9 Best Free Recruitment Software Tools in 2024

GoHire stood out in our testing as a recruiting tool that incredibly fits startups and small businesses. Its affordable price has remained unchanged for years, and you can test it out for free for two weeks. Plus, it’s packed with all the SMB ATS features we’d think of, from job boards to career pages, email engagement, onboarding, and even AI hiring tools.

Our initial impression of GoHire was its improved platform design, both visually and functionally. The latest version is much easier to navigate, unlike the previous one, which could be a bit clunky at times. We tested the platform on different browsers and mobile devices, and the experience had consistently been positive.

During the free trial signup process, we had a little trouble with email validation. But thanks to that, we experienced firsthand the responsiveness of GoHire’s support team. Jerome helped us out and resolved the problem the same day we got in touch with them.

GoHire’s dashboard provided a step-by-step guide to familiarize us with each feature. We also had a dedicated account manager for further assistance. Creating our first job post was straightforward, aided by the availability of over 700 job description samples. Custom questions for pre-screening purposes were limited to paid plans, but we could easily publish our job posts on 15+ integrated job boards and invite team members to collaborate.

Recently, the ATS provider introduced new AI hiring tools that help users generate job descriptions, career pages, outreach emails, interview questions, and onboarding checklists. We tried some, and they did deliver good enough answers in a few seconds.

3,000+ companies, including Snagajob, Promoter, Sweetberry, Swapcard, and Voucher Cart.

GoHire has three plans; each comes with a free 14-day trial you can sign up for using your email.

• Starter costs $89 per month and includes basic features, 3 active job posts, a custom career page, interview scheduling, and unlimited team members.
• Growth costs $150 per month and has all features from Starter plus customizable pipelines, bulk actions, screening questions, and mention team members.‍
• Pro costs $290 per month and has all Growth features plus unlimited job posts, automated stage actions, advanced reporting, video questionnaires, and private notes.

Not only does Manatal cover most of the features you’d expect from a budget-friendly ATS, but the platform also tops that off with AI-powered actions, such as candidate filtering and recommendations. You can explore Manatal’s features for free for up to 14 days, with no credit card required.

Signing up for a trial is pretty easy. We finished the sign-up form, verified our email address, and the vendor let us access its product. We started by posting a job and there were a few pre-built templates available for us to get things started. However, the salary currency just supports USD only. But other than that, everything looked good. There are several employment types and options to put the exact location, tick the remote position box, or leave it blank.

Navigating through the dashboard was straightforward. We tried making for ourselves a career page. It turned out this tool of Manatal is customizable but has some locked features like post-application and post-referral email workflows that we couldn’t use unless we upgraded to a paid plan. While we were expecting to be able to publish our first job to some free job boards, the trial didn’t let us do so, which was a bit disappointing.

To sum up, while Manatal’s capabilities are great, users won’t get much value from its free trial, as certain features like posting jobs on free job boards aren’t available for them to use. And as Manatal doesn’t offer a free plan, the only way to see how it actually works is to purchase one of its paid plans.

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Manatal has four plans and supports both monthly and annual billing. Below is its pricing when billed annually:

• Professional: $15/user/month, unlimited guests, 15 jobs per account, and 10,000 candidates.
• Enterprise: $35/user/month, unlimited jobs, candidates, and guests.
• Enterprise Plus: $55/user/month and includes Enterprise features, user groups, open API access, SSO log-in, priority support, and access to Beta features.
• Custom: Custom pricing.

Similar to Zoho Recruit, Wellfound offers a free-forever ATS for anyone to opt for on its platform. But what truly sets Wellfound apart is that it doesn’t cap the number of job posts, unlike Zoho Recruit, which restricts you to just one. Given its strong reputation as the hotspot for startup-savvy talent, most tech startups will likely find the right fit for their teams there pretty easily without dipping into the funds.

Diving into Wellfound's Job Platform felt like it was designed with lean startups like ours in mind—no frills, no fluff. You get to post job openings (as mentioned above, it’s free), and the platform enables you to neatly organize all applications, collaborate with other members using in-app notes, manage your conversations with candidates, schedule interviews, and track everything in one centralized location.

