Recruitee vs SmartRecruiters comparison

"In general, the platform is very simple to customize. We have previously used different ERP/funneling platforms, such as Pipedrive. They were all great, but they were very complicated to set up and very confusing. Getting someone completely new to use them was a pretty big headache, but Recruitee is very easy to use. It is very easy to get someone completely new to learn everything and use the project in one day. It provides the ease of onboarding people and the ease of use. It is not trying to be more than it is. It is just about hiring, and it focuses just on the hiring process, communicating with people, and going to multiple hiring stages. Most ERP/hiring solutions have massive integrations and customizations. They try to provide a lot of things in the platform, but Recruitee is there just to recruit. It is very linear. It just does its job well and doesn't try to be what it is not."

"I really like the privacy within Recruitee. I can add multiple hiring managers and manage all different vacancies without them having or being able to see what's going on in other vacancies. It is quite easy to use. I can easily add another colleague. It is straightforward and intuitive. I don't even have to explain to hiring managers how it works for us because they are able to figure it out once they click on it."

"What really impressed me was the ease with which you could alter the funnel. You could add steps to the funnel or just leave steps out. It provided flexibility. You could also assign specific people in the organization per vacancy. It is user-friendly, and it has a very good overview. When you open the screen with all the vacancies, it is very easy to see your overview. You can also assign the tasks that you have to somebody, which is something that not every system has."

"With just a click of a button, we can manage the process. Even generating offer letters and obtaining electronic signatures through DocSign are integrated into this application."

"What I really like about it is that it feels minimal, but is also dynamic. There aren't a lot of ways to get lost, which is good."

"With this solution, I was able to add diversity to my recruiting. I was able to source from multiple locations, and I could show where applicants came from. The reporting tools that are on offer, allowed us to expand our reach. We were able to add meaningful diversity into recruiting."

"The features that were most important for us to have were that it is user friendly and functional, which is definitely the case with SmartRecruiters. Our organization is located in developing countries where the bandwidth and internet stability are not the strongest and SmartRecruiters accommodates this challenge. It was a very big plus that we are able to use the system even in these locations."

"It has a lot of good features. We post all of our jobs through the system, and they have a marketplace where you can share the job post with the job boards they're working with. It is integrated with all the records about from where the applications are coming. We have all of our candidates gathered there. We can set up our own hiring processes depending on the type of job and then move them through the process there. It is also possible to involve hiring managers and give them access so that they can also track the candidates and have a look at TBE and interact in the system, which is very useful. We also use SmartRecruiters for job approvals before posting the job as well as for offer approvals before sending an offer. We have everything in the system itself, and everything is being tracked, which is very good for us. It is a reliable system, and you can use it for the full cycle of recruitment. You can really adapt it to your processes. When it comes to the configuration, it is easy to configure. Something that is good with SmartRecruiters is that they are always working on improvements. Every quarter, they have different enhancements or product releases, which is something that we appreciate."

"The most valuable feature is the way that they've set it up for collaboration."

"It has a neat functionality built in where it rates candidates. So, before you even look at the resume, you see a rating, and it is based on keywords. For example, it will tell you that an applicant is a frontend engineer and has used React, Angular, etc. It gives you a heads up so that you don't have to go through a hundred resumes on Monday morning eliminating applicants. It will tell you that this applicant's skills match 87%, which is pretty neat. You can skip the ones that are rated 25% or something."

"Job publishing and application tracking are the most valuable features. You can keep the flow of a candidate's application into one system. The whole collaboration can also be done within the system, which means that you can schedule interviews and add your feedback and ratings there. You can also communicate with the candidates. The analytics part of it is also very valuable. It is a useful feature that we use quite a lot. We don't really use other features such as recruitment marketing or CRM candidate relationship management in SmartRecruiters."

"The GDPR system needs some improvement. They say that you automatically have approval when you just add a CV. I might not have even asked for it. I would like to have a better GDPR system that asks or sends a request for saving data. It is not completely customizable. Sometimes, I can't do the things that I want to do. I would like to edit our career website, but I can only change the main page of our career website. I can't change the layout or pictures within our vacancies. They have it all automized to disable. We do everything that we can to make it as good as we can for Google for jobs, but I miss some of the checkpoints for Google for jobs, and I can't edit them myself."

"We found the evaluation of interviews offered in Recruitee too complicated, so we didn't use that. They offer a way to rate and evaluate interviews, but it was a little bit more complicated, so we didn't use that. It was also a little bit harder to find where this feature was located. What surprised me was that if you have one vacancy and you want to announce it, for example, in the Netherlands in Dutch and also in English, that wasn't possible. In such a case, you need to open two vacancies, but then, of course, your reporting is off. It would be really beneficial if they can offer the possibility of posting one position in multiple languages. In this particular organization, it was not really that much of an issue because it was a local organization. I understood from the person responsible for connecting Recruitee to career sites that there were some things that you struggled with, especially with regards to banners, pictures, photos, and things like that. I did not do it myself. On the backend, I personally didn't really have any issues. It could maybe have integration with Outlook so that you can plan interviews straight from the system, and they also show up in the Outlook calendars of the managers."

