Recruiting teams that use a best in class recruiting CRM can save time, money, and get the best talent in the door. Companies are not just sourcing talent anymore — instead, they’re using marketing tactics to build relationships with candidates, grow talent pipelines, and meet their hiring goals faster. It’s no surprise that recruitment marketing software has become a must-have for many hiring teams.
Why? These days, candidates have more control over the job process, deciding which companies and roles interest them the most. So when the market is more candidate-driven than ever, you have to work extra hard to find — and convince — top talent to work for your company. You’re now a recruiter and a marketer with a five-step hiring funnel that includes finding, attracting, engaging, nurturing and converting high quality candidates.
Recruitment marketing software is designed to help you more efficiently move through each step of this funnel so you can create awareness and drive conversions in less time and for less money. But which platform is right for your company?
To help you make the right investment, we put together this guide on all things recruitment marketing software. You’ll find a list of the top software platforms, pricing guidelines, questions to ask on demos and more. Let’s get started.
We spend hundreds of hours researching the best HR and recruiting software so you don’t have to. We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on practitioners and experts to help us recommend the right software. Most of the vendors featured on our site have no commercial relationship with us, we want to feature the best software for our readers regardless. Learn more
We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best Recruiting CRMs per our research and expert council as of March 2021.
Why we love it
:
It's a great ATS/CRM combo that is building a recruitment marketing suite for the enterprise sector.
Ascendify's solution can help your team with career site, onboarding, scheduling, talent communities, and university recruiting. They've strived to make a smart talent platform for strategic hiring and onboarding that can personalize content based on each applicant, match skills to jobs automatically, and identify which team within a company would be more suitable for a given candidate.
Ascendify
Customers
Marquee customers for Ascendify include GE, Panasonic, Cisco, Marriot, and Cigna.
Ascendify
Stats
Ascendify
Pricing
Pricing for Ascendify is not disclosed, since they will likely provide a custom plan based on your organization's characteristics.
Best For
Ascendify's product is mostly geared-up towards the enterprise sector. However, they are favored by companies in widely-varying industries and in several countries.
Worth Checking Out:
Ascendify is also built with diversity initiatives in mind. They try to partner with talent communities that are also putting in the effort when it comes to DEI. However, it is worth noting that the job distribution that they offer to niche sites, international networks, diversity networks and college networks is powered by eQuest at an additional fee.
Why we love it
:
With Loxo, you can set your recruitment marketing to autopilot by pre-building emails, SMS, phone calls, and LinkedIn activity.
Loxo's platform is built around making your recruiting team more efficient. What makes Loxo unique from other CRMs, is that they have an up-to-date database of 530 million people with their personal contact information. Their technology helps recruiters to build lists of candidates, outreach through automated sequences of texts/emails/calls/Linkedln, and manage every part of the hiring process through their CRM.
Loxo
Customers
Loxo
Stats
Loxo
Pricing
Loxo has only two pricing plans, free and premium. The free plan is for a single user, which would only work for independent recruiters or a one-person HR department. The premium plan, on the other hand, has no user limits, but the final pricing will vary depending on user count and company size. You can request a demo to get custom pricing based on your needs.
Best For
From their client list, you may gather that Loxo is suitable for several sizes of company and all sorts of industries. While that is true, it is worth mentioning that their product is made with individual consultants and smaller teams in mind.
Worth Checking Out:
Along with a Recruiting CRM, Loxo's AI-powered product suite also offers a Talent Intelligence Platform and an Applicant Tracking System.
Why we love it
:
From multi-channel job ads to career site building, automated campaigns and more, SmartDreamers has all the features you need for your recruitment marketing efforts.
SmartDreamers is an end-to-end recruitment marketing automation platform with a UI that’s very user-friendly. Fast-growing companies as well as enterprises can use it to launch powerful campaigns that enhance their employer branding, all while attracting quality job seekers.
SmartDreamers
Customers
AdsWizz, Renault, Genpact, UiPath
SmartDreamers
Stats
SmartDreamers
Pricing
There are three pricing plans
Best For
SmartDreamers is best suited for fast-growing companies and enterprises.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
:
Symphony Talent's SmashFlyX is a powerful platform that combines CRM, career sites, and programmatic advertising for smart recruitment marketing and campaigning.
SmashFlyX was one of the pioneers in the recruitment marketing category. At one point, their solution powered 25% of the Fortune 500 including S&P, Rio Tino, and Ticketmaster with dynamic career sites, CRM, chatbots, and more. Now owned by Symphony Talent, they've expounded on the successful recruitment marketing software with referrals, internal mobility pathways, and no-code approach to workflows.
Symphony Talent
Customers
Aside from the ones mentioned above, Symphony Talent's SmashflyX is also used by Mars, Advent Health, HP, Regis Corporation, and Dick's Sporting Goods.
Symphony Talent
Stats
Best For
SmashflyX has been designed to work with businesses of all sizes and in practically any part of the world. It is especially convenient for recruitment teams whose strategy relies heavily on digital advertising.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
:
In their mission to try and find the best career for every candidate affected by their technology, Eightfold is making an interesting use of deep-learning AI and applying it to the employee lifecycle.
