SmartRecruiters Review: Is It the Recruitment Software for You?
Charlette has over 10 years of experience in accounting and finance and 2 years of partnering with HR leaders on freelance projects. She uses this extensive experience to answer your questions about payroll.
Juvy has over 10 years of content writing experience and was a licensed teacher. She has evaluated and written about dozens of payroll and HR software solutions for small business to provide the best answers to your software questions.
This article is part of a larger series on Hiring.
SmartRecruiters is an enterprise-grade, cloud-based recruitment software designed for growing businesses that want a scalable end-to-end talent acquisition platform. Aside from job posting, it has recruiting campaigns, search filters, and interview scheduling. Pricing is customized, though it offers its free “SmartStart” tool for small companies (up to 250 employees) that lets you post up to 10 active jobs at a time.
What We Like
- Easy to learn and use
- Unlimited number of users and candidates
- Centralized candidate assessment
What's Missing
- Pricing is not transparent
- Job approval for the free version takes longer
- Self-scheduling feature is glitchy sometimes
Deciding Factors
- Customized pricing
- Free plan for an unlimited number of users and up to 10 active job posts at a time
What We Recommend SmartRecruiters For
SmartRecruiters earned a spot in our guide on the best free applicant tracking systems. It received perfect scores in both applicant tracking and reporting, given its robust features that help increase recruitment success. It also earned high marks in popularity but low ratings in pricing, mainly because it lacks transparency around its upgrade options.
In short, we recommend SmartRecruiters for:
- Startups looking to scale quickly with a limited budget: If your company is small and working within a tight recruitment budget, its SmartStart plan is the perfect choice for you. With this free plan, you’ll get to advertise your open jobs to over 300 job boards like Dice, Indeed, and Monster, and social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
- New recruiting firms and headhunters: SmartRecruiters’ robust recruiting tools make it a good fit for headhunters and recruiting firms. It has built-in candidate skill testing and assessment modules to help predict future performance and retention, without having to integrate with third-party apps. Plus, it has offer management features and can integrate with more than 500 HR solutions and boards.
- Businesses hiring international workers: If you’re expanding to a global market, the SmartGlobal add-on should help. It allows administrators to customize the user-facing and candidate-facing languages. It supports 32 user-facing languages, including Chinese, Greek, and Polish, and you can choose from 37 candidate-facing languages, including Japanese, Russian, and Thai.
When SmartRecruiters Would Not Be a Good Fit
- If you need a fully customizable and free applicant tracking system, then check out OpenCATS. It is an open-source software that you can easily download, install, and modify.
- If you’re looking for free applicant tracking with other team management tools, then Homebase is your best choice. Its free version lets you track time and attendance and build schedules in one location, making it ideal for restaurants and retailers that hire hourly workers.
- If your business is in an industry that’s historically more vulnerable to discrimination complaints than others, then MightyRecruiter’s robust reporting features will keep you in compliance. You can capture EEO data (ethnicity, gender, disability) from job applicants and access it in the case of an audit. It also has an “OFCCP Compliance” mode to track your searches so that you can easily download an OFCCP report (Excel or CSV file).
Looking for something different? Read our guide to the best recruitment software for small businesses to find one that fits your needs.
Top Alternatives At-a-Glance
 |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|
Best for | Businesses looking for a fully customizable ATS | Staffing agencies hiring for multiple companies | Small businesses with hourly workers |
Monthly fees from: | $0 | $0 | $0 to $99.95 per location |
SmartRecruiters Pricing
SmartRecruiters offers its SmartStart ATS version for free if your business needs no more than 10 active job posts. If you need more than that, you’ll need to upgrade to its SmartRecruit solution (custom-priced).
