Best Recruitment CRM Software | Top 10 Reviewed and Compared for 2023

With the best recruitment CRM software, you can easily tackle various key recruitment processes. Recruitment CRMs hold thousands of candidate profiles, automate manual processes to save recruiters time, keep existing candidate profiles up to date, and help recruiters find new candidates for the placements they need to make.

To help recruitment agencies and in-house teams choose the best recruitment CRM software for their business, we’ve reviewed 10 of the top providers available, including providers such as Recruit CRM, Salesforce, Rippling, and more. Read on to learn how these tools can help you and find the one that meets your needs.

Best Recruitment CRM Software | Top 10 Shortlist

Through our testing, we concluded that Recruit CRM is the best recruitment CRM software out there today. With that said, here’s our ranked shortlist of the cream of the crop for recruitment CRM needs:

1. Recruit CRM — The Best Recruitment CRM Software | Get Started With the Free Trial Now
2. Salesforce — Incredibly Popular Recruitment CRM Tool With Sales Features
3. Rippling — Phenomenal, Cost-Effective Recruitment Software
4. Pipedrive — Most Versatile Recruitment CRM Software
5. Bullhorn — Solid Recruitment CRM Software for Agencies of All Sizes
6. Zoho Recruit — Best Free Recruitment CRM Software
7. Monday Sales CRM — Most Customizable CRM Software for Recruiting
8. Freshteams — Easy-to-Use CRM Software for Recruitment Agencies
9. Greenhouse — Best for Powerful Onboarding Features
10. Bamboo HR — Great Recruitment Software for Small Businesses

Recruitment agencies have a lot of choices when it comes to choosing a recruitment CRM. There’s a lot that you have to consider when selecting the best one, such as:

With these in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of your leading options.

Best CRM Recruitment Software | Top 10 Reviewed

Here, we’ll dive into each of our top 10 picks for the best CRM apps for recruitment to help you find one that meets all your criteria.

1. Recruit CRM — The Best Recruitment CRM Software

Recruit CRM is used by recruitment agencies in 100+ countries worldwide and is a specialist recruitment ATS and CRM that offers all the features agencies need. Here’s how Recruit CRM cuts down on manual data entry, particularly when sourcing candidates:

You can add candidate profiles directly to your CRM from social networks such as LinkedIn by installing the Recruit CRM chrome extension. This will inform you whether the candidate is already in your CRM.

If they aren’t, you can add their details to your CRM, including their contact details and any relevant files, such as their resume.

The extension can also parse the candidate’s skills from their LinkedIn profiles which will help to keep their candidate profile ready and up to date while also allowing you to view any previous notes added to their profile and previous jobs they’ve applied for.

When viewing a candidate’s profile within the CRM, you can easily contact the candidate by calling them directly or emailing them directly from their profile.

The CRM also contains smart resume editing features, such as adding your company branding to any candidate resume you want to send to a client, which helps you maintain and build your brand identity.

Another intuitive feature that the platform contains is the ability to ‘pitch’ a candidate to multiple clients at once, which is particularly handy if you have numerous clients hiring for a position that one of your candidates is suitable for.

You can also track your revenue and your sales pipeline through the CRM. The ‘deals’ screen makes it easy to manage your active opportunities by status, candidate, or client and forecast future revenue expectations.

For example, if you click on an active job opportunity you’re prospecting for, you can submit candidates to clients for them to review and set up interviews directly inside the job opportunity.

Some of the other standout features Recruit CRM contains include:

Overall, Recruit CRM has all the features most recruitment agencies will need in a CRM. It’s a straightforward CRM to use, and new customers can get started with a free trial.

Pricing

Recruit CRM has three pricing plans, based on a per-user structure:

2. Salesforce — Incredibly Popular Recruitment CRM Tool With Sales Features

Salesforce is one of the leading CRM providers today, and they offer a sophisticated platform that recruitment agencies can use to manage the entire candidate journey.

