Hand picked by our HR Technology experts after product testing, user research, and much debate - enjoy!
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 move candidates more efficiently through each step of this funnel so you can create awareness and drive conversions. By focusing your recruiting efforts on candidates that have already expressed interest, you can hire 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.
We take research seriously. To make sure we’re offering our readers the very best solutions in a given software category, we are methodical, rigorous, and expansive in our research. We consult with HR professionals, vendors, and industry experts. We cut through the noise to bring you a carefully curated list of vendors, along with other essential information, to help you find the right software platform for your business.
Here’s how we chose who makes the cut:
Product: We believe in gaining a comprehensive understanding of a product before we recommend it, so we start by getting to know the software. Whenever possible, we meet with a senior executive (CEO or Head of Product) for a demo and Q&A. We also test the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best-in-class offering.
User feedback: We go straight to the source and compile feedback on user experience. Real-world input supports our commitment to diligence in our software evaluation methods and the products we recommend. Keeping up with the everyday experience of HR pros also puts new vendors on our radar, and it keeps us close to our community so we can better connect the right products to the right people.
Financial metrics: We are certified finance nerds, so we use all the data we can get our hands on to make selections for our guides. We comb through data for concrete statistics like retention rates, growth, profitability, and scalability. We evaluate the bottom line of each product because we know making a software purchase can put your reputation on the line.
Best for a use case: Software is never a one-size-fits-all product. Sometimes the best solution is free or cheap. Other times it’s the one that is best for global companies or the one that’s sized right for early-stage startups. Keeping this in mind, we include solutions across the spectrum so our readers can find the best fit for their unique needs.
Here's more detail if you want to read more about how we research vendors. Our dedicated staff writers rely on hard data, impartial experts, and user feedback to ensure our reviews are helpful, truthful, and hopefully a pleasure to read!
We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best Recruiting CRMs per our research and expert council as of 2023.
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
Review:
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
AdsWizz, Renault, Genpact
SmartDreamers
Pricing:
There are three pricing plans
There are three pricing plans
Best For
SmartDreamers is best suited for fast-growing companies and enterprises.
Why we love it
:
Not only does Manatal cover most of the features you’d expect from a budget-friendly ATS, the platform tops that off with CRM features, including email campaigns and revenue tracking dashboards.
Manatal
Review:
Manatal is a budget-friendly ATS that’s got candidate/customer relationship management (CRM) features built-in. It allows companies to customize pipelines that track the progress made with prospects, from initial contact to contract. It also offers a LinkedIn chrome extension to quickly connect with and save prospects’ contact info, and email integration for communication with those prospects, as well as sending them automated responses and mass campaigns.
To track the performance of your CRM efforts, Manatal offers detailed candidate placement and revenue tracking dashboards, letting you know how many candidates were successfully hired and how much money is coming in from clients.
Manatal
Customers:
Manatal is used in over 100 countries. Their customer list includes Unilever, Cocacola, Panasonic, Ogilvy, and Toyota.
Manatal is used in over 100 countries. Their customer list includes Unilever, Cocacola, Panasonic, Ogilvy, and Toyota.
Manatal
Pricing:
Manatal has two plans with fixed pricing. When Billed annually, they cost as follows:
Note:
Manatal has two plans with fixed pricing. When Billed annually, they cost as follows:
Note:
Best For
Manatal is used by organizations of all sizes across different industries, but it’s worth noting that the ball-park of their customers are SMEs.
Why we love it
:
Eightfold's recruiting software allows you to manage your job postings, applications and resumes in one place and provides deep insights into potential candidates' profiles. It can also automatically match qualified candidates with roles that fit them.
eightfold
Review:
Eightfold’s Personalized Candidate Relationship Management is more than just a recruiting CRM. It allows you to schedule and deliver targeted campaigns to a segmented portion of your talent pool, so you can communicate with the right candidates whenever you want. The built-in CRM also offers the ability to identify the best candidates for any given message through artificial intelligence – a unique power that only a few talent CRMs offer. Or you can manually segment candidates based on their location, experience level, diversity classes, and more.
eightfold
Customers:
Eightfold’s client list includes prominent enterprises like TATA Communications, LG, Vodafone, Bayer, Chevron, Morgan Stanley, and more.
