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One of the toughest tasks in recruiting for small businesses is spotting the best fit for a job among several qualified candidates. The AI-based candidate assessment tool included with Manatal’s applicant tracking system helps companies identify the top candidates among their list of finalists.

Businesses that want to put AI to work in their recruiting efforts will find several other applicant-tracking functions boosted by Manatal’s use of AI, such as tools that gather job-relevant information from applications and other sources.

Almost any organization engaged in hiring can afford Manatal’s entry-level Professional plan, which costs $19 per user per month. The package supports up to 15 jobs per account and accommodates as many as 10,000 job candidates. Larger businesses can step up to the Enterprise offerings that start at $39 per user per month and allow for an unlimited number of job postings.

Smaller organizations choosing the Professional product will have to do without some useful features, however. Workflow automations are included with both of Manatal’s enterprise plans, and Zapier integration and Open API access are available in the high-end Enterprise Plus package.

Time matters when it comes to a growing company’s need to find qualified candidates for its open positions. The quicker you can staff up, the sooner you’ll reach your organization’s goals.

That’s why an investment in applicant-tracking technology can pay off in the short term and long term. Manatal’s AI-based recruiting and candidate-matching capabilities spot top candidates based on various sources of information that it parses automatically and converts into rankings.

Value

At only $19 per user per month, Manatal’s Professional offering delivers a lot of bang for a small business’s recruiting efforts without requiring all that many bucks. While the plan lacks workflow automations and several other useful applicant-tracking features, it includes nearly all of the company’s AI-based tools and covers your business’ compliance requirements as well. Larger firms will appreciate the Enterprise package’s removal of Professional’s cap on jobs and candidates.

Functionality

In addition to candidate scoring, Manatal applies its AI technology to several other recruitment tasks, such as collection of candidate information from social media and parsing of resumes and LinkedIn profiles. The system automatically recommends candidates based on the job description, candidate profiles and other custom criteria and filters. Manatal even uses its AI capabilities to generate job descriptions automatically.

Manatal’s Professional plan for individuals and small teams is limited to 15 jobs and 10,000 candidates per account, but it supports unlimited hiring managers and lets you create as many custom job pipelines as you need.

Sorting through a mountain of potential hires is made easier by the company’s quick search, advanced search and boolean search options. The applicant tracking system lets hiring managers screen candidates quickly and add custom tags, such as “available” and “blacklisted.”

All Manatal plans integrate with Microsoft Outlook and Office 365 as well as Google Workspace and Gmail. They let interviewers add screening and knockout questions such as legal work status and possession of a valid driver’s license. In addition to workflow automations, the Enterprise Plus offering adds management of user groups, single sign-on, priority support and custom integration capabilities.

Support

Manatal’s Professional and Enterprise packages come with 24/5 chat and email support from within your account, as well as free data migration assistance, and free onboarding and training. Weekend support is limited to “urgent matters,” according to the company.

Small businesses won’t need to start their applicant searches from scratch because Manatal provides collections of templates for job descriptions, HR emails, interview questions and HR forms. Other resources are a knowledge base, documentation, an HR glossary and live training webinars. Manatal’s Enterprise Plus plan, which costs $59 per user per month, comes with priority support, although there’s no information on what support services it adds.

Our editorial team created our expert opinion scores. The expert score contributes to 10% of the data-focused methodology, which underpins our Blueprint rating for each company. The expert score combines first-person experience, subject matter expertise and extensive research to develop these metrics as another source of truth for readers during their decision-making process.

Hiring employees is often an ad-hoc affair for small businesses, which typically lack a dedicated HR staff. Keeping everyone involved in the process is much easier when you use the collaboration tools in Workable’s solutions for recruiting and applicant tracking. Team members can easily link their email and calendars, and they share a single applicant dashboard that shows them the job status and candidate progress at a glance.

Managers can connect with job candidates directly from the dashboard and approve or deny requests from team members. They can also push notifications through Workable’s mobile app and confirm that the hiring process is moving forward as expected. Workable distributes job postings to more than 200 job boards and supports social media recruitment campaigns.