Recruitment or hiring managers and their recruiters can manage all candidate communication from within Salesforce.

They can call, text, or email candidates, arrange interviews, and automate manual workflows — helping to give recruiters more of their time back and the edge against their competition.

Inside the platform, recruitment managers can also get an overview of their organization’s quarterly performance; this is important to track whether your organization is on target to hit its goals and objectives.

There are lots of different features for recruiters to explore on the platform. For example, on the opportunities screen, you can get an overview of the current sales opportunities in your pipeline and organize them by their status.

Recruitment agencies can:

The most impressive features within Salesforce are the custom workflows you can set up. For example, each recruitment agency will have its workflows, which can be set up within Salesforce with automated manual processes.

Salesforce also has a vast app exchange marketplace so that you can connect Salesforce with the other apps you use. How you implement Salesforce into your tech stack will depend on the size of your company and how many users will be using the platform.

As the CRM requires some custom setup for recruitment, we recommend that you contact Salesforce for assistance with setting up the platform to your way of working.

Pricing

Salesforce offers different plans for different business areas, e.g., small businesses, marketing, and sales teams. For this review, we’ve focused on Salesforces’ small business plans. With this choice, you have four options:

3. Rippling — Phenomenal, Cost-Effective Recruitment Software

Rippling is an employee management platform primarily designed for small businesses to manage their entire candidate and employee lifecycle.

It allows users to post their job openings on every platform, from Indeed to LinkedIn, to build their talent pipeline quickly.

On top of this, you can customize interview stages based on a candidate’s position, department, or seniority and create customized approval flows and alerts.

You can also send documents candidates will need to fill out, such as offer letters and I-9 and W-4 forms, and store those documents within the system for easy retrieval.

Besides all this, organizations can onboard new hires through the system and complete onboarding tasks such as:

The platform is user-friendly and easy to use, and you and your HR team can create tasks, assign them to appropriate users, and manage your open tasks from the same screen.

You can also integrate all your email and calendar tools into the app to streamline associated tasks. This paired with the automation features, help you and your team save time while simplifying manual processes.

With Rippling, you can customize the platform to your exact needs. For example, you can add additional features such as payroll processing, talent management tools, and employee benefits administration.

Rippling also has an app available, making it easy to use the platform on the go. Overall, the platform is easy to use, and small businesses can use Rippling as their central hub for hiring and managing talent and get started for just $8/month.

Pricing

Rippling’s pricing starts at $8, but you’ll need to contact them for a custom quote to determine whether they’re a good fit for your needs.

4. Pipedrive — The Most Versatile Recruitment CRM Software

While Pipedrive is a CRM primarily used by organizations because of its sales features, organizations also use the platform as a recruitment CRM when it’s customized for this purpose.

Pipedrive works particularly well for recruitment due to its simplicity and ease of use.

Inside the CRM, you can get a visual view of all of your candidates and their status, making it easy to see how many candidates you have at each stage of the hiring process. You can also easily book interview times with candidates directly through the app.

Alongside easy candidate management features, Pipedrive integrates with many platforms that you might use as part of your recruitment processes, such as Gmail, LinkedIn, job boards, and other third-party applications.

These integrations help you streamline your recruitment process as candidate resumes can directly feed into your CRM, and you can then use Pipedrive’s intuitive pipeline management features to score and interact with candidates.

The only downside to using Pipedrive as a recruitment CRM is that it does require some customization to set up the system for recruitment purposes. If you’re looking to do this, we recommend booking a session with Pipedrive for guidance.

Pricing

Pipedrive has these plans, as well as an Enterprise plan priced at $119/user/month:

5. Bullhorn — Solid Recruitment CRM Software for Agencies of All Sizes

Bullhorn is one of the global leaders in recruitment software, with over 10,000 businesses worldwide using the platform, mainly to source candidates while maintaining positive relationships with their clients.

