SmartRecruiters vs Zoho Recruit comparison

"I found the core product quite useful. It is easy to use and quite user-friendly. They have also got other options, such as CRM and HRS. They have other versions such as smart distribute, which is an HRS type of system to analyze and get permissions needed from the applicants. In terms of pricing, SmartRecruiters is much better than its competitors."

"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."

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

"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that amongst all the other ATS platforms that I have used, SmartRecruiters is the most user-friendly tool."

"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."

"I used the free version, which I found valuable."

"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 solution provides the ability to integrate with other Zoho apps, allowing us to automate the hiring process."

"There are two features I love in Zoho Recruit. The first one is mass customization. I can customize the blueprint how I like, add some steps I want to include, and schedule a date and time to send the emails. I can also use a lot of templates. Secondly, the best thing about Zoho is the customer service. Whenever I have an issue or want to upgrade something, I text them through Zoho, and they respond within 40 seconds."

"Good reporting feature."

"One of the features that I really like is that it's very administratively user-friendly. It is easy to add new managers into the system. It's very easy to switch and add regional capability, for instance. Zoho has put a lot of time into the administrative side to make it functional, which was a huge highlight for me and my team. Zoho's reporting functionality is good. It is easy to run lists in Excel, including dashboard reports, to determine if we are hiring accurately. We were able to tweak and improve our recruitment and hiring functions."

"The solution is secure and also very user friendly."

"The customization feature is the most valuable. I can add candidates to the system without having to go into it manually. I can look at a LinkedIn or PNet profile and literally right-click on it and pass that candidate into my database almost completely. It is 100% accurate for 90% of the time. It also has good security. I can't log in without a fingerprint. To log in, I have to give a fingerprint on my smartphone."

"The pricing seems to be very reasonable."

"The most valuable feature of Zoho Recruit is I can compete with the larger vendors in the business. I am constantly changing the configuration and the solution adapts to my needs."

"The solution needs to work on a single sign-on."

"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."

"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."

"One of the areas that we would like them to improve is the self-scheduling feature. They have a self-scheduling feature that can be made a little bit more automated when it comes to scheduling. We are trying to use it, but it doesn't feel very user-friendly. This is something that could be improved. They have launched WhatsApp connections in the system, where instead of sending emails, you can WhatsApp candidates directly from the system, but currently, it mainly works in a few countries. Spain, where I'm based, is not one of them. If we use the system, the phone number for the candidates would be from the UK, and we don't think that would be the best. This feature is good for some countries, but not for all at the moment. It was first launched in the USA and then in a couple of countries in Europe. It is not yet launched fully in Europe. Reporting is always something that can be improved. Even though it is working well for us, its reporting can be better. Currently, it is a little bit complicated when it comes to reporting. It has a few pre-made reports that are easy to access, but if you want more details, you need to build your own reports. In order to do that, it is a bit tricky to learn and understand how it works. Even though you have help agents and support for help, it takes some time to learn, but it is not impossible. We have very recently made some integrations with Tableau. We are building dashboards in Tableau where we can get daily updated reports, and they are definitely helpful. That's something we would recommend. SmartRecruiters has recently implemented an inbox. You can have an inbox where you can see all your conversations, but currently, it is not filtering between the recruiters, so you see everyone's emails in there. They have already announced that they are working on the filtering feature for a specific inbox to make it more personalized per recruiter. This way the recruiters can have an overview of their own work."

"Around 2015 and into '17, I worked at a federal contractor. I had to switch to a different applicant system as I didn't know if SmartRecruiters was OFCCP compliant, which is something that, as a US-based federal contractor, you have to ensure. They should work to appeal to the contractor industry and get the product OFCCP compliant."

"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."

"There were limitations with the system that we would have liked, not in the time, but the company in Germany really dictated that. So we couldn't do everything in the system we would have liked to it."

"The solution's reporting feature could be improved because it is not very strong."

"Zoho Recruit could benefit from increased flexibility and customization when creating and sending offer letters to new recruits."

"Zoho Recruit could improve in the ease of use because you need to know how to do scripting or coding to receive some of the functionality in the back end. For example, AI and automation need scripting and coding."

"Its automation is currently complicated, and it could be better. The biggest problem is that their instructions, videos, and documentation are terrible. These should be improved. I would like to see an email tracking feature and an option to find email addresses and leads."

"The pricing could be a bit more reasonable."

"It lacks the functionality for finalizing the process when a successful placement is made. There is no invoicing. It is missing the functionality for setting the placement and a start date. I do permanent placements as well as contractors, but it is not really geared towards contractors. So, I have to have a separate solution to manage contractors, timesheets, and things like that. It is just a bit of a pain. It is not as simple as some of the competitors, but it is far more able. There is a lot more to it, and it does a lot more than what any of the competitors currently do, which makes it a little bit more complicated to use, but it is easy enough. None of my staff have any issues. In all such solutions, you have to feed more than what they give you. It is a database at the end of the day, and I would like it to give me things. I would like to load a lead or get someone to just load leads all day, and I would like it to come back to me and say, "There's this position that you've loaded, and these candidates match. Can I send it?" I'd like it to be a little bit more proactive and feed me as much information as I feed it."

"There is a limit to the number of lines you can extract."

"Candidate filtering is a little cumbersome. I would love to see all the design and effort Zoho put in to the administrative user experience also be applied to the manager experience side. Quite a bit of filtering has to be done to get to what you want. Also, you can't get through many candidates because Zoho Recruit has a cap on how many candidates you can view at a time. If you've got hundreds of candidates per job, you may have to scroll through 10 pages."

"There's a bit of a learning curve."

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

"SmartRecruiters is an expensive solution."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It is in the middle price range. Everything is included in the price."

"The cost of each user depends on the size of our user base."

"Zoho Recruit is an affordable solution in comparison to BambooHR and costs relatively the same as Greenhouse implementation wise. It costs less than $100 per user. Large organizations will be able to get enterprise pricing, and Zoho is transparent with their pricing."

"I think it costs about $40 per month for a recruiter account. It comes with ten free accounts. It's well worth the money we are paying."

"The more you scale the solution the more it will cost. If you want the vendor to do the implementation or migration there are extra fees."

"In terms of cost, Zoho is by far the most reasonable for what you're getting. You get the option of monthly or yearly price. It is one cost per person for a license, and it is reasonable. My solutions are $50 per person per month."