Home
/
Reviews
/
Best Recruiting CRM Software

Best Recruiting CRMs - 2023

The Best Candidate Relationship Management Software, Benefits, Pitfalls, ROI calculations and more!

Phil Strazzulla
Written by
Phil Strazzulla
HR Tech Expert, Harvard MBA, Software Enthusiast
Contributing Experts
We are a reader supported site with strict editorial standards, clicks may earn a fee which supports our testing. Learn More
Last Updated: Jan 13, 2023
TOP
End-to-end solution
SmartDreamers
4.7
Popularity Score
4.5
User Score
4.8
Product  Score
Visit Website
TOP
End-to-end solution
SmartDreamers
4.7
Popularity Score
4.5
User Score
4.8
Product  Score
Get a Quote
TOP
SMB-friendly ATS with CRM features built-in
Manatal
4.5
Popularity Score
4.8
User Score
4.9
Product  Score
Visit Website
TOP
SMB-friendly ATS with CRM features built-in
Manatal
4.5
Popularity Score
4.8
User Score
4.9
Product  Score
Get a Quote
TOP
AI-driven candidate sourcing and job matching
eightfold
3.5
Popularity Score
4.4
User Score
4.1
Product  Score
Visit Website
TOP
AI-driven candidate sourcing and job matching
eightfold
3.5
Popularity Score
4.4
User Score
4.1
Product  Score
Get a Quote
Over 3 million HR leaders trust our advice

Introduction to Recruiting CRMs

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.

Show More +

Best Recruiting CRM Software

SmartDreamers

: End-to-end solution

Manatal

: SMB-friendly ATS with CRM features built-in

eightfold

: AI-driven candidate sourcing and job matching

Avature

: Customizable engagement workflows

Talentlyft

: Complete recruitment solution for SMBs

Symphony Talent

: Great for programmatic advertising

PhenomPeople

: Dynamic career sites

Yello

: Multi-language support

Beamery

: Quick candidate sourcing

Loxo

: Automated recruitment marketing

Our Criteria: Here's How We Chose The Best Recruiting CRM Software

We pride ourselves on strict editorial standards and use a thorough process to vet and review software before we publish it on the site (and in fact, most vendors we have to end up rejecting).  This process includes having our team of HR and recruiting experts use the tool themselves, getting user feedback, and then evaluating the vendor on key metrics like their financial health, customer retention, and responsiveness to customer queries.  You can read more about how we evaluate vendors here.

Reader Testimonials

"SelectSoftware Reviews is the best platform to discover top 1% HR tools. Their 10 years of HR Tech experience makes their reviews the best in the industry! Every time I speak about HR technology, SSR is my number one recommendation to for people pros."

Tracie Sponenberg
Chief People Officer, The Granite Group.

"SelectSoftware Reviews is my go-to place when it comes to researching HR tools. Their product reviews are real time-savers and trustworthy, and the online community is fantastic for bouncing questions and ideas off of others in the Talent space!"

Peter Stein
Building & Defining Recruiting Operations at Clear Street

"I trust SelectSoftware Reviews's HR Tech Reviews because they talk to so many experts, know the right questions to ask and uncover during in-depth product demos to come up with their best picks"

Stacie Justice
People + Strategy at Soundwide
Every month over 100,000 companies use SSR's research to find and buy the right HR software

Ready to find the right Recruiting CRMs for you?

Tap into our database of hundreds of different HR tech stacks!
Let's do this
Takes 30 sec
Next
Back
Next
By submitting this form, you consent to being contacted by Strazzulla, LLC (SelectSoftware Reviews) and up to 3 vendor partners by phone and/or email. You agree that Strazzulla, LLC may share your data with its partners to complete your request. You have the right to email us and have us delete your personal data at any time.
Back

Based on your company size & location, we recommend:

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Detailed Reviews of the Best Recruiting CRMs

SmartDreamers

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
4.7 / 5
User Score
4.5 / 5
Product Score
4.8 / 5

Why we picked SmartDreamers

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.

PROS

CONS

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

SmartDreamers Pricing

There are three pricing plans

  • Essential features social media ads, analytics, landing and career pages, ATS integration, and a detailed Academy.
  • Professional adds job board automation, advanced analytics, Google Analytics integration, A/B testing, custom forms, and multiple teams.
  • Enterprise adds niche website automation, ATS reports integration, custom reporting, CV import automation, custom career pages, and a dedicated account team.