With that said, it’s mainly for hiring candidates for multiple clients rather than in-house teams hiring only for their organization. Nevertheless, Bullhorn’s ATS has many features that help make recruiters’ lives easier.

First, Bullhorn’s ATS will sync with your email system, which will automatically track all the emails you and your team send and receive from candidates and clients.

Bullhorn also provides a widget that lets you see relevant data from your ATS within your email platform. For example, click on an email from a candidate in your inbox with a profile within your ATS. You’ll see details such as:

From this widget, you can take actions such as parsing their resume into your ATS, which saves you from manually copying and pasting the candidate’s resume. And of course, Bullhorn can also help you with sourcing candidates.

Through the ATS, you can build a careers portal where applicants can view and apply for open positions. When this occurs, Bullhorn will parse applicant resumes into your database and map relevant fields from the resume into their candidate profile, such as:

Recruiters can then search the ATS using particular keywords to find these candidates, such as searching by skill or candidate status.

Other candidate-sourcing features within the ATS include sourcing candidates from external job boards within the ATS and utilizing Bullhorn’s LinkedIn recruiter integration.

Bullhorn’s platform also contains candidate screening features such as the ability to run background and skills checks — in fact, it’s a name worthy among the best employment background check sites.

Pricing

The pricing for Bullhorn depends on the features you need from the platform. You’ll need to contact Bullhorn for a custom quote.

6. Zoho Recruit — Best Free Recruitment CRM Software

Zoho Recruit is a recruitment CRM system that allows an organization to manage all aspects of its staffing and recruiting needs. The platform is easy to use and can effectively manage and maintain a large pool of candidates while streamlining recruitment processes.

Through the platform, a brand can start attracting top talent while showcasing its brand’s values by creating a branded careers site that makes it easy for applicants to apply for open positions.

Recruiters can track applicants easily as the platform contains a dashboard where users can see how many candidates have applied for each position and the stage of the hiring process they’re at.

Users can also see a recruitment KPI dashboard and a candidate sourcing summary to see where the applicants for an open position are coming from, allowing a business to get insights into their most productive recruitment channels.

Alongside candidate sourcing and applicant tracking, it also manages candidate resumes, such as parsing information from resumes and populating this information into candidate profiles.

Users can also stay in touch with clients who submit candidates through the platform, share feedback about candidates, and build custom workflows to automate their recruitment processes.

On the whole, Zoho Recruit is an excellent option for businesses on a budget as they offer a comprehensive free plan.

Pricing 

Zoho Recruit has four plans available for Staffing Agencies:

For Corporate HRs, Zoho Recruit has three plans available ranging from a free plan up to $60/recruiter/month for the Enterprise plan.

7. Monday Sales CRM — Most Customizable CRM Software for Recruiting

Like Pipedrive, Monday Sales CRM requires some customization to be used as a recruitment CRM, but due to the platform’s flexibility, it can be done successfully.

Inside the platform, you can select the ‘recruitment process’ template from the template center. When you’ve chosen this template, you can edit different columns to indicate applicant status.

You can also set the template up to include ‘Form View’, which allows you to set up custom application forms that you can post directly to your careers site to start collecting candidate applications.

Once applications are coming in, you can invite the candidates you wish to interview to this board so they can leave notes. You can also streamline your candidate communication by integrating Gmail with Monday.

Through the platform, you can then set up custom workflows that fit with the way you communicate with candidates. On the whole, Monday Sales CRM is useful for small businesses looking to streamline their recruitment processes.

However, as it’s not a dedicated recruitment platform, it lacks some of the more advanced features that some recruitment CRMs contain, such as detailed analytics.

That being said, it’s a handy platform for small agencies or businesses looking for a platform that’s relatively simple to use and contains features to automate some of their hiring processes.

Pricing

There are five plans available for Monday Sales CRM:

8. Freshteams — Easy-to-Use CRM Software for Recruitment Agencies

Freshteams is a dedicated recruitment platform that agencies and businesses can use to manage talent acquisition and recruitment processes.