SmartStart | SmartRecruit | |
|---|---|---|
Price ($/Month) | $0 | Contact SmartRecruiters |
Numbers of Active Job Post | Up to 10 | More than 10 |
Multi-Board Job Postings | ✓ | ✓ |
Career Website | ✓ | ✓ |
Job Widget to Integrate Your Jobs on any Webpage | ✓ | ✓ |
ATS and Candidate Database Management | ✓ | ✓ |
Interview Scheduling Tools | ✓ | ✓ |
Configuration for Multiple Brands and Hiring Processes | N/A | ✓ |
Full Marketplace Access with 350+ Partner Recruitment Systems and Services | N/A | ✓ |
SmartRecruit, the paid product, has several upgrades to choose from:
- SmartMessage: Allows you to communicate with candidates efficiently
- SmartCRM solutions: Enables you to hire efficiently and strengthen your employer brand
- SmartGlobal: Lets you configure its platform for multi-country deployments
- SmartAssistant: Uses artificial intelligence (AI) to find, screen, and score candidates
- SmartJob: A recruitment ad agency within your ATS
- SmartPal: An advanced conversational AI
- SmartConnect: Allows you to integrate the platform seamlessly with RESTful APIs, SSO support, and HRIS connectors
- SmartDistribute: Centralized contract management of job distributions to more than 1,000 job boards in one view
SmartRecruiters Features
SmartRecruiters operates like most ATS software. You can post jobs, evaluate candidates, get feedback from interviewers, and view data analytics. It also has a hiring app to make it easy for job seekers to apply. Let’s take a look at some of its essential features.
Candidate Sourcing
SmartRecruiters lets you reach more candidates through direct sourcing, multiboard job posting, talent pool building using SmartCRM, and recruiting campaigns. This way, you can find the best talent inside and outside your organization.
Check out our guide on how to hire employees for your business.
Multiboard Job Posting
SmartRecruiters can post to over 300 job boards (including Monster, Craigslist, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor) with just one click—which is a large difference from other software like ZipRecruiter, which only posts to 100+ boards. You can also share jobs on social media like Facebook.
If you have an employee referral program, you can ask employees to provide candidate referrals. With SmartDistribute, you can identify which job boards are helping you fill your talent pipeline, given its tracking reports and post-to-hire metrics, a feature that only SmartRecruiters offer.
SmartRecruiters allows you to post job openings on both free and paid job boards.
(Source: SmartRecruiters)
Careers Page
SmartRecruiters allows you to build your own content-rich career pages using its drag-and-drop builder. If you already have an existing site, you can add a widget to make the site accessible. From here, you can upload videos, pictures, and even employee testimonials that showcase your company culture to encourage job seekers to apply, allowing you to find employees you’ll love in no time.
Collaborative Hiring Tools
With SmartRecruiters’ collaborative tools, your hiring managers and other stakeholders can exchange feedback on one platform. You can even create a standardized messaging system with its template library and maintain communication records using its historical message tracking.
Candidate Tracking & Management
With SmartRecruiters, you can easily customize your hiring process. It keeps the talent acquisition process running efficiently through customizable tasks and reminders, easy approvals, and real-time dashboards. You can even track the application status of candidates, allowing you to see who has been interviewed, given an offer letter, hired, and rejected. On top of that, you can also improve candidate experience with timely feedback and set reminders to speed up the hiring process.
SmartRecruiters’ candidate list shows you a talent’s current position, location, stage in your hiring process, and more.
(Source: SmartRecruiters)
Mobile Hiring Application
SmartRecruiters’ mobile application is available on both iOS (3.7 out of 5 stars) and Android (2.9 out of 5 stars) devices. It enables you to stay connected to your hiring team and screen, review, and approve candidates. Users find its interface simple and user-friendly, as it allows them to browse candidate profiles and even rate and review each qualified talent easily. However, others reported bugs and login problems that the developers are trying to solve.
With a SmartRecruiters account, you can download the hiring app for Android and iOS.
(Source: SmartRecruiters)
Applicant Screening
To help you identify the most qualified applicants, SmartRecruiters has customizable application forms and fully integrated assessments and skills tests to help evaluate a candidate. You can even put targeted selection questions in the application forms to determine if a candidate is fit for the role upfront.