Best For

SmartDreamers is best suited for fast-growing companies and enterprises.

No items found.

Manatal

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
4.5 / 5
User Score
4.8 / 5
Product Score
4.9 / 5

Why we picked Manatal

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.

PROS

  • Manatal is quite affordable and offers a 15-day free trial for users to test it out before making commitments.
  • Manatal is fairly easy to use. It features drag-and-drop enabled pipelines for candidate organization.
  • Manatal’s AI-based recommendations feature can save hiring managers quite a bit of time. It’s able to scan job descriptions then search a users talent pool and bring up candidates most suited for the job.

CONS

  • The AI recommendations feature works best with resumes that are in English, and doesn’t work as accurately with other languages according to several users’ feedback. Several users have also complained about Manatal’s interface only being available in English and that career pages cannot be published in languages other than English and Spanish. 
  • Manatal doesn’t offer a free plan. We mention this as a con as several SMB-geared ATSs do offer a free-forever verison, and that puts Manatal slightly behind competition. 
  • Manatal doesn’t offer prebuilt integration modules. They do have an open API that allows users to plug in third-party products and custom tools, but that required a bit more time and technical knowledge to accomplish. It’s also worth mentioning that only Custom plan customers can access Manatal’s API and Zapier integration. Customers on the Professional and Enterprise plan cannot.
  • Users can search for candidates via Boolean Search or Advanced Search, but cannot combine the two search methods together. E.g users cannot use the Boolean search operators (AND, OR and NOT) within Manatal’s Advanced Search tab.

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 Pricing

Manatal has two plans with fixed pricing. When Billed annually, they cost as follows:

  • Professional: This plan costs $15 per user per month for up to 15 jobs per account and 10,000 candidates. Customers on this plan can add unlimited guests.
  • Enterprise: This plan costs $35 per user per month for unlimited jobs per account, as well as unlimited  candidates and guests.

Note:

  • “Users” refers to the individuals with full unrestricted access to Manatal’s platform and its features such as recruiters and HR professionals who actively use the software.
  • “Guests” refers to individuals who are invited to collaborate on the platform through a dedicated portal such as hiring managers and decision-makers. These guests can access the platform free of charge and do not count towards the billable number of users.

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.

No items found.

eightfold

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
3.5 / 5
User Score
4.4 / 5
Product Score
4.1 / 5

Why we picked eightfold

Eightfold's talent intelligence platform covers every step of recruiting, from AI-powered candidate sourcing to the final selection. You can manage your job postings, applications and resumes all from the same place.

PROS

  • Eightfold uses AI technology to analyze your job postings and find the best fitting candidates. It can also rank those candidates based on their skills, experience and potential.
  • You can filter candidate searches by experience level or salary range so that you only see candidates that fit your hiring criteria.
  • The platform encourages diversity hiring and enables you to eliminate hiring bias through anonymous screening, aka profile masking
  • It improves overall employee experience by providing tailored training and development opportunities based on their skill sets and interests.
  • It has a built-in CRM to store and manage HR data about potential candidates, current employees, and previous employees.

CONS

  • There isn’t a way for hiring managers and recruiters to leave notes on candidates profiles within the system which is rather inconvenient.
  • Eightfold has a mobile app that employees can access for skills development but doesn’t currently have one for hiring managers and recruiters to manage their pipeline and perform other actions relating to the hiring process.
  • Several users reported that the tool does not search for candidates outside its database.
  • The platform’s pricing isn’t transparent and there is no free trial at this time.

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 Pricing

Eightfold's pricing plans are not disclosed on its website. Contact their Sales team for a custom quote.

Best For

Eightfold works best for organizations looking to fill more than 100 roles per year.

No items found.

Avature

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
4.7 / 5
User Score
4.4 / 5
Product Score
4.7 / 5

Why we picked Avature

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.

PROS

  • Avature’s solution is quite comprehensive. They have a full-fledged ATS with built-in video interviewing, offer management and onboarding solutions. They also have a CRM, allowing TA teams to amp up candidate engagement and plan for future hiring. 
  • Avature leverages artificial intelligence with features of automatic talent matching and candidate ranking. 
  • Avature comes with a recruiter mobile app that allows key stakeholders to perform several recruiting tasks while on the go. The app also supports offline use, and syncs with the system the next time it’s connected to the Internet.

