I'm a recruiter, and my whole company runs on Zoho Recruit. We use it completely from beginning to end, and the full cycle of recruitment happens in Zoho Recruit.
It is an online tool, and we completely use it online. We are using the Professional version.
The benefit is that my clients get candidates quicker from me. There is a portal for clients and candidates, and I can customize it. My clients are able to log in and kind of rate, comment, and approve or reject people they've seen for interviews. The resumes of the candidates are up, and the clients can reject or approve submitted resumes on their own. They can go and have a look at the history of a candidate. They've got access to all this.
The customization and automation features are the most valuable. for instance I am able to add candidates to the system in many different ways - Directly with a click from social media sites or job boards, from within outlook or Gmail, my career pages, LinkedIn, Facebook. I can upload zip files containing thousands of CV's, or import data from csv files or backups. There are browser plugins for almost any use case ad if not you have access to write your own application and integrate that into zho recruit.
It also has good security, mine is setup so that I can't log in without scanning my fingerprint on my smartphone.
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.
It is stable.
I'm able to upload thousands. I can do thousands of candidates at a time. If I've got multiple CVs, I can put 200 CVs in a Zip file, and I can upload them all at once, and it passes them all and puts them in the database. I don't think there are limits in terms of scalability.
There are five users at the moment. We all do recruitment except for our MD, who kind of uses it to manage, control, or get a bird's eye view of what's happening. We use it from beginning to end. When we look for a candidate, we first look in Zoho Recruit. If the candidate is not on Zoho, we put it on Zoho, and we entirely manage that candidate's placement from Zoho.
Their technical support is outstanding. Zoho's got something like 50 million customers. I've never had to phone them. I email them, and the same day, without fail and 100% of the time, I get a response and a resolution. I've got five users, and they all are very impressed.
It is a start-up, so we started from scratch, but before that, I've used many solutions. I've been doing this for 15 years, so I've used multiple solutions, such as Placement Partner and Bullhorn. I've also picked up and demoed just about all of them.
Zoho is by far the most comprehensive, and it does all the bits and pieces. There's no one solution that can do 100% of it. Zoho is as close to it as possible. Bullhorn is great, but it's not customizable at all. Any changes that you want to make or customization you want to make, they have to do them for you, whereas Zoho has got APIs. You can literally write the program and connect it.
It is straightforward. I haven't had to get any customization. It is literally just going online and configuring it a bit to be personalized or customized to your business. It is off-the-shelf. You put your logos and things like that.
We were a startup at the time, so I didn't have to move from an existing system. We started from scratch. There was no real deployment. We just had to get in and do it. I did it all myself. It was up and running completely within a month. I had set up the recruitment, workflows, templates, and emails for the entire company. It does everything. My emails go to it. Within a month, I had everybody trained and running a new system, working with it, and doing recruitment on the system.
I have seen ROI from using this solution. Being a small start-up agency, I don't have to employ a typist. I don't have to employ an administrator. I don't have to employ somebody to manage the process. I manage people, and I don't have to manage the process.
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.
I would absolutely recommend this solution. I would advise others to try and keep it as standard as possible. Keep it simple, and try to make as few customizations as possible. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that you can't do this business without one.
I would rate Zoho Recruit an eight out of ten.