Eightfold’s client list includes prominent enterprises like TATA Communications, LG, Vodafone, Bayer, Chevron, Morgan Stanley, and more.
eightfold
Pricing:
Eightfold's pricing plans are not disclosed on its website. Contact their Sales team for a custom quote.
Eightfold's pricing plans are not disclosed on its website. Contact their Sales team for a custom quote.
Best For
Eightfold is best suited for large companies and enterprises hiring more than 100 candidates a year.
Why we love it
:
Avature packs sourcing and advanced online marketing capabilities in a single solution, so that finding and engaging critical talent can be done easily and at scale.
Avature
Review:
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 is used by over 650 companies, including Shell, Cisco, L'Oréal, Mondelez, Siemens, and KPMG.
Avature
Pricing:
As with most enterprise-level solutions, pricing is not provided upfront by the vendor.
The pricing of Avature’s plans isn’t disclosed upfront. Contact an Avature sales representative to get a custom price quote based on the size and needs of your business.
Best For
As you probably assumed from their stats, Avature is best-suited for organizations with more than 5000 employees.
Why we love it
:
Unlike most other vendors in the recruitment solutions space, TalentLyft combines customer applicant tracking, recruitment marketing, sourcing, and talent CRM solutions into one tool, enabling users to have the needed context for informed hiring decisions.
Talentlyft
Review:
TalentLyft is a one-in-all candidate relationship management solution. The software seeks to satisfy all recruitment pain points; finding, attracting, engaging, and choosing the best talent, from one location.
You can start recruiting by building a new vacancy. It’s just a matter of typing in basic information and creating a customized application form. On the forms, you can choose which fields are optional or mandatory, request the applicant's resume and cover letter, and even include screen questions. TalentLyft also allows you to place triggers for automatic disqualification on close-ended questions.
TalentLyft also permits you to automate workflows, set triggers for each phase of the recruitment, and actions to highlight and follow. Some other CRM capabilities include adding assessments to the recruitment process.
TalentLyft offers a career site editor that allows you to create personalized websites to capture talents. You can use the editor without having coding knowledge. It comes with a drag-and-drop editor and text fields that allow you to design your website easily.
The editor, unlike other recruitment site builders, doesn't just let you build a single page. Rather, you can create a complete website with multiple pages, blog, job ad page, etc. To access the editor, click the Convert module, then Edit Career Site.
Talentlyft
Customers:
Talentlyft
Pricing:
TalentLyft offers a subscription model with 2 plans: Starter Plan & Pro Plan. The plans are differentiated by the number of active positions your business is hiring for per time.
Users are allowed to change their plans based on their present needs and preferences. TalentLyft also offer a 14-day free trial.
TalentLyft offers a subscription model with 2 plans: Starter Plan & Pro Plan. The plans are differentiated by the number of active positions your business is hiring for per time.
Users are allowed to change their plans based on their present needs and preferences. TalentLyft also offer a 14-day free trial.
Best For
TalentLyft is best for mid-sized companies in the information-technology sector with a workforce of 50 to 500 people, worldwide.
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.
Symphony Talent
Review:
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.
Dick's Sporting Goods, FCA, RioTinto, Mars.
Symphony Talent
Pricing:
Pricing is undisclosed.
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.
Why we love it
:
Phenom is a comprehensive tool that lets you manage all the stages of the talent experience into a single platform.
PhenomPeople
Review:
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
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.
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.
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
Review:
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
Pricing:
Pricing for Yello is not disclosed upfront, but will vary depending on user count and other requirements.
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.
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
Review:
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
Pricing:
Beamery's pricing is undisclosed because it will vary in accordance to each company's needs.
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.
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
Review:
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:
Amazon, Randstad, Cigna, Lockton, Onpartners, CT Assist
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.
A recruiting CRM helps streamline the entire recruiting process for both you the recruiter AND your potential candidates (not to mention your colleagues who will be part of the interview and evaluation processes).
At the end of the day, it humanizes the process. With a recruitment marketing platform, candidates aren’t just looking at job listings and submitting a resume — they’re interacting with compelling content that will inspire them to either apply, ask a question in real-time, or move on. All in all, there are many reasons to use a recruitment marketing platform. Here are a few of them:
This is really just a taste of what recruitment marketing software can do for your recruiting efforts. Keep reading to learn more about the platforms and features you can expect to get from them.
