8 Best Recruiting Software for Small Businesses
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Preparing job adverts, creating listings on job boards, managing hundreds of applicants — all these recruitment efforts take a huge amount of time and energy. Wouldn’t it be great if hiring employees for your small business was a little less manually intensive? That’s where cloud-based recruiting software for small businesses comes in. The right software solution uses automation and intuitive features to eliminate repetitive tasks, streamline workflows, and give you more time to focus on finding the best match for your role.
Using the top recruitment software to solve this problem just makes sense. The trouble is, there are so many different options when it comes to hiring software for small businesses.
In this guide, we’ve combined our own research and experience in this field to bring you a shortlist of the best recruiting software for small businesses along with their key features and pricing plans.
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Best recruitment software for small businesses and startups
Charlie Recruit introduces recruitment and applicant tracking system (ATS) features to the much-loved Charlie platform. Human resources and hiring teams can use Charlie Recruit to take care of all their hiring needs — from application to onboarding.
Simplify the process and remove those recruitment headaches with features that empower you to make better, faster, and fairer hiring decisions. Automate manual tasks, schedule interviews seamlessly, and personalise communications for a smoother candidate (and recruiter) experience. Introduce a fairer environment for candidate assessment, with features that help you minimise bias, score candidates objectively, and make decisions based on the candidate’s skills, experience, and competencies.
Charlie Recruit gives you all the features you need for smart, streamlined, and fairer hiring. When you combine this with the core Charlie platform, you have all the HR features you need in one place — making it even easier for even the smallest of businesses to embrace a better way to do HR.
Small business recruitment with Charlie
- Simplify the candidate management process from start to finish
- Streamline the candidate experience with built-in application forms
- Store all your candidate information in one place
- Grow your business when you need to with unlimited vacancies
- Create and launch a personalised careers portal that highlights your company and culture
- Minimise bias and create a fairer environment with blind hiring features and weighted scorecards
- Score qualified candidates effectively with a best-fit analysis
- Automate interview scheduling with seamless calendar sync
- Make applicants feel at home with a personalised candidate portal
- Send personalised communications to applicants to keep them engaged
- Take your new hires through an easy and seamless onboarding process
- Send contracts and manage eSignatures without leaving the software
- Make data-driven decisions with the help of analytics and reports
Verified User in Management Consulting, G2 review
“Even though we're a small company, the time saved using this platform runs to over 200 hours per year. We've had several HR meetings with Charlie for support and they've always been so quick to get back to us with clear advice which is tailored to us.”
Pricing
Charlie Recruit starts at £55 +VAT per month for 1-14 team members and unlimited job openings. An ongoing subscription of Charlie is required — this starts at just £20 per month.
Best recruitment software for US-based small medium sized businesses
BambooHR is an all-in-one HR and recruitment platform that includes features for hiring and onboarding. Users can benefit from a built-in applicant tracking system and recruiting solution with collaboration, letter templates, and the ability to quickly list an advert on job boards.
BambooHR is designed with the US in mind, so some UK-based companies may find specific wording or features unnecessary. It’s also best suited to companies with 150+ employees.
Small business recruitment with BambooHR
- Track applicants from interest through to offer and onboarding
- Collaborate on recruitment with a built-in messaging system
- Never forget an offer letter with customisable letter templates
- Manage recruitment on the move with the BambooHR® Hiring mobile app
- Review and improve your hiring processes with analytics and reports
Bethany A., G2 review
“It's been a great tool for a company our size in our hiring and recruitment. Love that it automatically posts our job listings to partner sites - saves us time and money.”
Pricing
Available on request.
Best recruitment software for fast-growing startups and medium-sized businesses
Workable is a popular software for recruiting that covers employee sourcing, hiring, and onboarding. The platform uses AI features to surface suitable candidates, along with automation to help eliminate manual tasks.
Workable is another platform that’s built for the US market, and its relatively high monthly price point and limited included features may make it less appealing to the smallest of businesses.
Small business recruitment with Workable
- Generate a list of best-fit and top talent candidates automatically with AI Recruiter
- Post job ads to over 200+ sites in just one click
- Hire more inclusively with built-in anonymised screening tools
- Access pre-made interview kits, scorecards, and letters
- Streamline interview scheduling with self-serve and automated options
Joy S., G2 review
“The different stages of the hiring process help me stay organised while in the process. I also love how it seamlessly integrates with the other job sites so that I only have to go to one spot for everything involved with posting and managing the applicants.”
Pricing
Plans start at $149/month for Starter, which includes 2 active jobs alongside core recruiting features.
Best recruitment software for startups and staffing agencies
Zoho Recruit is a tool that combines applicant tracking software with a CRM system. The platform focuses on using automation to streamline the recruiter and applicant experience, with candidate sourcing, social recruiting, and AI-powered recruitment.
Zoho Recruit’s mix of features and the way it’s designed make it a promising choice for recruitment agencies or larger teams, but it may be overkill for some small businesses.
Small business recruitment with Zoho Recruit
- Create and launch a branded careers site
- Reach potential candidates with a one-click job posting on 50+ sites
- Store data and filter through candidates in the built-in CRM
- Use AI matching to identify the best candidates
- Automate communications with applicants and incoming employees
Adam Q., G2 review.
“As a startup it was really helpful to use Zoho recruit to intake a ton of applicants, stand up a careers page, organize a hiring process and set up a few email automations. The fact that I could do that all in one app allowed us to make our hiring process way less manual.”