CONS

  • Avature’s pricing is not readily available on their website. They also do not offer a free trial.
  • Several users noted that the UI isn’t intuitive and takes some time to get used to.
  • Avature’s assessment feature is quite basic and isn’t built out enough compared to point solutions in that space. So if you want to test the skills and cultural fitness of candidates, you’d need a third-party solution.
  • Avature doesn’t have an automated reference checking feature built-in. The platform does integrate with third-party solutions that facilitate reference checking, but you’ll have to purchase those solutions too separately.

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 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.

No items found.

Talentlyft

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
3.3 / 5
User Score
4.9 / 5
Product Score
4.2 / 5

Why we picked Talentlyft

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.

PROS

  • TalentLyft offers an affordable pricing model that is flexible depending on the number of open positions you want to have at a given time. Hence, you're not forced to pay for position space you don't need. 
  • They offer a customized hand-held onboarding process where the customer success team shows you how to use the tool, taking the necessary time to go through the features that matter most to your company. 
  • The career site editor has a drag-and-drop feature that allows you to build a custom site without prior coding experience. 
  • TalentLyft offers integrations to many job boards allowing you to post openings from one location.
  • TalentLyft offers an affordable pricing model that is flexible depending on the number of open positions you want to have at a given time. Hence, you're not forced to pay for position space you don't need. 
  • They offer a customized hand-held onboarding process where the customer success team shows you how to use the tool, taking the necessary time to go through the features that matter most to your company. 
  • The career site editor has a drag-and-drop feature that allows you to build a custom site without prior coding experience. 
  • TalentLyft offers integrations to many job boards allowing you to post openings from one location.

CONS

  • There is no support for video interviews and there are very few integrations allowing for it. 
  • Some users complain about technical glitches like certain applicants not receiving emails or search features not functioning optimally. 
  • Candidate replies go straight to the recruiters' email rather than their TalentLyft account. Some would find it preferable to have everything in one location.
  • There is no support for video interviews and there are very few integrations allowing for it. 
  • Some users complain about technical glitches like certain applicants not receiving emails or search features not functioning optimally. 
  • Candidate replies go straight to the recruiters' email rather than their TalentLyft account. Some would find it preferable to have everything in one location.

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

  • KPMG
  • Raiffeisen bank
  • Erste bank
  • Ericsson
  • Microblink
  • Falkensteiner
  • Dekra
  • Decathlon
  • HT Group
  • Zepter

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.

  • Starter Plan: This starts at $40 per month for 2 active jobs and includes features like job board syndication, interview kits, scorecards, reporting, branded career pages, unlimited users and pools, chrome sourcing extension, and employee referral program. 
  • Pro Plan: This starts at $82 per month for 2 active jobs and includes everything on the starter package plus workflow automation, a custom domain for your careers site, custom fields, multiple recruiting pipelines, and a dedicated account manager. 

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.

No items found.

Symphony Talent

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
3.6 / 5
User Score
3.8 / 5
Product Score
3.8 / 5

Why we picked Symphony Talent

Symphony Talent's SmashFlyX is a powerful platform that combines CRM, career sites, and programmatic advertising for smart recruitment marketing and campaigning.

PROS

CONS

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.

Symphony Talent Pricing

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.

No items found.

PhenomPeople

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
4.3 / 5
User Score
4.5 / 5
Product Score
4.6 / 5

Why we picked PhenomPeople

Phenom is a comprehensive tool that lets you manage all the stages of the talent experience into a single platform.

PROS

CONS

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

  • Microsoft
  • Southwest
  • Honeywell
  • NFI
  • CSG
  • RentPath

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.

No items found.

Yello

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
4.2 / 5
User Score
4.2 / 5
Product Score
4.4 / 5

Why we picked Yello

Many HR professionals gladly use Yello to hire with more effectiveness, sourcing, engaging, and advancing candidates in a single platform.

PROS

CONS

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

  • Johnson & Johnson
  • eBay
  • Toyota
  • BDO
  • Adobe

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.  

No items found.

Beamery

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
4.1 / 5
User Score
4.1 / 5
Product Score
4.2 / 5

Why we picked Beamery

Beamery's Talent CRM is a nice-looking tool with notable features such as one-click sourcing, automated workflows, and nurture pools.

PROS

CONS

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

  • AstraZeneca
  • Workday
  • Continental
  • Nasdaq
  • Zoom

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.

No items found.

