10+ Best Staffing Agency Software for Recruitment Firms (2024)

Manatal’s client portal is powerful. It gives clients free access to submitted candidate profiles where they can leave reviews and notes and even communicate directly with the agency on each opening.

As an agency, you decide what stage of the talent pipeline clients can see, what candidate info they can view, and what actions they can take. The arrival of scorecards also makes the candidate review process more consistent and efficient and is an excellent replacement for back-and-forth email exchanges.

As expected from a robust ATS, Manatal can connect with many free and paid job boards. We also found no issue customizing and integrating the career page with our website. The only thing we didn’t like here was that we couldn’t add more than one location to the same job—quite an inconvenience, considering clients often have the same openings at multiple branches.

We tried uploading an Excel file of 50 candidates to the system, and everything went smoothly. However, if you have a few hundred or more, you’d better contact Manatal’s support. While the platform claims it can handle 1,000 resumes at a time, some enterprise users we spoke to experienced hiccups and data format errors during migrations.

Candidate searching is also really nice. Recommendations sort candidates from your existing database and provide potential ones. There’s also a search bar for quick search, along with Boolean and advanced filters that are combinable to identify top candidates in seconds.

Manatal’s in-app tutorials and documentation are solid. However, seeking technical support via live chat was a big disappointment. The vendor can take days to get back to queries!

Engagement is another area Manatal struggles with. There's no email scheduling, and its free monthly email credits may not be enough for many agencies—200 for Professional and 1,000 for Enterprise.

Although Manatal’s starting price is low, given its limited native integrations (6 HRMS and 1 assessment tool) and API and Zapier integrations reserved for highest-tiered plan users, connecting it with existing recruiting systems can really push the cost up.

10,000+ companies, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Panasonic, Ogilvy, and Toyota.

Manatal has four plans with options for monthly and annual billing. When billed annually:

• Professional: $15/user/month, unlimited guests, 15 jobs per account, and 10,000 candidates.
• Enterprise: $35/user/month, unlimited jobs, candidates, and guests.
• Enterprise Plus: $55/user/month and includes Enterprise features plus user groups, open API access, SSO log-in, priority support, and access to Beta features.
• Custom: Custom pricing, tailor functionalities and support per user request.

Ceipal’s ATS exceeded our expectations. It’s very handy for posting jobs across various job boards, locating applicants, scheduling candidate interviews, and onboarding new hires. What's more, it's user-friendly—we actually skipped reading the knowledge base (though we recommend you don’t do the same to be aware of all features) and could still use it right away. This is a huge plus, especially if your staffing firm has members who may not be the most savvy with HR and recruitment tools.

Ceipal’s integration capabilities are, by far, the most comprehensive we’ve seen in this software category. This tool seamlessly integrates with over 155 HR systems, covering a wide range from popular paid job boards and free ones to VMS, social media, background check apps, video interview tech, and communication platforms.

Ceipal’s Engage feature is also quite impressive! Serving as a centralized communication hub, you can nurture candidates and prospective clients in bulk with built-in outreach templates and triggerable workflows while monitoring the progress of these relationships with real-time data and analytics.

Ad spend management is another of this recruiting solution’s specialties. The fact that you are allocated a certain amount of credits within a set timeline not only helps you stay on budget but also ensures your recruitment efforts don’t rely solely on ads.

However, after chatting with other recruiting folks, we realized we weren’t the only ones who found it frustrating with Ceipal’s service uptime. There are instances where the platform takes time to load when switching between job boards, and occasional session expirations occur.

We also expected a better performance from Ceipal’s AI tools. Though it doesn’t happen often, we still find it a pain that the current algorithms sometimes recommend profiles with outdated contacts or ones that don't align well with job requirements.

Despite the seemingly affordable price of $24 per user per month, this vendor locks many prominent features for staffing agencies, such as the client portal and candidate sourcing, as add-ons. You should also be aware that you’ll have to purchase at least five user seats to use Ceipal.

The Agency and Quality Staffing of America are some of the 2,500+ companies that have used CEIPAL.

CEIPAL has three plans, each comes with a free trial you can opt for after getting on a demo with its Sales team.

• Ceipal ATS is $24 per user per month with a 5-user minimum
• Ceipal Advanced Automation Bundle is $48 per user per month with a 5-user minimum
• Ceipal Workforce Management is $4 per user per month with a 25-user minimum

CEIPAL charges for migration from native drives, WhatsApp account/phone number and message credits.