Pricing
From free, for one active job listing and limited features. Paid plans start at £20/month per recruiter, for 10 active jobs and a wider range of hiring features.
Best recruitment software for purpose-focused startups
Greenhouse brings candidate sourcing, applicant tracking, and onboarding together in one place. It’s billed as an “all-together” hiring platform, with a focus on purposeful, collaborative, equitable, and engaging recruitment.
Greenhouse’s ethos and feature set make it ideal for startups that are highly values-driven. If you’re looking for a more traditional or simple recruiting software, your specific needs might be better served elsewhere.
Small business recruitment with Greenhouse
- Send automated yet personalised bulk outreach campaigns
- Build a branded corporate careers page that highlights your company culture
- Improve equity, diversity, and inclusion with features designed to remove bias
- Improve communication with automated reminders and alerts for team members and applicants
- Create a structured hiring plan and use automation to streamline tasks
Gabby B., G2 review.
“I really like the ability to be able to automate processes like the auto-reject function for candidates who don't meet expectations. I also like the data dashboard that gives us insight on diversity metrics as well as other important recruiting metrics.”
Pricing
Available on request.
Best recruitment software for medium-sized companies with multiple recruiters
JazzHR offers application tracking software alongside other beneficial features, like employer branding, recruitment compliance, and collaborative hiring. The platform specialises in recruitment, so you’ll need to use another tool to support onboarding and ongoing employee management.
Unlike some platforms where you pay per recruiter, JazzHR’s plans include unlimited users. This makes it a good option for medium-sized companies with a larger HR team.
Small business recruitment with JazzHR
- Build a customised careers page for your brand
- Syndicate job listings to key sites in one click
- Collaborate on hiring decisions with a real-time candidate stream
- Assign tasks to team members automatically to speed up your workflow
- Send personalised emails to candidates at key moments
Ashley Robinson K., G2 review.
“Having JazzHR, simplifies my process to post jobs and have applicants all in one database for not only ease of my HR processes, but also my hiring manager team.”
Pricing
Starting at $75/month for the Hero plan, which includes 3 active job listings.
Best recruitment software for high-growth startups
Breezy is a modern hiring software designed to help speed up the recruitment process. The platform uses automation to cut down on manual tasks, and integrates with a range of HRIS and employee management systems to bring all your data together.
Breezy’s features and platform seem to be built with growth in mind, making it a good candidate for teams that are planning to accelerate their startup and need to hire quickly.
Small business recruitment with Breezy
- Design a careers site to showcase your employer brand
- Promote your job listings on over 50+ sites in one click
- Remove bias with Incognito Apply, which removes identifying details automatically
- Automate repetitive tasks like interview scheduling and emails
- Tap into 800+ recruiting and HR templates to streamline your workflows
Beka C., G2 review.
“Though Breezy had a steep learning curve, I now view it as user-friendly and intuitive. The learning curve was derived from the variety of ways to accomplish the same goal.”
Pricing
Free plan available, which includes basic features for one position or talent pool. Paid plans start at $157/month for the Startup plan, which includes one active position and more features.
Best recruitment software for early stage and growing startups
GoHire is a recruitment software tool that HR teams can use to attract candidates, manage recruitment, and improve the candidate experience. The platform is clean, modern, and designed to help recruiters hire the best candidates quickly.
As a UK headquartered company, GoHire is a good choice for UK startups and small businesses, as well as small recruitment agencies.
Small business recruitment with GoHire
- Use one-click job posting to list your advert on 15+ sites
- Streamline recruitment with job description and offer letter templates
- Showcase your brand with a dedicated careers page or job listing widget
- Allow candidates to self-schedule interviews
- Work together with collaborative candidate notes and a team inbox
Chris M., G2 review.
“GoHire does the job. I used it to hire a small team for a tech start-up and after trying to use spreadsheets, Trello and all the other non-fit-for purpose tools found GoHire to do exactly what was needed.”
Pricing
Starting at £69/month for the Starter plan, which includes 3 active job posts and all standard features.
Simplify the hiring process with Charlie
Recruitment tools can take all those repetitive, manual, time consuming tasks within the talent acquisition process and automate them for you — saving you time, energy, and effort.
With Charlie Recruit, you can enjoy all those benefits and more, with a platform that combines not only hiring features but everything you need to make HR feel effortless.
Explore what Charlie Recruit has to offer and discover an easier way to grow your team.
Written by:
Jenny Tattum
Jenny is a Senior Product Manager at CharlieHR. She has years of experience with product planning and development, and user research too – she put together this guide by collecting data and information on competitors so we could improve our product and tailor it to small business owners.
At last – hiring and HR, all in one place
Recruiting software for small businesses — Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
HR recruitment software, also known simply as recruitment software, makes it easier to manage the hiring process from start to finish. These tools include features that allow you to prepare and list job descriptions, post to job boards, source candidates, shortlist CVs, and manage the interview process.
The best software for recruitment will depend on your individual needs. Some software tools are designed for big businesses with large recruitment teams, while others are designed with hiring agencies in mind. If you take care of HR for a small business, you’ll want software designed with you in mind — like Charlie.
While you can use both for recruitment purposes, a customer relationship management (CRM) system and applicant tracking system (ATS) are subtly different. You can use a CRM system for multiple purposes like collecting customer records, storing employee details, or keeping potential applicants’ details safe. With an ATS, its sole purpose is to support recruitment — allowing you to track applicants and their details right the way through the hiring process.
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