These features come at a price that suggests Workable’s applicant tracking system is intended for SMBs with more than a few dozen employees. The entry-level Starter plan, which costs $149 per month and is available to companies with up to 50 employees, lets you have only two active jobs. Workable’s Standard package supports unlimited jobs but is priced from $932 per month for businesses with 51 to 100 employees, and $1,620 for those with 101 to 250 workers.

Small businesses looking for a recruiting and applicant tracking product usually purchase a bunch of other HR features as well, whether they need them or not. Workable’s applicant tracking software gives these companies the option to buy a solution that focuses primarily on finding and onboarding new hires while adding a handful of HR features, such as an org chart and employee directory. Then they can upgrade to the company’s higher-end plans to add other employee-management functions as the needs arise.

Value

Finding and hiring the best candidates for your business’ open positions can spell the difference between a thriving operation on the way up and one that’s floundering. Small and midsize businesses will realize the value of Workable’s Starter plan through enhanced communication among the people involved in the hiring process (and with job candidates). Team members share a dashboard that shows at a glance where candidates stand in the hiring process, and they receive timely notice of actions required to keep the ball rolling.

Justifying Workable’s relatively high price becomes easier for companies with more than 50 employees that can benefit from the applicant tracking features available in the Standard and Premier plans. These include employee onboarding, time management and Premier’s payroll integrations.

Functionality

The separation of recruiting and most other HR functions in Workable’s plans gives SMBs the ability to choose the features they need now and upgrade to additional ones as they expand. However, the Starter package’s limit of two active jobs makes it a viable applicant tracking solution only for small businesses with modest hiring needs.

A great option for SMBs intending to add staff more quickly is to take Workable’s Standard package for a 15-day free spin around the block to try out some of its advanced recruiting and applicant tracking features. These include employee onboarding, e-signatures for company files and time off management. However, Workable sells several recruiting tools separately: texting is an additional $39 per month, video interviews are $49 per month and candidate assessments cost $29 per month.

Support

Workable’s support staff can be reached by clicking the user icon in the top-right corner of your account and selecting “Help” then “Ask a question.” The company’s phone and chat support hours are 3 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET Monday to Friday (excluding holidays). Its normal response time is within three hours of receipt during regular hours.

You can also contact support using the company’s web form or by email. The Workable help center features getting-started guides, a video library and tips for using the product. To learn the ins and outs of Workable’s recruiting and applicant tracking products, sign up for the company’s academy that features self-paced instruction on hiring, onboarding, reporting and other HR topics.

Our editorial team created our expert opinion scores. The expert score contributes to 10% of the data-focused methodology, which underpins our Blueprint rating for each company. The expert score combines first-person experience, subject matter expertise and extensive research to develop these metrics as another source of truth for readers during their decision-making process.

Not all businesses take a DIY approach to recruiting and applicant tracking, instead choosing to work with a staffing agency that does the heavy lifting. Other companies go to the opposite extreme and choose to take full charge of the platform they use to fill their open positions.

HiringThing focuses on offering applicant tracking and onboarding solutions as private-label systems that agencies can brand for themselves, while also serving as a platform that integrates recruiting and hiring with a business’s internal systems.

HiringThing describes private-label (or “white label”) applicant tracking systems as the “backbone” of its business. The solutions address all aspects of hiring by covering recruitment, onboarding, payroll, employee engagement, HR analytics and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) optimization.

The company’s applicant tracking platform integrates with background checks and screening, popular email services, calendars and job boards for distributing job postings. The HiringThing developer program offers a free sandbox and/or demo account, partner API keys and a referral agreement with co-marketing prospects. Its API documentation describes several use cases, including quick-apply and skill assessment tools.

This isn’t the applicant-tracking solution for your typical small business, but HiringThing still provides a valuable service to small companies by giving the staffing and recruiting agencies they’re likely to deal with the tools mom-and-pop-style organizations need to find qualified, talented workers to fill their open positions. Larger businesses benefit from HiringThing’s services for developers, which allow companies to tightly integrate applicant tracking with their other business processes.

Value

Companies with positions to fill can get a lot of mileage out of free job boards, but paid job boards are where they’re likely to find the deepest and broadest talent pools. All HiringThing plans let you post to free job boards, but adding your positions to paid boards requires the company’s Standard plan which costs $99 a month.