Bullhorn has earned a strong reputation in the staffing agency software domain for its comprehensive suite that covers everything from candidate sourcing to onboarding and back-office duties. What's cool is the flexibility it offers—you get to pick and pay for only the additional modules you truly need, like timesheet management, expense tracking, and invoicing. It’s a relief knowing you won’t be burdened with unnecessary expenses, isn’t it?

One thing that caught our attention is how Bullhorn rolls out the red carpet for Salesforce users. The integration is smooth as butter, making it a powerhouse staffing solution. They also acquired Mployee in January 2024 to boost their capabilities on the Salesforce platform.

We love Bullhorn’s SourceBreaker too. This feature lets you kill two birds with one stone. On one hand, it provides search technology that makes the talent search easier with an array of filters: thousands of job titles, keyword variants, and company lists. On the other, it acts as a sales intelligence suite that knows exactly what to do to discover new leads for users to target.

However, the abundance of features in Bullhorn comes with a trade-off: a less-than-ideal user experience. We've had our patience tested dealing with frequent crashes, especially when trying to view candidate profiles or run searches. It became a routine to log out and log back in just to keep things moving.

Bullhorn’s reporting is also quite disappointing. We went ahead and customized our workflows, only to find out that the standard reports track just default steps. To get insights into our custom workflow steps we're left with no choice but to opt for Bullhorn's custom reports, and unfortunately, those aren't on the house.

Bullhorn has four price plans: Team, Corporate, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus. Contact Bullhorn’s sales team for a quote.

We demoed Zoho Recruit and were drawn to its visual hiring pipeline. It’s customizable—you can add, remove, edit stages, and even color code them to your liking. You can also have a holistic view of applicants' progress right from your dashboard.

When it comes to job posting, while JobAdder lets you post on over 200 job sites, Zoho Recruit lets you share your post on more than 3,000 job boards worldwide. Creating a careers page using the customizable templates on Zoho Recruit is simple and functional. It's not super visually aesthetic, but it gets the job done in terms of promoting the brand: it presents all vacancies, the company profile, and an overview of its culture.

We’re also glad we gave Zia, Zoho’s native AI-based chatbot, a try. This chatbot has a knack for providing prompt support to applicants, whether they have questions about placements, application status, or anything else related. Zoho Recruit doesn’t lag behind in talent matching capability either. When we created a new job with the desired skills, the system efficiently ran the evaluation and presented us with the best matches whose resumes and cover letters aligned with our set requirements.

You might have already realized that it’s hard to find another staffing agency software that offers an entirely free plan like Zoho Recruit. This free version, though coming with a couple of limitations on customization level and storage (256MB), should be good enough for staffing firms just starting out.

However, it’s a shame that Zoho Recruit charges separately for its client portal and mass email, considering several staffing agency software vendors include these two features within their base plans. Things didn’t turn out very well either when we explored Zoho’s mobile apps. Both the iOS and Android versions let us down with constant crashes, even after clearing all caches and reinstalling the apps.

Bosch, Deloitte, Saint-Gobain, PWC, Allianz.

Zoho Recruit provides four plans with free trials and add-ons:

• Free plan allows 1 active job at a time.
• Standard is $25 per user per month, billed annually.
• Professional is $50 per user per month, billed annually.
• Enterprise is $75 per user per month, billed annually.
• Available add-ons: Client portal and video interview modules.
  

JobAdder is for people who prefer a flexible approach when it comes to pricing. The recruitment staffing agency software offers a month-to-month payment option that you can cancel at any time. You also have the freedom to adjust the plan, up or down, with no strings attached.

With a wide range of integration partners, JobAdder covers various aspects of applicant tracking, from job posting to interview scheduling, candidate assessments, follow-ups, and onboarding. This is beneficial if you’ve already worked with multiple recruitment tech vendors, but bear in mind that it may not be as welcoming if an all-in-one solution is what you’re after.

JobAdder is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to recruitment analytics reports. It provides over 60 built-in reports and dashboards—a satisfying number even for picky users. What’s more, these reports are shareable and downloadable, meaning you can easily discuss them with your teammates and clients to finetune your hiring strategies.

When testing this recruitment software, we were expecting powerful user management features but, unfortunately, this is something JobAdder is actually struggling with. Even when we were in our admin accounts, we weren’t able to change certain settings (e.g., toggling email reminders or editing timesheets) ourselves but had to rely on JobAdder’s customer support.

We should also warn you that dealing with duplicates in JobAdder can be frustrating, as the system lacks the capability to merge deals or contacts and requires some workarounds from the user end.

Firefish, MAYDAY, and West Recruitment.

