Recruitment Software for a Small Business: Top 6 for 2023

For owners of a growing operation, the need to find recruitment software for your small business to help you with your hiring should be a cause for celebration. You’re expanding, after all!

And in a competitive labor market, you want to do the recruitment process right — which means getting in front of the right talent pool and marketing yourself well.

But, if you’re a hands-on small business owner, you might feel a little uneasy about having to learn a new tool or delegating your recruitment needs to software.

Recruitment software can do a lot more for your small business than just helping you find new hires. There are software solutions for interviewing, hiring, and even onboarding. And we’re going to explain how they can work for you and give you some of our recommendations for top recruiting tools to try.

What is Recruitment Software?

Recruitment software is a tool that allows businesses to automate and streamline their hiring, onboarding, and training processes. They can take care of the entire experience — from posting ads on job board sites, to gathering resumes, to screening and applicant tracking, to interviewing, onboarding, and training.

Sourcing Talent

This software plays an integral role in finding potential hires. Recruiters can use it to discover qualified candidates, including those who may not actively be looking for a job. It uses advanced algorithms to search databases and online platforms for candidates whose skills align with the job requirements.

Screening Resumes

When a large volume of applications and resumes flood in, it becomes labor-intensive to sort through each one manually. The software can automatically filter resumes based on specified criteria such as skills, experience, and educational background. This facilitates the shortlisting process, allowing recruiters to focus on the most relevant applicants.

Engaging with Candidates

Maintaining a clear line of communication with job seekers is essential for a successful hiring process. Recruitment software helps automate many of these interactions, sending timely notifications and updates to candidates. The software can send reminders for interviews, prompt candidates to submit any missing information, and even provide feedback post-interview. This keeps applicants engaged, enhancing their experience and potentially increasing the chance of accepting an offer if made.

Selecting Candidates

With the aid of artificial intelligence and assessment tools, the software makes the selection process more efficient. These features analyze a range of variables, from the qualifications on a resume to performance in virtual interviews. As a result, recruiters have a more reliable and quicker way of identifying candidates who are the best fit for the organization.

Sending Offer Letters

Offer letters are a critical yet cumbersome part of the recruitment process. The software simplifies this by offering customizable templates. These templates automatically fill in specific candidate and job details, such as position, job type, and other requirements. This automation saves time, ensuring that the focus remains on getting the best talent on board as quickly as possible.

Task Automation

Manual administrative tasks consume a significant amount of time in the recruitment process. Automating these activities not only accelerates the process but also minimizes errors. For instance, the software can auto-generate reports, schedule interviews, and update candidate status in real-time.

System Integration

The software isn’t a standalone solution but often offers seamless integration with other enterprise systems such as Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), Payroll, and even marketing software for employer branding activities. This creates a cohesive technology ecosystem within the organization.

Analytics and Reporting

Data-driven insights are valuable for any business function, and recruitment is no exception. The software usually comes with robust analytics capabilities. These allow you to track various metrics like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and candidate source effectiveness, giving you a clear picture of your recruitment efficiency.

What to Look for in Recruiting Software as a Small Business

When you’re searching for the right recruitment software for your small business, it’s good to have your needs in mind. Ideally, you’ll want to find software that is easy to learn and can take you all the way from the recruitment and onboarding stage to the long-term retention of your recruitment so that you don’t have to add any other new tools into the mix.

Consider Your Team’s Unique Needs

Ask yourself and your hiring team these questions before you look for a recruitment software:

• How many employees do we really need to hire based on our staffing needs?
• Do we want to advertise on popular job boards?
• What do the right candidates look like?
• How do we want to track and manage the new applicants?
• How long do we have to learn new software?
• How will we handle employee onboarding once we’ve hired new team members?
• Do we pay employees hourly, on commission, or on salary?
• Do we need to make taxes, HR, and compliance paperwork an integral part of the onboarding process?