The applicant tracking and onboarding packages that HiringThing sells to agencies and businesses are priced based on a custom quote from the company. For staffing agencies, HiringThing’s value lies in the return they can realize by offering their client businesses a private-label applicant tracking and onboarding system. The value delivered to SMBs is the control they can exercise over all aspects of their integrated applicant tracking system.

Functionality

HiringThing puts management of how applicants are recruited and tracked in the hands of agencies and HR departments. The products HiringThing sells meet the needs of private-label applicant tracking systems and companies looking for custom solutions that are tightly integrated with their other work processes.

Hiring companies and job applicants benefit from features such as calendaring, candidate self-scheduling options and videoconferencing. The applicant tracking solutions from HiringThing use AI to screen resumes and help with writing job descriptions. To ensure your job postings reach as many potential candidates as possible, the service distributes to free and paid job boards such as LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter and Totally Hired.

Support

Support is available by opening the chat window in the bottom-right corner of pages on HiringThing’s site and then creating a support ticket by entering your name, email address and other information, including the severity of the problem for your company’s workflow. After you click the Submit button, you’re notified that you’ll receive a response from the company’s support team soon.

From within your HiringThing account, you can open a live chat window, access the support database and submit a support ticket. The HiringThing knowledge base includes sections on security, billing and plans, background checks and integrations. It also features a video library illustrating scorecards and how to customize forms.

Our editorial team created our expert opinion scores. The expert score contributes to 10% of the data-focused methodology, which underpins our Blueprint rating for each company. The expert score combines first-person experience, subject matter expertise and extensive research to develop these metrics as another source of truth for readers during their decision-making process.

The challenge of modern recruiting is sifting through the deluge of resumes and other job candidate information to make sure you spot the gems among the mountains of data rubble. Zoho Recruit takes much of the pain out of skill- and experience-matching by automating bulk resume uploads then creating a short list of top candidates.

This and other recruiting and applicant-tracking automations let businesses of all sizes respond faster to job seekers, who in turn benefit by knowing the status of their applications. Candidates are able to pose questions using Zoho Recruit’s chatbots, which serve as a first level of candidate screening. Other automations send emails and text alerts, assign tasks and update records based on preset triggering events.

Many of the automated recruiting and applicant tracking features sold by Zoho Recruit are available only in the company’s Enterprise plan. This includes Blueprint, which lets companies create automated workflows by dragging and dropping sequences of actions with branching decision trees based on specific conditions.

Taking advantage of Zoho Recruit’s state-of-the-art applicant tracking technology sends a message to job applicants that your company is taking the lead in putting business tech to work for the benefit of its customers and employees alike.

Still, the tangible rewards of adopting automated recruiting and candidate tracking are speed and accuracy: Your organization can identify top applicants quickly and guide them smoothly through the hiring pipeline.

Value

Startups and very small businesses can take advantage of Zoho Recruit’s free plan as a sort of extended trial, although the limit of a single active job makes the freebie impractical for most companies no matter their size. The true value of the company’s applicant tracking systems for small businesses is its Standard package, which costs $30 per recruiter per month and supports 100 active jobs.

Many SMBs will choose Zoho Recruit’s Premium plan so they can take advantage of the service’s assignment rules that direct records to specific recruiters based on preset criteria. Other added features of the Premium offering, which costs $60 per recruiter per month, are support for 250 active jobs, custom reports and dashboards, and recruitment forecasts.

Functionality

It’s difficult to imagine a recruiting or applicant-tracking feature that Zoho Recruit doesn’t offer. In fact, the abundance of functions in the company’s plans can overwhelm small businesses with relatively basic recruiting and hiring needs.

For example, Zoho Recruit’s Standard package comes with the ability to create 50 custom fields, 50 custom views and as many as 100 workflow alerts per user to a maximum of 3,000. Smaller operations may be daunted by the many customization options and would be better served by a solution that they can use right out of the box.

Of course, other companies will jump at the chance to create their ideal system for attracting and hiring qualified job applicants. These organizations can apply Zoho Recruit’s automations and customizations to foster closer ties to potential employees and speed up the interview and job-offer process.