We know from experience how helpful it is for staffing agencies, especially large ones, to have recruiters and sales share a centralized system to align on candidate pipeline and placement needs. And Avionté delivers just that. It provides applicant tracking, talent engagement, onboarding, time tracking, and billing. In other words, it lets you have both front and back office tools under the same roof.

Avionté’s UI might not win any beauty contests: It felt like working within Outlook but, oddly enough, that familiarity was comforting. It made navigation and feature access straightforward.

Avionté boasts one of the most extensive integration capabilities we’ve encountered in staffing software: 35+ native recruitment tools and custom APIs. Same goes for its automation workflows. Agencies can select specific requirements for new hire signatures—background checks, drug screening, e-verify, and location-relevant tax documents—and the system then will form automated workflows accordingly and notify the hires to complete their onboarding tasks. Our experience from the hire side was also great. The UI is clean and allows talent to save completed steps and go back later.

However, we were less impressed with Avionté’s Android app: It kept crashing and reloading. Things got better when we switched to the iOS one, though.

It’s normal to accidentally create or assign a wrong job order for a recruiter, but the fact that Avionté didn’t allow users to correct mistakes, even when they are on an admin account is disappointing. Another irritating thing we caught when testing this tool was that the system would not only replace rather than append work history when applicants reapply, but it also wiped all of our notes on the candidate.

1,000+ staffing agencies, including TEEMA Solutions Group Inc., David Aplin Group Recruiting Solutions, Integrity Staffing have used this recruitment agency software tool.

If you're running a staffing agency and are after a powerful solution for high-volume sourcing and outreach, Gem is a strong contender. This software offers a comprehensive talent database for roles across industries and is especially helpful for those frequently dealing with tech placements.

Gem has clearly tried to bolster everything recruiters like to have in a sourcing tool. You have all the important data for prospective candidates from multiple sources like LinkedIn, Indeed, Behance, and GitHub gathered in one place. The Likely to Move feature allows you to identify candidate profiles that Gem's algorithms suggest are more open to new job opportunities and you also won’t have to make requests every time you want the system to update a candidate profile: This is taken care of automatically by Gem.

We also love that Gem’s email sequence feature doesn’t make staffing agencies feel they have to sacrifice either speed or personalization in their outreach. The automation equips recruiters with set-and-forget sequences rather than one-off emails. They can also send sequences on behalf of a teammate (oftentimes it’s their hiring manager) or drop candidates' individual emails if that’s what they want.

Gem doesn’t provide any pre-built email templates, but with the wealth of insights provided in its reporting, we can let this limitation slide. Gem’s data is all tracked in real-time and presented nicely with illustrative graphics and diagrams. Data-driven recruiters will like Gem’s Team Activity as much as we do: it shows recruiters how many activities, such as LinkedIn views, first messages, and follow-ups, occurred in a given time period—a valuable way for recruiters to reassess their time management.

This may or may not be a big deal, but the fact that Gem can integrate with LinkedIn but can’t provide users the ability to automate InMail sends to candidates is not great. Though Gem does offer options to share candidates internally and externally, there isn’t a dedicated portal for clients you can use here.

On the pricing front, this sourcing tool demands annual payments. The keen-eyed among you will notice Gem offers a free plan for early-stage startups, unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to staffing agencies.

1,200+ companies, including Coinbase, Slack, Asana, Dropbox, Lyft, Indeed, Pinterest, and Doordash.

The cost of Gem's services is based on the size of your recruitment team, the number of hires, and other factors like custom ATS integrations. You can reach out to their sales team for a quote.

Loxo Source can be useful whether you are filling a placement, scaling your staffing team, or strengthening your database for future needs. Our experience with Loxo Source was just as good, if not better, than with LinkedIn. It offers one of the largest talent databases we’ve seen (1.2B+), its search tools combine AI, Boolean, and advanced filters, and it has the ability to save searches.

We love being able to choose exactly which field to display on candidate cards with Loxo. The system allows up to five fields to show, plus highlights and notes on candidates—just the right amount of data for a quick candidate reference. Unfortunately, though, the chosen fields apply to all candidate cards across all jobs and the entire team (you can’t select different fields for different jobs).

Sharing candidates with clients in Loxo can be done in three ways. Quick Share allows specific attributes of individual candidates to be shared, while Formal Share lets you share a few candidates along with their formal submission documents. However, Client Portal is our favorite. It allows staffing firms to share certain candidate information and provides clients with an easily accessible pipeline overview without needing a Loxo account.