Loxo

Visit Website
Get A Quote
Popularity Score
3.2 / 5
User Score
4.6 / 5
Product Score
4 / 5

Why we picked Loxo

Loxo’s comprehensive recruiting platform packs a CRM that lets you put recruitment marketing on autopilot by pre-building emails, SMS, phone calls, and LinkedIn engagement.

PROS

  • Loxo’s massive database provides recruiters with a wide pool of potential talent to choose from.
  • Utilizing AI technology, the platform effectively identifies, screens, and ranks the most suitable candidates from its database.
  • The availability of a free plan with unlimited user seats and job postings allows for flexibility and cost savings.
  • Loxo integrates a comprehensive Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) system into its platform.
  • The customer service is highly rated by users, citing that it’s fairly fast to get help when needed.
  • The platform enables the scheduling of multi-medium campaigns with timed sequences, automatically pausing when a contacted candidate responds.

CONS

  • Due to its advanced features and sophisticated nature, it takes users quite a bit of time to get the hang of the platform.
  • Integration with third-party VOIP services for call and text recording isn’t currently supported.
  • Some of the database candidates’ information is outdated, and contact details are limited to work emails.
  • The complexity of the Boolean search and internal searches leads to missed or skipped candidates.
  • The mobile app offers limited functionality and primarily supports outreach activities.
  • A few users have experienced occasional lags in bulk emailing.

Loxo Review

Loxo's platform is specifically designed to enhance the efficiency of recruiting teams. What sets Loxo apart from other CRM systems is its extensive database, complete with the contact information of over 1.2 billion people. Leveraging this database, Loxo’s CRM helps recruiters build lists of candidates, organize them in pipelines, and do outreach through automated sequences of texts, emails, calls, and even Linkedin, in one place.

We appreciate Loxo’s holistic approach to recruiting, with additional tools for you to source, screen, track, and keep applicants engaged throughout the hiring process.

Loxo Customers

Bank of America, Amazon, All-State, Trinity Health, and Lockheed Martin are a few of the companies that use Loxo.

Loxo Pricing

  • Loxo has three pricing tiers, Free, Professional, and Enterprise. Free, you guessed it, is free of charge, comes with moderate access to the platform’s ATS and recruiting CRM, and allows for an unlimited number of seats and jobs. Do note that add-ons are not included in this plan and are purchased separately.
  • The Professional plan costs $299 per seat per month (billed annually) and gives users access to everything in the Free plan, plus advanced addons for sourcing and outreach, customized workflows, built-in communication tools (email, SMS, & calling), guided onboarding, priority customer support, and more.
  • Lastly, Loxo’s Enterprise plan is made for companies that do volume hiring and require advanced security. On this plan, you get all of the features in Professional, plus AI internal mobility sourcing, e-signature integration, SSO, SOC 2 Type II reporting, audit logs, different deployment options, and a private database instance. Contact Loxo’s Sales team for a price quote.

Best For

From their client list, you may gather that Loxo is suitable for companies of different sizes and all sorts of industries. While that is true, it is worth mentioning that their product is made with agencies' and mid-sized companies' needs in mind.

No items found.

Why Use a Recruiting CRM

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:

  • Engage people who have already expressed an interest: Like ads served to you based on past internet searches, the cornerstone of digital marketing, a recruiting CRM lets you target candidates that have engaged your company, career site, or job ads in some way. Instead of paying to find new candidates each time, you can prioritize this segment. Since it's an arguably high-intent group, at least in some percentage, you can save time and money. For instance, after Activision implemented Eightfold, 41% of their 2021 hires were rediscovery candidates, meaning, employees hired for a role different to the one they first applied to.
  • Convince more career site visitors to apply: You can build a better career site to tell your employer branding story. This ultimately allows candidates to learn more about who your company is — not just what your company does. You can even create separate landing pages/microsites for key roles, giving you the opportunity to provide more than the standard job description and requirements.
  • Build talent communities: Nurture passive candidates via talent communities. If you meet someone who would be a great fit for your company but you don’t have the right opportunity for them now, you can log their information until the right job becomes available. These talent communities will live in the built-in CRM, which will also let you keep track of active candidates, recruiter tasks, candidate feedback, and more.
  • Make a great first impression on potential candidates: Use built-in HR Chatbots to answer job seeker questions in real-time. Interacting with candidates while they’re researching your company gives you more direct access to “warm leads” you might otherwise miss. It also shows them that you’re interested in them, which could be the reason they submit an application in the first place.