However, one downside we noticed was its lack of third-party job board integrations. Unlike most recruitment tools that allow you to post jobs to multiple platforms at no extra charge thanks to their built-in job board network, Wellfound restricts its free users to its job board, which hosts around 12 million job seekers. For a broader talent reach, there seems to be no other way but to either pay for job promotions or upgrade to a paid plan.

And when we compare the free ATS to alternatives like Recruit CRM or Zoho Recruit, we do feel a pinch from the absence of multilingual support and some AI-driven functionalities, like automatic job description generation.

25,000+ companies, including Modern Health, Xander, and Dosu.

Wellfound provides a free ATS for applicant access and tracking. Paid plans start at $149/month, with add-ons and custom packages available.

Like Manatal, Recruit CRM doesn’t ask for your credit card info to grant you access to its free trial. What sets this vendor apart, though, is that this free trial has no time limit, meaning you can use it for as long as you want.

Recruit CRM’s search function is universal across its plans. You can do Boolean, filter searches (including radius search), or a combination of the two. The only downside is that you can't search for specific words in your call logs. This is on Recruit CRM’s product roadmap and, given how responsive they are to customer requests, it’ll likely be available soon.

We were immediately impressed by the detailed instructions integrated into the dashboard. Plus, there’s a live chat box in the right corner. The humans behind it didn’t disappoint, with responses coming in a few minutes.

Recruit CRM’s resume parser is pretty awesome, too. You can parse up to 49 resumes, check for duplicates, and even get your non-English resumes parsed.

In terms of CRM features, Recruit CRM's free trial is a good starting point for small employment agencies. You get the basics like a deal pipeline, a custom dashboard, and invoicing, plus GPT integration. You even have access to Zapier to connect the platform with other apps you use.

However, you can only use one sequence and have one hiring pipeline with the free version. There’s also no call recording, no texting, and no resume formatting.

Recruit CRM is more focused on agencies than corporate companies. So, if you need things like referral management or onboarding, you'll have to look elsewhere.

1,200+ agencies such as Blue Recruiting, G4 Global Partner, and Zeren have used Recruit CRM.

Recruit CRM offers three pricing plans. Billed annually, the Pro plan costs $85 per user per month, while the Business plan costs $125 per user per month. For the Enterprise plan, annual billing is the only option, and it costs $165 per user per month.

If you've been following the buyer guide, you might have noticed that SeekOut is no longer on our recommended free recruitment software list. They've made changes and now only offer their sourcing extension to paid users. No worries, though—we've found a great alternative in Breezy HR.

As we first checked out Breezy HR, we were struck by how straightforward their pricing is. You know exactly what you’ll pay for each plan. The free plan, Bootstrap, is super easy to sign up for. You fill in a form (no need to give your credit card info), and that's it. After confirming our email, we landed on this dashboard.

We liked the simplicity of the platform’s design. It makes it easy to figure out where to go for what. And the fact that the live chat got back to us within an hour didn’t sound bad at all for a free service.

Like most other free recruiting tools, Breezy HR’s Bootstrap lets you have one active job. Yet beyond that, it allows you to add as many users as you want, customize your career site, including a referral page, and access over 50 job boards to distribute your open positions.

When you check out this recruitment solution yourself, don’t forget to visit the resume parsing tool. It can handle more than 20 languages while making sure all your parsed resumes are searchable, which is undoubtedly the free parser par excellence we’ve tested.

However, our biggest letdown with Breezy HR’s free plan is that it only allows access to candidates added in the past 30 days. This basically means that despite having unlimited candidate pools at your fingertips, there's a good chance you won't be able to move candidates through your recruitment process within that time frame, let alone kick off any talent nurturing campaigns.

Breezy HR is used by over 17,000+ companies, including Tonal, Duolingo, and Product Hunt.

Breezy HR’s Bootstrap is free forever, as introduced above. In addition, there are three fixed-pricing paid plans: Startup, Growth, and Business, which cost $157,$273, and $439 per month billed annually, respectively. Pro plan has custom pricing. Some advanced features, such as SMS/Text Messaging and Candidate Match Score, are offered as add-ons.

Gem is a paid recruitment platform. However, startups founded less than three years ago, with under 15 employees, and raising less than $7 million in funding can use the platform free of charge. And this vendor also has a free trial anyone can opt for with their company email.