Eightfold is another newcomer to the recruiting CRM space that is coming on strong. Their talent attraction suite drives higher conversions at top of funnel by allowing applicants to find the roles that are most relevant to them. They then help with screening talent via AI on a de-identified basis to drive un-biased hiring practices. They even have a talent management suite, which says a lot about how they view the importance of the entire employee lifecycle.
eightfold
Customers
eightfold
Stats
eightfold
Pricing
Eightfold doesn't have a free version nor do they disclose their pricing upfront or offer a free demo. The best way forward, naturally, is to request a demo.
Best For
Enterprise clients looking for a company that strives to stay at the forefront of current trends in both technology and HR in general may very well find a good match with Eightfold.
Worth Checking Out:
The team at Eightfold frequently put out resources like case studies, infographics, data sheets, webinars, and podcasts, on all things tech and AI in HR. They even have a talent university available for customers.
Why we love it
:
Phenom is a comprehensive tool that lets you manage all the stages of the talent experience into a single platform.
Phenom is best known for their dynamic career sites which will serve different content to job seekers based on their behavior, and resume/LinkedIn (if uploaded). We love that this is taking a page directly out of the best practices of eCommerce to drive more conversions. Also worth checking out is their HR chatbot, recruiting CRM and AI driven analytics.
PhenomPeople
Customers
PhenomPeople
Stats
PhenomPeople
Pricing
Pricing for Phenom is undisclosed. This may be due to the fact that they're geared mainly towards large and enterprise-level organizations, but also since they have many different products within the platform.
Best For
Large organizations and enterprises looking to manage all stages of their talent's experience in the same robust platform.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
:
Many HR professionals gladly use Yello to hire with more effectiveness, sourcing, engaging, and advancing candidates in a single platform.
Yello’s talent acquisition software started with events-based recruiting and has since moved into candidate relationship management, video interviews, sourcing, scheduling, and much more. We keep hearing great things from practitioners about this software!
Yello
Customers
Yello
Stats
Yello
Pricing
Pricing for Yello is not disclosed upfront, but will vary depending on user count and other requirements.
Best For
Yello is used by all kinds of companies, from those with 50 employees to enterprise clients with over a thousand. It's also used in multiple countries and multiple languages.
Worth Checking Out:
An attractive aspect of Yello is that they do a lot of work in the campus recruiting space, as well as hiring for government jobs. It is also notable that they do a lot of research of their own, putting out resources like reports on statistics and trends of recruitment operations. They frequently push out great content of this sort for the benefit of the whole HR space.
Why we love it
:
Beamery's Talent CRM is a nice-looking tool with notable features such as one-click sourcing, automated workflows, and nurture pools.
Beamery is one of the newer entrants into this market, and has one of the slickest solutions out there. It’s almost as if a sophisticated marketing team built your recruiting software - from career sites to candidate nurturing, there is a lot to like in this recruiting platform.
One such thing is how they enable recruiting teams to proactively build pipelines of candidates ahead of demand. Their software can automatically surface qualified talent in response to a new job opening up, for instance.
Beamery
Customers
Beamery
Stats
Beamery
Pricing
Beamery's pricing is undisclosed because it will vary in accordance to each company's needs.
Best For
Beamery is certainly designed with big enterprises in mind with ongoing recruitment needs.
Worth Checking Out:
Although mentioned before, it is worth noting that their talent academy is open to the public. This portal has resources like guides on recruitment marketing and how to measure the effectiveness of your career site.
Why we love it
:
Avature combines ATS and CRM capabilities into one powerful platform that is used by KPMG, IBM, Pepsi and over 600 other companies. One of the most powerful aspects of this solution is the ability to customize workflows for both recruiters and candidates that meet the needs of different functions and geographies.
Avature
Customers
Apart from the ones mentioned above, Avature is also used by Cisco, L'Oréal, Mondelez, Siemens, Specsavers, and many more.
Avature
Stats
Avature
Pricing
As with most enterprise-level solutions, pricing is not provided upfront by the vendor.
Best For
As you probably assumed from their stats, Avature is best-suited for organizations with more than 5000 employees.
Worth Checking Out:
An interesting fact about Avature is that many individuals among their current senior management were instrumental parts of the leadership at HotJobs.com. At one point, Hot Jobs was the second largest online recruiting system in the United States. They were purchased by Yahoo! for $433MM in cash and stock in 2002.
As we’ve covered, a successful recruiting strategy would be nothing these days without a solid marketing component. But combining recruiting and marketing can be overwhelming. That’s why recruitment marketing software can be such an asset for recruiting teams.
With the right solution, you can take your recruitment marketing to the next level, drive more of the right candidates to your job applications, foster connections to passive candidates who might be a fit for future roles, and hire top talent faster. As a TA leader, your job just got easier. And your company, as a result, just got more productive.
As a next step, we recommend setting up a couple of demos with the vendors that interest you the most — you’ll get a better feel for their solutions and actually see how they’d fit into your overall recruiting and employer branding strategies. Then, when you’re ready to move forward, find someone on your staff with marketing DNA to lead the project and consult your marketing team for best practices. Until then, good luck!
If you want to be the smartest in the room when it comes to People, sign up for our weekly newsletter
HR Tech companies can take advantage of capital strategies used by large companies through MA...
Here are tips on how to use your time more efficiently when buying HR software...
If you lead a talent acquisition team, please think twice before buying new ATS, here's why...