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.

Pro Tips on Recruiting CRMs

Benefits and ROI From Candidate Relationship Management Software

When you use a CRM for recruiting, you are increasing your overall recruiting and hiring efficiency.

  • More candidates: You’re attracting more of the right candidates, faster.
  • Faster time to fill roles: You’re filling key roles, faster.
  • Higher recruiter productivity: And you’re increasing your company’s productivity, faster.
  • Better analytics: You know what works best — and what’s not worth your time (or budget)

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.

Recruitment CRM Software Pricing

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

Key Features: What You Can Expect from a recruiting CRM

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:

  • Optimized Career Sites: Build a more interactive career site to tell your employer branding story and attract candidates. To convince people to apply for (and then accept) roles, you need a dynamic site that shows relevant content to each person (for example, tech-related info for engineers, diversity initiatives, company culture-related activities, etc.).
  • Talent Communities: Nurture passive candidates so you have a pool of potential job-seekers when the right opportunity opens up at your company. Maybe you find someone who would be a great fit for your company AND they’re interested in working there, but you don’t have the right role for them at the moment. Keeping their information on file and building a relationship with them now will pay off in the long run when the right opp finally comes along.
  • HR Chatbots: Communicate with job-seekers in real-time as they are on your career site and considering applying. If they have questions, they can ask them in real-time, ultimately preventing candidate drop-off and increasing their chances of submitting that application.
  • CRM Tracking: Keep track of candidates, feedback, recruiter tasks, etc. with Candidate Relationship Management. You’ll be more organized with tracking, reporting, following up, etc. which means your overall productivity will increase.
  • Landing Pages & Microsites for Key Roles: Sometimes, a standard job description and job requirements aren’t enough to sell a role. Build individualized pages for key roles that require more information, stats, etc. Again, the goal is to inform candidates so they have fewer questions and are more likely to apply.
  • Centralized Content: House all your recruiting content in one place and transmit it seamlessly across email, social media, and more. This will save you time in the long run as you’ll no longer have to post the same content on all of your channels individually — and you’ll have tracking for all these posts in one place so you can more easily see which channel is more effective at bringing in applications.
  • Campaigns & Tracking: Create, send and track recruiting campaigns from one place. See who is responding to them and who needs follow-ups, run A/B tests to see what kind of selling points get the most attention and applications, etc.
  • Recruitment Events: Ditch the clipboards at your next recruiting event. Instead, go digital and keep better track of who stopped by your table/booth. Most recruitment marketing platforms let you do mobile check-ins, send more streamlined communication before and after, and more.
  • Candidate Screening & Evaluations: Find candidates that are the right fit for your company and run necessary background checks. At the same time, keep track of the feedback you and your colleagues have so you can make hiring decisions faster and prevent candidate dropoff.
  • Interview Scheduling: With built-in and easy-to-use scheduling, candidates can self-select the times that work best for their phone screens and in-person interviews. This eliminates the tedious back-and-forth of email scheduling that can sometimes cause a candidate to slip through the cracks.
  • Video Interviews: If a promising candidate isn’t in your immediate area, you don’t have to fly them in for an interview. Instead, conduct live video interviews from anywhere or have candidates pre-record their interviews to share with your team.
  • Analytics & ROI: Not sure if that last email campaign to your candidate database was successful? Are those company stats on your career site the right ones to hook candidates? With built-in analytics and tracking, you can make more informed decisions about what strategies are working best — and which ones aren’t.

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:

  • Content (i.e. no content strategy for your career site): Your career site is what you’ll use to tell your employer branding story. What story will you tell and what other information do you want to include? As a start, compile your company’s core values, any employer-related awards (like Inc’s Best Places to Work), company stats, employee testimonials, and benefits.
  • Engagement (i.e. no email strategy for talent communities): How do you plan on engaging your various talent communities — and how are you segmenting them? Will you send regular email campaigns? What information will you send in each campaign? These are all questions to think about as part of your recruitment marketing strategy.
  • CRM (i.e. lack of CRM training): This is a no-brainer, but you’ll need to know how to use your CRM to its fullest potential. Most platforms offer onboarding/training help, so make sure to take them up on it!
  • Cross-Functionality (i.e. not leveraging your marketing team as a strategic advisor): It’s always a good idea to engage your marketing team — especially when it comes to your content and email strategies. After all, your marketing team ultimately creates your company’s story, voice and talking points — and they’ve tried and tested what works to attract customers. To make sure you’re consistent and on-message (not to mention poised for success), use your marketing team as a strategic advisor.
  • Marketing Expertise (i.e. no one on recruiting/HR team has marketing DNA): As you’re building out your recruiting team, look for folks that have some marketing background. While your marketing team will be a helpful advisor, it’s even more advantageous to have someone with marketing experience helping with day-to-day recruiting.
  • Selective Usage (i.e. you don’t use all the functionality offered): When using a new software platform, many companies only leverage a portion of the features. When you’re not taking advantage of everything, you’re ultimately selling your efforts short. In most cases, the features are designed to be used together so you can more seamlessly and more efficiently find success. So if you’re paying for the full suite, use the full suite!