We headed to Gem’s dashboard and immediately loved clean and simple layout. Getting around is super easy, thanks to their step-by-step guides.

Gem’s Chrome extension is quite a nice feature which let us lift and save candidate info right within LinkedIn and Indeed for later use. One thing we didn’t like about it, though, was that finding the extension on the Chrome Web Store can be a bit of a headache. We ended up using the direct link from Gem since searching for it directly in the Web Store didn’t work.

In our latest review, we decided to test out how well Gem plays with Calendly, Gmail, and Slack. The self-help integration guide was pretty straightforward, but we thought we would bug Gem's support to get a feel for their customer service. And they didn’t disappoint—integrations were a breeze, the support team got back to us in about half an hour, and it seems they're pretty open to adding new integrations if you've got some in mind.

We heard lots of good things about Gem’s Sequence, so we went in with high hopes. Thankfully it totally lived up to our expectations. This single feature let us incorporate our email signature, add curated content, schedule the emails, and even keep an eye on our hiring data. We particularly found Gem’s analytics tool attractive—it lets you track critical stats on how your outreach campaigns and sequence content are performing in real-time. The platform also makes it easy to share these data points with stakeholders.

Unfortunately, Gem still has no mobile apps. It’s been months since the vendor stated on their website this is on their roadmap, yet we haven’t seen any progress at all. Also, it's a bummer that the platform doesn't offer built-in features for email template library, internal hiring, or a referral program.

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Gem has custom pricing. You can reach out to their sales team for more information.

Zoho Recruit’s free plan gives users a lot more features than we thought a no-cost tool would. In addition to candidate management, you get email management, interview scheduling, and support through weekdays — all for free.

Though G-Suite, Outlook, and native HR tech integrations are only available for paid editions, Zoho Recruit does provide free users with Zapier access. This can be quite handy if you want to connect your free recruiting tool with some of your team’s day-to-day apps, like Google Calendar, Slack, and Zoom.

Zoho Recruit is also quite capable of language inclusion. As of 2024, this recruiting platform has supported 26 different languages, from English and Spanish to Arabic, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Not everyone likes the idea of doing things from scratch, so we’re glad the free plan comes with five customized email templates plus a user-friendly resume search feature for time-saving.

However, it's important to note that Zoho Recruit restricts its free users to having only one active job opening at a time. The storage limit isn’t ideal either — it’s capped at just 256MB.

Zoho Recruit also gave us quite an overwhelming feeling in our first encounter, mostly due to the abundance of tabs and menus.

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Zoho Recruit has different pricing for corporate recruiters and recruitment staffing agencies, with features such as client portal, video interview, data migration, and premium support are available as add-ons.

• For corporate HRs, there are three plans: Free, Standard ($25/recruiter/month billed annually), and Enterprise ($50/recruiter/month billed annually).‍
• For staffing agencies, there are four plans: Free, Standard ($25/user/month billed annually), Professional ($50/user/month billed annually), and Enterprise ($75/user/month billed annually).

Recooty offers a free ATS with basic features that can be a great tool for small businesses.

The free-forever plan supports one active job post at a time, integrates with job boards, and enables users to create a branded careers page and share jobs across social media platforms. Users can also store received candidates on the system to build their own talent pool and reuse it later on.

We have found that Recooty’s free plan is easy to set up and use. Posting a position on multiple job boards takes just a couple of clicks. Applicant tracking is also a breeze, thanks to automated email notifications.

The biggest drawback of the free plan is that it only allows one user, so collaboration isn’t possible.  Additionally, the platform can only connect with LinkedIn and Slack, making it challenging to sync data across your HR tools.

While we’re impressed by the tool’s affordability and simplicity, readers should note it lacks a Chrome extension and built-in communication tools for collaborative candidate assessment and saving messages within the system. Third-party integrations can serve as a workaround for this shortcoming, but that can introduce inefficiency and security issues.

On that note, API support is only available for Recooty’s highest-priced plan. We haven’t seen Recooty roll out its mobile app, though users have requested it often in the two years we’ve been keeping an eye on Recooty.

Sendlane, Airtable, Uber, Rack Bank, American Hospital, Trello.