"One of the minor problems was that when we sent mass emails to every applicant at one stage, some people didn't receive the email. It would go into some kind of a spam box or something. It took us quite a while to figure this out. Of course, this is a general problem with emails, but some other platforms have better ways to find this, warn, or give you best practices. With Recruitee, it took us quite a while to figure out that the problem is happening and how to deal with it. That was one of the minor issues. Another issue was related to communication. They have a support team, but it takes quite a while to hear back on some of the issues. They don't work on weekends. It was a little unusual for a SaaS product."

"Some features are not as straightforward or user friendly to implement."

"One thing that has been a bit of a struggle is getting tech support. It is a little more difficult to get support from SmartRecruiters. They want you to have your own in-house person to help you with any issues, whereas with both Lever and Greenhouse, you can just click a button at the bottom of the screen and chat with someone almost instantly."

"Sometimes, there is this language or communication barrier in terms of what the applicants mentioned. SmartRecruiters sometimes has trouble understanding certain types of keywords or has certain types of language, translation, or grammar issues."

"There were problems with integrations around other systems and each one had to be custom-built, which took a little while to get set up and running."

"The major improvement area is how it integrates with other systems. That's where we've had some sort of pain points. They've done a lot of work with their development team in setting up integrations with other types of software like SuccessFactors, which we use, but we have found some glitches there. This is probably where they need to do some work. Sometimes, when it refreshes or there is any sort of update in SmartRecruiters, it has a direct impact on the integrations that we have with other tools. We are not always notified when that takes place. We have had HR say to us, "We've just hired this guy. He is not there in our end board at all. What's going on?" That's when we realized that the integration is actually broken. When we have other solutions like SuccessFactors, it would be very helpful to have knowledge articles for such integrations. We have found some of the templates that we want to use and some of the customizations that we do around the offer letters and the contract letters to be a little bit more difficult, which hasn't made this process any more efficient than it was. We still have to do a bit of manual intervention there. I don't know if it is just our company, but we need to have different clauses and things in place. We have stopped using DocuSign as well, and we are trying to look at other ways of doing that. They are aware of this."

"We ran into some serious issues related to language barriers."

"SmartRecruiters' on-click application process could be better."

"We require greater flexibility for customization with our employer branding. Currently, it is very much driven by the SmartRecruiters design. We are using a SaaS solution, so we are powered by what is in the core product itself. A disadvantage of being a SaaS solution is that there aren't many customization options because you are literally buying it out of the box. You use whatever is offered to you in a box as much as you can, and that might be a problem sometimes because customizations are not achievable. They should definitely improve and provide more flexibility for customizations. For a large organization like ours, they can provide more flexibility on the authorization side of things. They could create a much more flexible way of access and separate the IT or help desk access when they need to go into the system and do some fixes. Currently, it is set up in a way that that you have access for everything or nothing, which is not useful in terms of the separation of duty that we have. There are also other things like matrix, where we can have a better and deeper kind of analysis."

"Its pricing is quite reasonable. Recruitee was more favorable price-wise as compared to other solutions."

"When we bought it, it was good in terms of quality and cost. It was not very expensive, but I heard that quite soon after that, they changed their way of pricing, which meant that the price went up quite substantially. Earlier, you had to just pay for the number of vacancies or slots that you wanted to use in the organization. We bought 10 slots, and they changed that system. I don't know how it works now because I don't work there anymore. Licensing was on a yearly basis. You selected a number of slots and paid for that year. You could buy more, but you couldn't go for less. We had to pay a setup or implementation fee. Support was included in the license."

"It was amazing, but right now, they got more expensive due to the different plans that they offer. They offer basic, intermediate, and advanced plans. It used to be really easy. You could just have a number of slots as vacancies, and that's what you paid for. Now, you pay for the number of slots and the plan you have, and it got a lot more expensive. I think we had a 40% increase in price. Support is always included in the license."

"SmartRecruiters is much better than its competitors. Considering the type of features and services it provides, it is probably one of the best solutions in the market. Others may offer a similar price, but their services won't be that good or the user-friendliness won't be that great. The licensing works based on how many users are there in a company. If you are using other functionalities, like CRM and HRS, the price increases."

"They are pretty competitive. As the product matures, it has much more functionality and different pricing models. It can relatively cost a lot more if you want to use additional features, but, in general, it is competitive in the industry. We work on a yearly license agreement based on the company size. There are the support costs, which are a part of the additional cost based on the percentage of the licensing fee. So, it has a license plus support cost. Then, of course, there are other add-on options that we can purchase and procure whenever we want to based on certain negotiated arrangements."

"I wasn't involved in its acquisition, but I would assume that SmartRecruiters is pretty pricey."

"SmartRecruiters is an expensive solution."

"Back in 2018, when I engaged with their sales, they wanted to charge around $10,000 for an annual subscription. Depending on your organization, that either could or couldn't be expensive. I personally think it's a fair price. However, I engaged them and negotiated a lower price with them. I think I got closer to $6,000. It came with a commitment of three years."

"I haven't been so involved with pricing, so I don't have all details, but I know that we are paying per head when it comes to different countries. There is an additional fee for new features that they release. If it is something that we would like to use, we need to pay some extra for it."

"There were implementation costs in the first year to get everything set up and running, and then they have various modules on top, which are optional and available at an extra charge."