You can post your open jobs to numerous platforms with a single click, including your own careers site and your chosen job boards. In the ‘recruitment’ dashboard, you can see a clear overview of your open jobs and the number of candidates who’ve applied.

Inside the recruitment dashboard, you can also see an overview of your job requisitions, manage your candidate communications, and assign tasks to different team members.

Freshteams also contains extensive reporting features. For example, through the ‘reporting’ dashboard, you can set up and view reports such as:

And more. These reports contain detailed analytics that recruitment and hiring teams can use to see how their recruitment efforts perform.

Freshteams is another platform useful for small businesses and those on a tight budget, as they have a free plan available and generous free trials on their paid plans.

Pricing

Freshteams has four plans available:

9. Greenhouse — Best for Powerful Onboarding Features

Greenhouse is a comprehensive ATS and hiring platform that helps organizations find and manage the right talent for their business. The platform is primarily used for hiring and onboarding new employees and contains features to facilitate these processes.

For example, the platform integrates with hundreds of job boards so you can get your open positions in front of talent quickly and efficiently. You can also create branded careers sites through the platform where applicants can find your open jobs.

A unique hiring feature of Greenhouse is the recruitment plans users can set up before they start the process.

Users can specify the pipeline stages involved in the hiring process and what each stage involves, organize who’ll be involved in each stage, and any documentation and paperwork required.

Greenhouse has paid particular attention to candidate experience within their platform.

For example, when a hiring manager indicates that they want to interview an applicant, the applicant can select a time for the interview, cutting out the annoying back and forth of trying to pin down a time and date through email.

Those in charge of the hiring process can also set scorecards on which they want recruiters to base their decisions about applicants; this helps ensure applicants are based fairly on their skills rather than other factors.

The platform’s CRM-style functionality makes it easy for organizations to consult their talent pool when hiring for a new position. When a candidate’s information is added to the platform, a candidate profile will populate, and users can filter a profile accordingly.

The only real drawback to the platform is that it can be tricky to implement into your tech stack. Greenhouse does offer a knowledge base and training videos, but customers have noted that the customer support can be slow.

Pricing

Greenhouse offers three plans. Unfortunately, Greenhouse doesn’t state the pricing for each plan on their website, and you’ll have to request a demo to see the platform and get pricing.

10. BambooHR — Great Recruitment Software for Small Businesses

BambooHR is an extremely popular HR platform businesses of all sizes use to manage their recruiting and payroll processes. It’s a useful tool, giving employers detailed insights into their employees’ salaries, benefits, training, and job history.

In addition, the platform also features:

And more. On the ‘People’ dashboard, you can view all of the employees within your organization. Inside individual employee profiles, you can view and edit their personal information, time off, who they report to, and their documentation, training, and notes.

In addition, employee information is nicely laid out on this screen, making it easy to view, manage and add new employees to the platform.

The ‘Hiring’ dashboard is where you can post your job openings, fill in the relevant fields, choose the hiring lead, and choose the department the job belongs to.

You can then post your job description to platforms such as Indeed, Glassdoor, and ZipRecruiter. On the hiring screen, you can also view the candidates who’ve applied for your open positions, their details, and resumes and contact them directly through the platform.

BambooHR is a solid platform that businesses can use to manage their existing employees and hire new talent.

The platform’s features are nicely laid out and easy to navigate; inside the platform, you’ll also find video walkthroughs that can help you learn how to use individual features.

Pricing

BambooHR has two plans available, but you’ll need to contact the company directly for pricing:

Best CRM Recruitment Software | Top 10 Compared

Here’s a quick head-to-head comparison of the leading CRM software for recruiting:

The Key Benefits of CRMs for Recruiting Agencies | Why You Need One

Recruiters working for a recruitment agency have to put a lot into finding the right candidate for a position. They need to:

Managing all of these steps manually or using a variety of different apps is time-consuming for recruiters.

