic reports, so the make-or-break was customizability. While about half got perfect scores, Zoho Recruit alone lets you build reports from square one.
20% of Overall Score
We considered interface, customer support, online guides, and mobile apps. Indeed earned a perfect score.
Bottom Line
Recruiting software helps you advertise for jobs, evaluate candidates (from resume parsing to interview notes), and track them through the process to make sure you find employees you’ll love. Some services focus on the job postings themselves, while others have more extensive features for evaluation and even onboarding.
Overall, we found Zoho Recruit to be the best recruitment software for small businesses for 2023. It’s an affordably priced yet complete recruiting system that has excellent tools for agencies or small businesses in a hiring surge. It offers a basic free plan and a free trial of its paid plans, so give it a try today.