We Tried the Best Recruiting Tools for Every Use
Recruiting can be an overwhelming process—and stress seems to be building for recruiters and hiring teams. Research shows that 53% of recruiters feel their job was more stressful in 2023 than in the previous year.
It’s impossible to pin down one single reason for this increase in stress—but poor recruiting technology decisions are definitely a contributing factor. One study found that 50% of recruiters would leave their current organization for one that offered better recruiting tools.
So, which tools should you consider for your recruiting process? In this Willo guide, we’re exploring five of the best recruiting tools on the market for a variety of uses.
What Are Recruiting Tools?
Recruiting tools are software platforms designed to automate, streamline, and improve the virtual recruitment process. They help with various aspects of hiring—from sourcing candidates to finalizing hires—and they play an important role in helping you find talent as efficiently as possible.
Here are the main categories of recruiting tools and their purpose in the recruitment cycle:
- Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Talent Relationship Management (TRM) Platforms: Offer comprehensive solutions for tracking applicants, managing candidate relationships, and streamlining recruitment workflows.
- Candidate Assessment Tools: Used for pre-employment testing to evaluate a candidate’s competency for a role before moving forward in the recruitment process. They can assess various competencies, including cognitive abilities, technical skills, and personality traits.
- Video Interviewing Software: Enables recruiters to conduct interviews remotely, overcoming geographical and scheduling barriers.
Why are Recruiting Tools Important?
Efficiency and Time-Saving
Recruiting tools automate many aspects of the hiring process, like screening resumes, scheduling interviews, and sending follow-up emails. This automation reduces the time HR teams spend on admin tasks, allowing them to focus more on strategic activities like engaging with candidates and making informed hiring decisions.
Source: How EDF Fills 400+ Roles Per Recruiting Season
For example, with Willo’s help, EDF (UK) was able to cut their recruiter admin time in half, while still maintaining a positive candidate experience.
Cost Reduction
By streamlining the recruitment process and reducing the time-to-hire, recruiting tools can significantly lower the costs associated with hiring. This includes costs related to advertising job openings, conducting interviews, and the potential costs of a bad hire.
Good recruiting tools also help you reduce overhead—just ask MyTutor, who reduced overhead by 12% while simultaneously increasing recruiting capacity.
Improved Candidate Quality
Finding high-quality candidates has traditionally been a matter of holding out for the right person to come along. It takes time and resources to sift through resumes, conduct interviews, and make a hiring decision.
Recruiting tools speed this process up, helping you find top talent more quickly.
Willo is a great example of this. We help you screen candidates without sinking time into scheduling or back-and-forths. And our Scorecards help you streamline the review process to create shortlists of higher quality hires in less time.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Recruiting tools typically come with useful analytics and reporting capabilities that provide insights into the hiring process. HR teams can use this data to identify bottlenecks, assess the effectiveness of their recruitment strategies, and make informed decisions to improve future hiring cycles.
Enhanced Candidate Experience
The use of recruiting tools can be a large help in improving the candidate experience by providing timely communication, personalized feedback, and a streamlined application process. A positive candidate experience is important for building an employer brand that attracts the top talent you desire.
Criteria to Consider When Choosing Recruiting Tools
- Ease of use: A recruitment tool with an intuitive, simple, and clean interface can be more effectively used by your team, regardless of their tech expertise.
- Automation: Check how much of your time-consuming, manual tasks the recruiting tool will automate. The efficiency of a tool’s automation should be able to match your specific needs.
- Scalability: As your organization grows, your hiring needs will become more complex. So, make sure to verify if your recruiting tool is capable of scaling along with your company’s needs, supporting high-volume hiring, and enabling your HR team to manage multiple candidates efficiently.
- Integrations: The ability of the recruitment software to seamlessly integrate with other tools and platforms you use is essential. This helps create a cohesive recruitment ecosystem, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness.
5 Best Recruiting Tools for Every Use
- Willo: Best for asynchronous interviewing.
- Recruitee: Best for sourcing and tracking candidates.
- Criteria: Best for performing candidate assessments.
- SmartRecruiters: Best for seamless job post management.
- Jobscore: Best for building your candidate pipeline.
1. Willo
Willo is a candidate screening platform that helps companies save time and make more confident hiring decisions.
Willo uses a simple, four-step process to help employers quickly review candidates. Start by creating interviews using various question types and sharing invite links with candidates at scale. When candidates record an interview, your hiring team is notified so that they can review the interview, create shortlists, and collect feedback from stakeholders.
Willo is also GDPR-compliant and automates the tedious process of performing identity, right-to-work, and criminal background (DBS) checks for potential employees.
Relevant features
- Async video interviewing: Facilitate high-volume hiring with async interviewing and features like customizable question types, mass invites, file uploads, language localization, question generation, and more.
- Multiple question types: Video, audio, text, document upload, or multiple choice questions.
- Collaboration tools: Create shortlists and share interviews with any internal stakeholder securely using the Showcase™ feature. You can also create Scorecards to standardize candidate evaluation across your recruitment team.