Find Pricing That Fits Your Budget

We recommend starting with free and affordable tools because they’re good for getting experience, practice, and buy-in from other team members before you invest too many resources in a new recruitment software.

While paid tools can often boast more features and integrations, this isn’t always the case. For instance, Homebase’s free hiring and onboarding feature has everything you need to manage hourly work.

Look for Key Integrations

One of the key features of recruitment software is integration with job board sights that will put your local job posting in front of the right eyes. You might want to give it a pass if the recruitment tool doesn’t integrate easily — and for free — with job listing sites like Indeed, Google, ZipRecruiter, Craigslist, Linkedin, or Glassdoor.

It’s even better if your recruitment software of choice can provide you with job description templates that will save you time when you’re posting a new position to several job boards at once.

The 6 Best Recruiting Software for Small Businesses

To get a better idea of what recruitment software is out there, take a look at these 6 highly-rated recruitment tools and what they offer in terms of features and pricing for your unique needs.

Homebase

• Best for small business owners who pay hourly and are looking for a free option that’s easy to use and offers more features beyond recruitment, hiring, and onboarding. Homebase can work for salaried employees, too.
• An all-in-one management solution for small businesses: Homebase automates every aspect of your small business recruitment and management. It was designed to move employees seamlessly from recruiting, hiring, and training and into day-to-day processes like scheduling, communication, time sheets, and even payroll.
• It’s free to access their recruitment, hiring, and onboarding features.

• • The Basic Plan is free
  • The Essentials Plan is $16/month/location
  • The Plus Plan is $40/month/location
  • All in One Plan is $80/month/location

Breezy

• Best for small business owners who want to create a dedicated career website: You can create customizable career sites for interested candidates to visit and apply for jobs, and you can host the sites on your website or on Breezy’s platform.
• Access to premium and niche job boards: Breezy is a recruiting solution that lets you submit your open positions to dozens of popular and niche job board sites so that you can get more local attention from qualified candidates.
• Breezy’s Bootstrap Plan for one job posting is free, and pricing after that includes:

• The Startup Plan at $171/month

• The Growth Plan is $299/month

• The Business Plan at $479 per month.

BambooHR

• Best for startups and small accounting, tech, legal, or consulting firms and companies: BambooHR is a great solution for small companies that want to grow and who have some experience with recruiting.
• Collaborative applicant tracking and hiring: For startups and growing small businesses, BambooHR’s recruiting CRM (candidate relationship management) software lets you communicate with your team about the applicant tracking process and collaborate on hiring decisions.
• You have to contact BambooHR for a custom quote: Software review sites report that BambooHR pricing starts at

• $4.25 PEPM (per employee per month) for their Essentials Plan

• $8.25 PEPM for their Advantage Plan

Workable

• Best for small companies interested in video interviews: Their premium screening tool lets applicants record videos of themselves answering your interview question.
• Give your candidates assessments to see if they’re a good fit: Workable’s recruiting system gives you access to cognitive and personality tests that you can assign to candidates to see how their values and skills match up with your needs.
• Unlike Homebase or Breezy, no free plan available: You can access a 15-day trial when you sign up, but after that, pricing includes

• $455/month for the Standard Plan for companies with 21-50 employees

• $910/month for their Premier Plan

• $129/month for their Paygo Plan

• $159/month extra for video interviews

• $99/month for texting

• $119/month for their assessments tool.