However, Loxo doesn’t cover anything back-office. No onboarding, no time tracking, and no payroll means you need to rely on third-party tools for such needs.

From what we’ve seen, small staffing agencies will likely find Loxo a bit expensive. The software does come with a free plan, yet its sales CRM is locked as an add-on, and so are many other essential features like integrations, sourcing, outreach, and reporting.

If you’re after staffing agency software with an exceptional mobile user experience, there are much better options. Loxo doesn’t have an Android app, and our experience with its iOS app was boring: it offers fewer capabilities than the browser version and, sometimes, crashes.

13,000+ companies, including Sanford Rose Associates Executive Search and Randstad.

Loxo has a free plan and three paid plans which start at $119 per seat per month when billed annually.

Odro covers pretty much all recruitment agency video needs: Capture for video sales messaging, Vision manages live and asynchronous video interviews, and HireDeck—a slick candidate submissions portal.‍

Capture is introduced as an easy-to-use, effective video engagement tool, and it truly delivers. With a simple click, you can craft an HD video message for a prospective client or candidate. But the real standout is the embedded feature named Quickfire. It allows you to personalize your video message in seconds, changing everything from the thumbnail to the title and caption.‍

Vision includes two-way, one-way, and advanced analytics. While it may resemble other corporate video interview software at first glance, certain differences truly make it a real deal for staffing businesses.‍

Talent Dashboard is one such difference—a co-branded portal housing shortlisted candidates for client access. This portal consolidates candidate videos, resumes, salaries, notices, and other documents, enabling clients to interact by commenting, liking, and requesting interviews or callbacks. A link to a branded Talent Dashboard truly is a good alternative, if not better than traditional email correspondence.

Odro's reporting capabilities set it apart in an area where many video interview platform vendors fall short. It provides real-time stats on viewer behavior and engagement. Alongside team and individual reports, you also have the ability to set up cohort one for effective comparison.

Hiredeck is a new offering from Odro, which we totally loved. It presents all essential candidate info within a password-protected, branded portal that can be easily shared with clients, all at no cost.

However, if you're seeking video interview tech that integrates well with your existing staffing recruitment software, unless you’re using Bullhorn or Vincere, you're in the wrong place. Odro can connect only with the two mentioned ATS, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.

There’s also something sad about Ordo’s onboarding. The whole process takes around six weeks, which can be unforgivably long for some. The learning library has many training videos, but its layout made it really hard to find the ones we wanted.

Odro has been used by 800+ companies, including both corporates and staffing agencies. Adecco, Advantage Group, and CastUK are some of its customers.

Odro is priced per user, but the fee varies depending on the volume of users and the length of the agreement. Most companies sign up for a 24 or 36-month commitment, although they do accept 12.

If we rewind the clock to our time working at recruiting firms, nothing stressed us out more than the client communication hustle: the constant shuffle between CRM, ATS, and email just to find and send candidate details to clients, the mundane manual email follow-ups for client feedback on each candidate, and the exhausting manual feedback collection.

With Recruit CRM, though, the usual process of sending candidate details can be done in less than 3 clicks! What's even cooler is that the link sent to clients is more than sufficient. It includes all the fields about the candidate profiles you want to share while providing a space for clients to quickly give feedback on each profile.

We also like the Radius Search feature: it lets users look for potential candidates within a chosen radius range. If you have candidates’ addresses available in your database, this feature works like a charm. We tested it by searching for front-end developers in LA within a 12 km radius of Disneyland, and the platform didn’t take more than five seconds to show us the matches.

Assigning jobs to candidates who are already placed or unavailable for a specific time period is a real issue for any staffing firm. Recruit CRM's attention to this detail—allowing users to mark individuals or mass candidates as unavailable for a specified time period—is impressive. These marked candidates will only appear as available once the unavailable period is complete.

However, we are disappointed with Recruit CRM’s reporting capabilities. It can only cover basic metrics with rather plain visualizations, and it sometimes even pulls unchosen fields into reports. As a result, those seeking more in-depth analysis have to rely on its API, which definitely is not for everyone.

It's also worth noting that Recruit CRM no longer offers a free plan. But, to be fair, its starting price is wallet-friendly enough for SMBs, and there’s a free trial anyone can opt for.

Recruitment CRM has 1,200+ customers in over 100 countries, including Blue Recruiting, G4 Global Partner, and Zeren.

Recruit CRM offers three plans and a free trial that lets you experience all of its features. When paid annually: Pro costs $85 per user per month, Business costs $125 per user per month, and Enterprise costs $165 per user per month.