However, many useful recruiting and applicant-tracking features are available only as add-ons, including video interviews ($12 per license per month) and client portals ($6 per license per month).

Support

Zoho Recruit’s paid applicant tracking systems are supported 24/5 by telephone, while its Enterprise customers have 24/7 telephone and live chat support. All of the company’s customers can reach its support staff by email with a maximum response wait of three hours for paid plans and one hour for Enterprise users. Paid customers receive 45 days of product onboarding support (Enterprise plans extend this to 60 days).

Getting started with Zoho Recruit is facilitated by the company’s help center which includes resources on talent sourcing and management, customization, automations and integrations.
Other help center resources are a developer and API guide, training videos, webinars and community forums.

Our editorial team created our expert opinion scores. The expert score contributes to 10% of the data-focused methodology, which underpins our Blueprint rating for each company. The expert score combines first-person experience, subject matter expertise and extensive research to develop these metrics as another source of truth for readers during their decision-making process.

Some businesses will find an abundance of job seekers with the background their open positions require. Others are looking to fill jobs that have more specific skills, training and other characteristics. For these companies, finding a job candidate with the unique combination of background and skills for a particular position can feel like they’re diving into haystacks in search of the world’s smallest needle.

Recruit CRM’s candidate matching feature clears away much of the proverbial straw by letting you search for candidates based on another candidate with the qualifications you seek. The company’s applicant tracking systems save businesses time by integrating with GPT, the AI engine behind the popular ChatGPT app, to help with writing job descriptions and creating email templates, among other uses

These advanced recruiting features don’t come cheap, however. Recruit CRM’s entry-level Pro package costs $100 per user per month and limits some of the product’s best features, such as allowing only two matches per candidate. Most SMBs will be better served by the company’s Business offering, which is priced at $150 per user per month and supports 50 matches per candidate.

Endless rounds of pre-interview interviews and post-interview follow-ups can make filling an open position tedious and tiring. Recruit CRM comes to the rescue with an applicant tracking solution that applies techniques that allow the best matches for jobs to rise to the top of that towering stack of resumes. Companies that can afford the product’s high price will find it helps them make short work of recruiting and hiring the best people available.

Value

Determining whether Recruit CRM’s applicant tracking systems represent a good return on your investment can be tricky because the benefits of spending less time to find higher-quality candidates may not be easy to quantify. Much of the equation will depend on the nature of the positions a company is trying to fill.

For example, an aerospace engineering business hiring rocket payload specialists will have a narrower field of candidates than a company looking for general office support staff. Similarly, locating suitable candidates for a senior management position at an import/export business requires a particular set of skills that will have been acquired over a very long career (ones that even Liam Neeson lacks).

With prices of $100 and $150 per user per month, respectively, Recruit CRM’s Pro and Business plans are most valuable to companies that struggle to find suitable candidates for their open jobs.

Functionality

AI-based resume parsing and GPT integration are examples of Recruit CRM’s application of technology to enhance a company’s bottom line by helping quickly fill jobs with the most qualified candidates available. However, the solutions also deliver the basic recruiting and applicant tracking features that help businesses establish and maintain a connection with job candidates.

Keeping in touch with applicants is facilitated by email scheduling and sequencing that combines tasks with automatic emails that continue on a preset schedule until you receive a response. Candidates can submit information through a portal to update their profile, and custom dashboards make it easy to view the status of all candidates in your job pipelines. However, some functions are limited in the entry-level Pro plan, including a single email sequence and only 15 custom fields.

Support

All Recruit CRM subscribers have access to 24/7 live chat support that claims to have an average response time under one minute. The support is available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Dutch as well as English (the company’s plans are offered in these languages as well).

Recruit CRM’s help center describes the company’s products and features and explains its applicant tracking system, job posting and onboarding, among other topics. The company also provides a video library with dozens of short videos offering tips for improving your business’ recruitment and hiring. Lastly, the Experts’ Corner features tips and advice for managers and recruiters.

Our editorial team created our expert opinion scores. The expert score contributes to 10% of the data-focused methodology, which underpins our Blueprint rating for each company. The expert score combines first-person experience, subject matter expertise and extensive research to develop these metrics as another source of truth for readers during their decision-making process.