Demo Questions: What to Ask During Your Demo

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:

  • How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack? What integrations do I need?
  • How will others in the organization use this solution?
  • What are the key features I want to ask about?
  • What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution?
  • How does pricing work?
  • What implementation guidelines do they suggest?

When it comes to recruitment marketing software specifically, here are some sample questions to ask:

  • How is automation built into the product?
  • How does your system talk to the ATS? What are the advantages and disadvantages of hooking it up to it?
  • What is your 12-month product roadmap?
  • What changes in recruiter efficiency have you seen?
  • What changes do you see in the conversion rates across the various parts of the hiring funnel?
  • How long does it take to get a new career site up? Who supplies the content for this? What’s the overall design process?
  • How would the product work for a job fair or events?
  • Who's on the team behind AI and data? Does the company hold any patents?

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.

Implementing Candidate Relationship Management Software

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:

  • Select a project manager: Appoint one person to oversee the implementation process and keep track of key stakeholders, timelines, communication (both internally and with the software provider), etc.  Without one person incentivized and empowered to own this project, it will drag.
  • Understand tech requirements: Find out what tech requirements and/or system integrations are necessary for this implementation upfront. To determine this, discuss with your tech and/or IT teams as well as the account rep at your vendor of choice.  Get as SPECIFIC as possible when you ask for what kind of integrations need to happen and how they will happen.
  • Stay focused: Create a well-defined scope to keep things on track, on time and on budget.  The functional lead who is running with this project (probably head of TA or CHRO/CPO) should have regular checkins with the project manager here.
  • Have regular check-ins: You’ll want to have regular touchpoints with your key stakeholders outside of the point person to make sure everything is running smoothly. Whether these happen daily, weekly or monthly depends on the scope of your implementation, where you are in the process, and the estimated timeline.
  • Business Goals: When things get slow, or various stakeholders are holding you up, simply go back to your ROI analysis and why this is important to your company as a way to get senior leaders to move the ball forward with whoever is stalling you.

Recruiting CRMs FAQs

What is a recruiting CRM?

Recruiting CRM (candidate relationship management) software is a system that allows recruiting teams to track relationships with job candidates and manage the recruiting funnel.

What’s the difference between a recruiting CRM and an ATS?

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.

What are some recruiting CRM features?

Key features of recruiting CRMs include:

  • Career site
  • Talent communities
  • HR chatbots
  • CRM tracking
  • Landing pages and microsites for key roles
  • Centralized content
  • Candidate screening
  • Events
  • Video interviewing
  • Interview scheduling
  • Analytics

Why use a recruiting CRM?

A recruiting CRM provides multiple benefits to your company, including:

  • Stronger career site
  • Built out talent pool
  • Better first impressions with candidates
  • Faster time-to-fill
  • More powerful recruiting analytics

What To Do Next

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!

Looking for HR Tech Advice?

Join our community

Ask questions, share knowledge, find new job opportunities, network and more in our 
closed HR Tech Buyers Community

View Community

About Us

  • Our goal at SSR is to help HR and recruiting teams to find and buy the right software for their needs.
  • Our site is free to use as some vendors will pay us for web traffic.
  • SSR lists all companies we feel are top vendors - not just those who pay us - in our comprehensive directories full of the advice needed to make the right purchase decision for your HR team.

Interested in getting in touch with ?

By submitting this form, you consent to being contacted by Strazzulla, LLC (SelectSoftware Reviews) and up to 3 vendor partners by phone and/or email. You agree that Strazzulla, LLC may share your data with its partners to complete your request. You have the right to email us and have us delete your personal data at any time.

Thank you! We'll get in touch with you shortly

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.