JazzHR

• Great for small companies and businesses who want to expand their brand or franchise: Museums, bicycle shops, security agencies, staffing agencies, and construction companies have all used and trusted JazzHR to help them with their recruitment marketing and management.
• Reach out to your candidate via text: You can avoid emailing candidates back and forth and communicate by text with JazzHR’s texting tool
• No free plan, and more expensive when you pay monthly: When you pay annually, Workable’s pricing includes

• • The Hero Plan for $39/month

• • The Plus Plan for $239/month

• • The Pro Plan for $359/month

ZohoRecruit

• Best for freelance recruiters and recruitment startups who are just getting started with recruiting: Their free plan gives new recruiters access to free job boards, candidate management, email management, and interview scheduling.
• Conduct video interviews in real time: Like Workable, ZohoRecruit lets candidates record their interviews, but you can also conduct live interviews with their platform.
• Like Breezy, ZohoRecruit’s Forever Free plan extends to one job posting, but then pricing goes up: Pricing depends on whether you’re an internal HR team or staffing agency using ZohoRecruit, but for internal HR teams, pricing includes

• • A free plan for 1 active job

• • $25 for 10 active jobs

• • $50 for 20 active jobs.

How to Optimize the Recruiting and Onboarding Process

After finding top talent, it’s time to level up with your onboarding, training, and work culture so you can be the most competitive option for your ideal employees.

Be a Place Where People Want to Work

You need to recruit to build out your ideal team, but recruiting only goes so far. If your work culture needs too much improvement, you probably won’t retain or even convince the right applicants to work for you.

So, before you even start recruiting, engage with your team to get a read on how they feel about your business. Do employees feel your team leadership lacks transparency or overlooks them at work? If you get mixed responses, brainstorm some ways you can boost employee happiness and engagement for your current and future employees.

Refine Your Employee Onboarding Process

A recent Gallup report found that it’s difficult for new employees to envision a future with a business if the onboarding isn’t clear about expectations for the near future. You can combat this by creating templates to work from during onboarding and carefully plotting out your step-by-step onboarding process.

We also recommend creating an employee handbook that outlines:

• Your mission and values
• Your policies, rules, and mandatory legal information
• Wages, work hours, and time off
• And your safety practices and protocols

Properly Train New Hires

When you or your hiring managers take the time to train your new hires well, you’re more likely to keep them. So you have to think about how you can optimize the learning process and accommodate different learning styles.

Building a customized, detailed training plan for your employees with learning modules, role-playing sessions, and trainee celebrations built in will ensure that your new hire doesn’t get overwhelmed right away and has a positive candidate experience.

Other Tools That Help Small Businesses Grow

Growth isn’t a bad thing, but it’s difficult to do alone. We recommend thinking about these useful services and tools to help you and your team stay safe, compliant, and connected with each other.

Outsourcing HR Services

You likely don’t have an HR team as a small business owner, but you still have HR challenges. You have to worry about things like compliance with labor laws, employee performance management, and legal guidelines around hiring and firing.

Outsourcing your HR services doesn’t mean you have to hire a professional — you can use an automated HR software tool that serves your needs and doesn’t hike up your labor cost.

Timesheets and Time Clock Software

Did you know that today’s time clock software lets your team clock in and clock out on mobile apps? You don’t have to rely on paper spreadsheets or a centralized system that requires your workers to be on-site to clock in. This works especially well for remote and field teams.

Time clock software can also make your payroll faster and easier. Take, for example, our Homebase time clock app that lets you turn your employee hours into payroll timecards for easy payday access.

Team Communication Tools

It’s hard to make sure your team has everything they need to succeed if you don’t have clearly defined communication channels for specific topics.

We recommend team communication tools that have built-in messaging for sending messages to individual team members, groups, or to everyone at once without having to rely on circulating phone numbers and emails.

Homebase’s team communication features also notify you about team attendance and no-shows so you can track their performance in the same app.

How Homebase Helps Small Businesses Put it All Together

What’s better than a recruiting software that helps you handle everything from sourcing the best talent to hiring and onboarding? An all-in-one, user-friendly recruitment, and management software for your team that keeps all your performance management tools in one place.

Homebase was designed for small business owners who pay their employees hourly, and we’ve helped 100,000+ businesses streamline all of their recruitment, hiring, scheduling, payroll, and HR and compliance processes in one platform so they can focus on running and scaling their businesses.