Top 9: Hiring Software Solutions for Small Businesses and Startups
Welcome toTop 10, Recruiter.com’s weekly rundown of the best of the best in recruiting! Every Friday, we release a list of some of our favorite people, things, and ideas dominating the industry. From awesome tech tools and cool companies to great books and powerful trends, no stone in the recruiting space will be left unturned.
This Week: Top 9 Hiring Software Solutions for Small Businesses and Startups
In a sense, today’s recruiters and hiring managers are a bit spoiled: No matter the challenges they may face in the hiring process, there’s a software out there to help.
Of course, whether or not recruiters and hiring managers have the funds or executive buy-in they need to acquire these software solutions is another matter entirely – but at least the hiring teams of larger organizations have a shot. For small businesses and startups, the picture is often a little bleaker: Most hiring software solutions are simply out of the question; the budget can’t accommodate such purchases just yet. Moreover, these businesses rarely, if ever, have dedicated recruiting and hiring teams in the labor market. Even if these companies could afford to purchase big-name hiring software, they wouldn’t be able to dedicate precious manpower to learning and operating these often arcane systems – there’s too much work to do!
Which is exactly why we’ve compiled today’s Top 9. It is a list of hiring software solutions that are uniquely attuned to the needs of small businesses and startups. From affordable pricing to simple, efficient interfaces, the following 9 softwares offer the features and functions that startups and small businesses need in order to make great hires without breaking the bank or wasting their limited resources on overly complex hiring processes.
1. Comeet
Many of the major players in the hiring software space offer solutions that tend to be more complicated than is necessary. Thankfully, the era of the power user is quickly coming to a close – and companies like Comeet are leading the charge. If ease of use is important to you, then you may want to look into Comeet, which won a 2015 UX Award for user experience excellence thanks to its simple and efficient design.
Nigel Ravenhill, who handles marketing for Comeet, says that “ease-of-deployment with minimal employee training” is of the utmost importance to the company. That’s what makes it such a good fit for startups and small businesses: Even if the employees who are handling the hiring process are not highly trained in the ways of hiring software, they’ll be able to pick up Comeet in just a few minutes.
2. Workable
Earlier this year, Business News Daily named Workable the “Best Recruiting Software for Small Business Overall,” and it’s easy to see why. Workable was specifically designed for the hiring needs of small businesses and startups. Users can post jobs to multiple boards with one click, create their own branded career sites (even if they know nothing about coding or site design), and track and review applicants, all without leaving Workable’s software.
Workable has also received high praise from its users. For example, Ed Cooke, cofounder of Memrise, has this to say about the software: “I’m deeply impressed with the functionality available – I can even see recruiting getting addictive through Workable.”
A one-stop hiring software that is easy to use and even “addictive”? Solutions like that don’t come around very often.
3. Lever
For startups and small businesses, hiring is almost always a collaborative affair. Because these companies don’t generally have dedicated hiring teams, employees and leaders usually work together to find, review, and select the right candidates, especially in the earliest stages of the business’s life.
Lever made it to our list because it is an ATS that is all about collaboration. By incorporating the @-mention systems we all know and love from social media, Lever makes it easy to quickly grab your coworkers’ attentions. Perhaps the coolest feature, though, is the email sync: Lever allows users to synchronize their email inboxes with the platform, which means all communication between the company is stored in one central location. Anyone from the team can check out how communication is going with a given candidate and where it needs to go. No more chaotic email chains!
4. BambooHR
Mariame Bakkouri, content marketing manager at business software review website Cloudswave, is responsible for putting BambooHR on our radar – and we’re glad she did.
“It is considered as the No. 1 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that provides online HR software services for small and medium businesses,” Bakkouri says. “BambooHR has a cloud-based system that is very intuitive and helps growing companies to manage employee information using a personalized human resources information system (HRIS).”
Bakkouri’s comments get to the heart of why BambooHR earned a spot on this list: It doesn’t just help small businesses and startups make hires – it also helps them keep track of those hires once they are on board. Just like ATSs, HRIS software is usually out of reach for small businesses and startups. BambooHR offers both an ATS and HRIS in one package. Goodbye, slapdash recordkeeping systems – hello, streamlined, high-tech human resources (even if you don’t technically have a human resources department yet).
5. Underdog.io
If you own, operate, or work for a startup, you already know that the single biggest obstacle in the hiring process is a lack of time and manpower. The hiring process often requires a lot of dedication, and when you’re working with a limited staff, it’s hard to pull people away from more immediate tasks to have them focus on hiring instead. Underdog.io solves this problem by doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Underdog.io deals exclusively in jobs at startups. Here’s how it works: Candidates send their resumes to Underdog.io. At that point, Underdog.io reviews and ranks the candidates, and then sends the best of the bunch to your company. From there, you can contact the people you like and bring them in for interviews. Sorting through candidate pools is one of the toughest and most time-consuming aspects of hiring, but Underdog.io does the work for you.
6. Recruitee
Of all the nominations we received for this list, Mike Wiendels’s endorsement of Recruitee was the most enthusiastic. We’ll let the cofounder of Podium himself take it from this point, because we couldn’t have said it better:
“In my experience, the hardest challenge for us as a startup is maintaining a simple process. We were used to using Excel sheets and multiple email accounts. That was only costing us more time. While we tried a few recruitment softwares that had a broad range of features, none of them offered the ease of use like Recruitee. It has everything a startup needs: A visual pipeline of candidates with a drag and drop editor, emailing and scheduling meetings, and promoting vacancies online. It’s really all a small business needs, and because of the simplicity, getting the whole team up and running was easy and quick.”
(Full disclosure: Wiendels also works for Recruitee, but he came to us in his capacity as a startup founder, not a representative of Recruitee.)
7. iCIMS
Like Comeet, iCIMS was honored by Business News Daily as one of the best recruiting software solutions for small businesses in 2016. What sets iCIMs apart from the competition is the sheer amount of functionality it offers. You can pretty much do anything hiring-related as long as you have iCIMS: iCIMS Connect helps startups and small businesses find and reach out to candidates; iCIMS Recruit offers a full (and affordable) ATS; and iCIMS Onboard gives startups and small businesses the tech they need to implement world-class onboarding processes. What more could you need from a hiring software solution?
8. Applicant Pro
ApplicantPro is one of few startup-friendly hiring solutions to offer built-in candidate screening functionality. You can incorporate questionnaires into your job postings to ask candidates directly about their skills and experiences, and if a candidate’s responses to your questions fail to pass muster, ApplicantPro automatically filters them out. You don’t even have to worry about hitting “reject.”
What’s really cool, though, are the integrated skills tests. Want to really assess a candidate’s leadership skills or math capabilities? ApplicantPro offers assessments you can use to screen for these and many other skills right through the platform.
9. Hireology
Hireology is a data-driven hiring solution specifically built for startups. As if that weren’t cool enough, though, it also boasts a simple, effective, seven-step hiring process. From sourcing tools and interview guides to reference checks and detailed reports, Hireology guides startups through every step of the process. Establishing a go-to process is often one of the biggest challenges that small businesses and startups face, but with Hireology, you don’t have to worry about that.