The company offers four pricing plans:

• Free plan - Limited to one active job slot, one user, and one location.
• Pro Plan - the plan goes for $49/month with 10 Active job slots, 10 slots, and 3 locations.
• Ultra Plan - goes for $99/month with 25 active job slots, 50 users, 10 locations, and all features under the Pro plan.
• Max Plan- goes for $199/month while offering 75 active job slots, 100 users, and 20 locations and all features under the Ultra plan.
• All the plans come with a 14-day trial period in which you can test the service without providing your credit card details. After the trial period ends, you will need to update your card to continue using the services.

Indeed is perhaps the biggest and most popular job posting platform available today. It allows companies to post jobs and apply skill assessments to those posted jobs to reach one of the largest talent pools on the internet, all for free. Once a candidate passes the assessment(s) and their credentials have been reviewed, companies can use Indeed’s built-in messaging system to reach out to candidates and schedule interviews. Though it is optional, companies can also sponsor job posts on Indeed to reach quality candidates faster.

Indeed is used by over 3,000,000 companies, including Nokia, Schwab, McDonald's, and the University of Oxford.

It doesn't cost anything to post jobs to appear on Indeed's general search results. To reach more candidates however, you may want to try sponsoring your listing. The price for sponsoring a listing varies depending on the title, location and available job seekers for your posted job. After you define such criteria, Indeed will calculate and show you the price of sponsoring your listing so you’re able to decide if it’s within your budget before paying for it. To ensure you only pay for desired results, Indeed gives you 48 hours to reject unwanted applications before you’re charged.

Calendly is an appointment scheduling platform that comes with an indefinite free plan. Although not exclusively built for recruiting per se, HR managers can take advantage of this freebie at the interviewing stage of recruiting.

We think simplicity is the best word to describe how Calendly looks and works. Even if you're new to setting up interviews, navigating this tool won’t make you scratch your head. Plus, the automatic language and timezone detection is such a nice touch to make booking interviews seamless for candidates and colleagues worldwide.

Calendly natively integrates with most popular calendars and video conferencing tools. In the free version, you can create unlimited one-on-one events, send automated event notifications to your candidates, and customize your booking link.

Another thing we really like about this scheduling app is its reasonable pricing. Though it has gone up a bit since last year, it's still pretty affordable (at $10 per user per month) compared to other interview scheduling tools like Paradox and GoodTime. And the best part is, there's a free 14-day trial you can sign up for without having to give in your credit card info.

Unfortunately, Calendly's free plan only supports one-on-one events and one active booking page at a time. The customization features provided in this plan also disappoint us, with only two options available: the ability to change your event’s color and its name.

Some users may find the mobile apps less intuitive and functional compared to the browser version, as they can be slow and lack some key functionality.

eBay, Compass, Lyft, Dropbox, La-Z-Boy, Twilio, and Stack Overflow.

Calendly is always free for a single calendar per user. Regarding paid options, it has 3: Standard and Teams start at $10 and $16 per user per month when billed annually, respectively, while Enterprise requires annual billing and starts at $15,000 per year.

SeekOut is an AI-powered talent search engine designed to help your hiring team source and recruit candidates from social media sites. While most of their solutions cost money, they do offer their SeekOut Sourcing Assistant — Chrome extension for free. The tool is quite handy in extracting rich information directly from LinkedIn, GitHub, and other sources, allowing recruiters to collect, enrich, and export potential hires’ profiles.

SeekOut is used by enterprise customers such as VMware, Salesforce, Merck, UiPath, and Anaplan.

Seekout has a few different plans:

• Premium: Access to 441M+ candidates, diversity sourcing and hiring tools, people insights, contact info for 500 candidates per month and exporting of 5,000 profiles per month.
• Premium Tech: All of Premium, plus specific tools for sourcing tech talent. These include Coder Score rankings, GitHub search tool, direct access to candidate's code, and tailored insights.‍
• SeekOut Expert: Designed specifically for Engineering and Life Sciences hiring.

The actual pricing of SeekOut’s plans and services isn’t disclosed on their website. You would have to contact their sales team for a custom price quote.

Seekout also provides a free Chrome extension for sourcing, SeekOut Sourcing Assistant. It’s free to use but with a limit of getting verified social links and emails for 10 candidates per month.