You can immediately add a tag, move an application, or reject a candidate using SmartRecruiters.
(Source: SmartRecruiters)
Interview Scheduling & Process
SmartRecruiters allows you to compare your interviewers’ calendars side-by-side and sync scheduled interviews across calendars. You can also schedule virtual interviews with multiple candidates and provide interview updates automatically. Standardized scorecards are used to get objective feedback from interviewers.
Offer Management & Onboarding
You can use SmartRecruiters’ customizable offer letter templates and forms to extend offers to new hires quickly. Candidates can also view, sign, and accept offers from any device using SmartRecruiters’ DocuSign integration. To ensure the quality of your new hires, you can use its pre-integrated background and reference checks during the onboarding process.
Recruitment Analytics
SmartRecruiters’ end-to-end recruitment analytics and real-time recruiting data maximize hiring performance and give you insight into how to drive recruiting strategies forward. Also, you get immediate access to historical recruiting data, which you can export for further analysis or use to create personalized reports via SmartRecruiters’ native Report Builder. You can even automate recurring reports delivery and share results with your team within the platform.
SmartRecruiters’ list of pre-built downloadable reports.
(Source: SmartRecruiters)
Third-party Integrations
SmartRecruiters offers integrations with BambooHR, Appical, and Flare HR, so you can upload candidates’ data to your HR software or payroll service once they’re hired. One of the services SmartRecruiters offers that other ATSes don’t is access to business partners and recruitment firms (when you upgrade to its paid edition). You can also connect SmartRecruiters to your company’s Google or Microsoft calendar to schedule interviews and book available rooms for your interviews.
SmartRecruiters Ease of Use
- Intuitive interface
- User-friendly controls
- User interface is available in English and 33 other languages (including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish)
- Knowledge base with extensive how-to guides (recruiting best practices, product tutorials)
- Technical experts and certified project managers give you configuration, testing, and integration assistance and customized training for your hiring teams
Overall, SmartRecruiters is a user-friendly recruitment platform that has a straightforward and configurable interface with a mobile application that is easy to learn and use. In addition, it has a one-stop-shop resource center of how-to articles that tackle everything—from an FAQ and step-by-step instructions to video tutorials and recruitment best practices. A team of technical experts and certified project managers are on standby in case you need assistance on implementation or even training.
However, it only offers live phone support in its premium plan. For subscribers in the free plan or those not needing urgent support, you can send your inquiries through its SmartPal feature or send a ticket through its customer support portal through its website or directly from the app.
If you’re unsure SmartRecruiters is right for you, see how it compares with our other free applicant tracking software.
What Users Think About SmartRecruiters
Users Like | Users Don’t Like |
|---|---|
User-friendly tools | Limited notification system |
Straightforward interface | Customization options aren’t robust |
Simple but effective team collaboration features | Occasional job posting glitches |
Many users who left SmartRecruiters reviews online raved about its intuitive interface and user-friendly tools. Several even commented that it made their hiring process simple and more efficient. They also appreciate its collaboration tool, templated emails, and centralized candidate assessment feature.
On the other hand, some reviewers dislike that they can’t customize some of its features and that its job posting feature can be glitchy sometimes. Others wished for a notification system that automatically updates them whenever there’s a change in an applicant’s status.
At the time of publication, SmartRecruiters reviews earned the following scores on popular user review sites:
- Capterra: 4.2 out of 5 based on 130+ reviews
- G2: 4.3 out of 5 based on 430+ reviews
Bottom Line
If you’re looking for applicant tracking software with robust collaboration tools and a candidate management system, then SmartRecruiters is a good choice. It lets you post opportunities on multiple job boards and social media platforms using its one-click functionality. It even allows you to receive candidates around the globe and evaluate them together with the other members of the hiring team and stakeholders, even while using your mobile phone. On top of all that, it also automatically provides successful applicants with an offer and onboards them.
If you want to learn more about its functionalities, then sign up for SmartRecruiters.