- Multiple ATS integrations: Willo comes with over 5,000 integrations, including multiple major ATS platforms. Integrating Willo with your ATS means easy data transfer, added async interview functionality, and an improved hiring process.
Pricing
Willo has a free-forever plan for freelancers or small businesses with limited hiring needs. This plan is limited to one job and 10 responses per month. All paid plans offer unlimited responses (based on a fair-use policy).
Pros & cons
Pros
- Easy setup and integration
- Improves efficiency in the hiring process
- Customizable to your company’s branding
- Supports seamless collaboration with your team
- Interview more candidates at a fraction of the cost
- Safe, secure, and GDPR-compliant
Cons
- No live interviewing
2. Recruitee
Recruitee is a hiring automation tool designed to streamline your recruitment process.
The platform provides a comprehensive solution to help HR teams source and track applicants, build their employer brand, and gain deeper insights into their recruitment pipeline.
Relevant features
- Automated workflow management: Offers a kanban-style applicant tracking overview to give real-time insights into the candidate pipeline. Workflows are automated to create and complete tasks and assign reviews to other team members.
- Interview evaluation templates: Provides a system for hiring teams to stay unbiased and fair when reviewing candidates.
- Careers site builder: Includes a no-code career site editor to help you build your employer brand.
Pricing
Recruitee offers an 18-day free trial as well as three paid plans:
- Start ($199/month) allows for 5 job slots.
- Grow ($249/month) allows for unlimited job slots.
- Optimize (custom) is designed for recruitment agencies.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Mobile app functionality
- Efficient organization of applicants and scheduling of interviews
- Reliable customer support
- Attractive and user-friendly interface
Cons (based on SoftwareAdvice reviews)
- Lack of customization options, particularly for application forms and recruit-a-friend features
- It can take some time to launch updates and new features
3. Criteria
Criteria is a candidate assessment solution that provides a broad selection of web-based pre-employment testing services. The platform focuses on offering a comprehensive suite of assessments that measure cognitive aptitude, personality, emotional intelligence, risk likelihood and skills to help hiring teams make informed decisions.
Relevant features
- Extensive portfolio of assessments: HR teams can combine assessments from the different categories to gain multidimensional candidate insights.
- Interviewing tools: Build structured live interviews using the question library and templates. To help with reviewing, candidate assessment results and interview notes will be combined in one place.
- Candidate management: Easily send emails to your candidates, remind them to complete assessments, and move them through your hiring pipeline.
Pricing
Criteria offers customized pricing plans, so you’ll need to request for pricing. However, they do offer a 14-day free trial (for employers only) where you can try out up to 20 tests.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Assessments are consistently validated by scientific experts
- Real-time results and intuitive score reports
- Available in over 20 languages
- Integration with various ATS and HRIS platforms
- Mobile-friendly so candidates have easy access
Cons (based on Capterra reviews)
- It can be difficult to build and customize your own assessment
- It takes a long time to obtain quality-of-hire insights
4. SmartRecruiters
SmartRecruiters is an all-in-one hiring solution that’s designed for companies with high-volume hiring needs. The platform’s features cover hiring processes from CRM to job advertising and applicant tracking.
Relevant features
- Integrated programmatic job advertising: Provides a job advertising strategy that distributes job postings.
- AI assistant: Helps with resume screening, matching current and past candidates with your open job roles, and reducing evaluation bias.
- Chatbot: Offers text functionality and a chatbot to make it easier to communicate with your candidates through your recruitment channels.
Pricing
SmartRecruiters offers customized pricing, so you’ll need to contact them for a quote.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Customizable workflows
- Detailed analysis reports
- Responsive customer support team
Cons (based on G2 reviews)
- It can be difficult for small teams to get used to the multitude of features
- You have to start a new email chain each time you message a candidate through their profile
5. Jobscore
Jobscore is a talent acquisition and recruitment software that’s tailored for businesses looking for an affordable and scalable recruitment tool.
Relevant features
- Job post management: Enables one-click job posting across various platforms including social media promotions, and offers efficient job post tracking.
- Branded careers site: Enables a custom design of your careers site. A drag-and-drop tool allows you to add your company logo, job listings, photos, and videos.
- Employee referral: Offers functionality for employee referral, so your existing teams can help fill your recruitment pipeline.
Pricing
Jobscore offers a free 30-day trial and three paid pricing plans—Start ($129/month), Scale ($399/month), and Enterprise (custom).
Pros & cons
Pros
- Bulk review and response to candidates
- Automatic candidate scoring
- Candidates can self-schedule interviews
- Mobile-friendly
Cons (based on G2 reviews)
- Candidate search functions could be improved
- Interview interactions could be more intuitive
Streamline Your Recruiting Process With Willo
Ultimately, recruiting tools are indispensable in the modern job market, addressing several critical challenges faced by HR professionals. By enhancing efficiency, improving candidate quality, and enabling data-driven decisions, these tools play a pivotal role in shaping effective and competitive hiring strategies.
At Willo, we specialize in arming HR teams of any size with a simple but powerful set of async candidate screening and identity verification tools that streamline operations and lead to better hires in less time.
Want to see it for yourself? Explore Willo with a live demo today!