But the right recruitment CRM such as Recruit CRM can help recruitment agencies automate and carry out all of these steps within their CRM while bringing other benefits to their recruiters and organization.

Let’s look at some of the benefits below.

Better Candidate Engagement and Experience

The right CRM can help recruitment agencies improve their engagement with candidates.

For example, recruiters can use a CRM to set up a range of automated emails and notifications to candidates, from letting them know when there’s an update on the job they’ve applied for to recommending new jobs that fit their profile as they become available.

All of this helps recruiters send candidates relevant communications in a timely manner while giving them a better experience.

In addition, many recruitment CRMs enable agencies and organizations to post their open jobs to their own branded careers site, along with custom application forms that a business can create through their recruitment CRM.

This helps give applicants a positive first impression of the brand.

Better Analytics and Insights

Recruitment CRMs give recruiters and hiring managers key insights into their recruitment process. These insights include detailed analytics into individual jobs such as:

These insights help recruitment and hiring managers see what’s working and what’s not and make any tweaks to their recruitment processes that they need to.

Streamlines the Candidate Review Process

Recruitment CRMs help make the process of reviewing candidates much more straightforward. Recruiters can analyze candidates’ resumes, rank candidates according to set criteria, compare candidates more easily, and ultimately make more placements.

Get More Eyes on New Jobs

Recruitment CRMs make it easy for recruitment agencies and corporate HRs to get their job postings in front of more potential applicants.

Recruitment and hiring managers can post open jobs to multiple channels through a recruiting CRM such as their own careers site, job boards, and social media channels such as LinkedIn.

This capability means more active and passive job seekers will see the job advertisements they post and help attract more qualified candidates.

Agencies Can Build and Utilize Their Talent Pool

Recruiting agencies using a CRM will often have thousands of candidate profiles held within their CRM. So when searching for candidates, an agency using a CRM already has a rich talent pool they can utilize before searching for new candidates.

How We Chose the Best Recruiting CRM Software for Recruitment Agencies

There’s a lot that went into our selection process for the best recruiting CRM software for recruitment agencies; here are some of the key factors we considered:

Functionality

It was essential to consider what each platform offers in terms of functionality.

We considered what recruitment tasks and processes each CRM could automate or simplify for recruiters, particularly around candidate sourcing, candidate communication, and candidate screening.

We also considered what features would help recruiters with these key recruitment processes. These features included:

We also considered the functionality of CRMs platforms, such as Salesforce and Pipedrive, that aren’t recruitment-specific CRMs but can be used for recruitment with some customization.

Price

We looked at the price of each platform and the number of plans each provider offers.

Zoho Recruit, Monday Sales CRM, and Freshteams all offer free plans, while each vendor provides free trials for a number of their plans, so there are plenty of options for recruitment businesses of all sizes and budgets.

Ease Of Use

We weighed up how easy each CRM is to use when reviewing and ranking the providers we looked at.

Ideally, the recruitment software you use shouldn’t be too complicated to implement, and any provider you choose should be able to assist with implementing a recruitment CRM into your tech stack.

Recruit CRM is the most comprehensive CRM recruitment agencies can use. The platform balances ease of use with advanced functionality making it an excellent choice for recruitment businesses of all sizes and recruiters of all technical skill levels.

Level Of Support Offered

It’s important to know the level of support that each recruitment CRM provider offers. The support you need will depend on how comfortable you and your users are with the CRM you select.

Most recruitment CRM providers will offer demos of their platform and onboarding sessions to new customers, these sessions are well worth it if you’re looking to get the most out of your CRM.

With that said, you should also consider the complexity of integrating the CRM into your existing tech stack.

Think about what apps you’ll need the CRM to integrate with, whether you’ll need to transfer data from an existing platform into your CRM and how much assistance you’ll need with setting up the CRM to fit your current processes and workflows.

Recruitment CRMs FAQs