When you use a CRM for recruiting, you are increasing your overall recruiting and hiring efficiency.
But these aren’t necessarily tangible benefits. To help you calculate your return on investment, check out our ROI calculator for recruitment marketing software. A lot of the value with a recruitment marketing platform is getting more people into your recruiting funnel through a better career site, and talent communities. So, this model contemplates increasing the views to applies conversion rate in row 13 - and the financial implications of this increase.
Each platform charges differently. In general, the pricing models are either per seat, per employee or per hire — and for the most part, pricing depends on the size of your company. For example, 100 person companies might pay around $5,000 per year (although this software is really for large companies) while large enterprises might pay up to seven figures. When you reach out to request a demo, don’t forget to ask about how pricing works for a company of your size.
Pricing models depend on who you partner with. Per seat, per employee, and per hire are all quite common. The bottom line is that the larger your company, the more you’ll pay.
Pro Tip: This is enterprise software, and so be on the lookout for ways to negotiate: signing a contract early, taking out implementation fees, leverage from multi year contracts (you’ll almost certainly use this software for several years, even if it’s not
As we previously mentioned, recruitment marketing software can help you find more of the right talent at a fraction of the time and cost it takes using traditional methods (like combing LinkedIn or using a recruiting firm, for example).
In today’s job market, you need to take a strategic approach to your recruitment marketing so that job seekers are inspired to apply and, if offered a job, excited to accept. Recruitment marketing software helps you round out this strategy by offering some or all of these features:
Preparing for Success: Common Mistakes HR Professionals Make During the Buying/Implementation Process — Plus, How to Avoid Them
If you’re new to recruitment marketing software, you may encounter a variety of roadblocks that make the buying and/or implementation process more difficult than it needs to be. To set yourself up for success from the start, check to see if your organization needs help in any of these key areas:
Before selecting any software program, always request a demo and go into that demo with a game plan. At the end of the day, you want to be in control of it — that way, you’ll have a clear picture of how that particular platform can benefit your hiring efforts. To prepare, come up with a list of questions specific to your recruitment marketing needs and the use-cases you care about.
The following questions are always a good place to start, no matter what the software platform is:
When it comes to recruitment marketing software specifically, here are some sample questions to ask:
Additional to this, you can also ask if they can put you in touch with some of their current customers. If they do, you can ask first-hand about the type of results they've seen from the tool, how it has impacted their recruiting efforts, and how have they found the product to evolve over time. Shout out to Todd Raphael, Head of Content at Eightfold, for helping us put together some of these.
As with most software platforms, there is no one-size-fits-all implementation process for the Recruiting Marketing Software solutions we’ve listed here. Implementation depends on a number of factors specific to your business, including the size of your company, the internal resources you have available for implementation, the amount and type of tech already in your stack, and more.
In general, small businesses can get up and running rather quickly, with the biggest hurdle being a new career site (i.e. creating content, getting sign-off from marketing, etc.). On the other hand, large enterprises may not be fully operational for over a year due to integrations with the ATS, organizational training, etc.
When you are diligencing the vendors we’ve listed, ask them on demos for their implementation plans, and then have an in depth conversation around how this will map to your organization’s idiosyncrasies. Maybe you have design resources in house, or need to get another vendor to handle this. Maybe your ATS doesn’t have an easy to apply integration with a given system - which isn’t a deal break, it just needs to be talked through.
Regardless of your business’ size, here are a few implementation best practices to help yours run as smoothly as possible:
Recruiting CRM (candidate relationship management) software is a system that allows recruiting teams to track relationships with job candidates and manage the recruiting funnel.
Recruiting CRMs and ATS’s are similar, but there are key differences. An ATS specifically manages applicants, while a recruiting CRM manages a wider pool of candidates, both active and passive. ATS’s are designed to make the hiring process more efficient. Recruiting CRMs are designed to nurture candidate relationships and boost sourcing efforts.
Key features of recruiting CRMs include:
A recruiting CRM provides multiple benefits to your company, including:
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!
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