Your hiring team’s guide to recruitment tools

Hiring teams have to juggle an enormous range of responsibilities. Recruitment tools can help lighten the load.

There are lots of expectations for recruiters and hiring managers. You have to network. You have to source new talent. You have to be a social media guru. You have to screen resumes. You have to interview. You have to call references. You have to negotiate salaries.

Each of these tasks requires unique skills, and each of them takes time to get right. Despite your best intentions, no hiring team has the time to do everything right. 

Luckily, hundreds of new HR tech startups have emerged to help hiring teams address their growing list of responsibilities.

To help you sort through the madness, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of all the types of recruitment tools currently available on the market, how much they cost, and how they’ll make you better at hiring.

What are recruitment tools?

A recruitment tool is a piece of technology or software that helps you increase efficiency and maximise production at any stage of the recruitment process. These include tools such as applicant tracking systems, candidate relationship managers, employee referral tools, interview tools, chat-bots, and more.

Any recruitment task that’s repetitive, cumbersome, or currently maintained by a series of unruly spreadsheets could be streamlined by a piece of software. That’s why recruiting automation and tools should play a key role in executing your talent strategy.

The many benefits of recruitment tools

Recruitment tools can significantly increase your hiring team’s productivity and capacity, helping you at every stage of the recruitment pipeline. 

On top of saving you time and effort, recruitment tools can help you:

• Enhance your employer brand
• Write compelling job descriptions
• Source more candidates online
• Test candidates on their skills
• Improve quality of hire
• Eliminate unconscious bias
• Reduce your time to hire
• Recruit passive candidates
• Increase employee referrals and social sharing

That’s why we consider experience with recruitment tools like an applicant tracking system (ATS) to be one of the most important recruitment skills.

All of that said, it’s all about choosing the right tools.

Key questions to ask before adopting a recruitment tool

Rushing into hiring the wrong candidate for a role is more costly than waiting for the right person. The same can be said for adopting a new recruitment tool.

When shopping around for technology, beware of shiny object syndrome. It’s exciting to discover an innovative piece of software that promises to solve all your problems, but adopting a new tool requires time, effort, and budget.

How well your organization adopts a tool is more impactful than the tool’s list of capabilities. To get the most out of any tool, you’ll need complete buy-in from your HR team, hiring managers, senior leadership, and your IT department.

So before you dive into a new piece of HR technology, here are some key questions to ask to ensure you make the right choice.

• What goals are we trying to achieve? 

There are an infinite number of tools out there with a wide range of capabilities. Before looking for solutions, you need to understand your problems. Are you trying to reduce time-to-hire? Collaborate as a growing HR team? Centralise documentation? Identify your most significant recruitment pain points and document them.

• What existing technological dependencies do we have? 

Are there any tools or processes your organization is already bound to? Knowing this will help you look for any necessary product integrations.

• How easily can the tool be adapted into your existing HR processes and tools? 

Think about how you would adopt any new tool into the day-to-day workflows your team already has in place. Is there potential for disruption? Are there any risks involved? Does the tool work with your technology dependencies?

• Can the tool be centralised? 

A new tool won’t work to its full capabilities unless it’s adopted organization-wide. Rather than adopting a tool for your department or branch, it’s best to adopt the tool centrally at your organisation’s head office.

• Can the tool be customized to your needs? 

Some recruitment tools are one-size-fits-all, whereas others can be customized for each organization. For example, is there an API to connect the tool to your other technology? Is there custom reporting available? Before pulling the trigger, ask what elements of the tool are customizable.

• Will implementing the tool require additional hardware? 

Some tools may require investment in servers or other computer hardware. Work with your IT team to make sure you have the necessary real-world tools to support the technology.

• How many users does the tool allow for? 

Most tools are priced either by HR-team users or by total employee headcount. Consider both your team’s size today and what it may look like two-to-three years from now.

• Is it a one-time license or a SaaS product? 

While some tools offer a one-time purchase and implementation fee for your business, others require a monthly fee. Which pricing plan is best for your business will depend on your business structure, need to scale up or down, and cash flow.

• Do you have the ongoing budget? 

Do you have the necessary monthly budget for a SaaS product? Even in the case of one-time licenses, there may be unexpected maintenance costs such as a new customization or integration.

• Can the tool adapt to your changing business? 

Is your company scaling quickly? Do you often undergo mergers or acquisitions? Identify potential changes to your organization and choose a tool that can roll with the punches.

• Will the tool require significant onboarding & training? 

Training time is an additional hidden cost for any new tool. How much time will it take to train HR staff, hiring managers, and employees on the new tool, and how does that impact your business’s bottom line?

• Does the tool overlap with existing tools? 

There isn’t a one-to-one ratio of tools to capabilities. Some tools are designed narrowly for one purpose, whereas others act as end-to-end software suites. Adopting one of these umbrella tools may render one of your existing tools redundant. This could mean cost savings, but it may also create another technology migration project. Evaluate any new tool as part of your whole HR technology stack rather than in isolation.

• Will the tool contribute to your recruitment goals? 

After answering all of the above, return to your original goals. Given the expense, time, and effort of adoption, will the tool help you achieve your recruitment goals?

If a tool can pass through the gauntlet of questions above, then it’s worth adopting! This may feel like overkill when you’re time-pressured to fill open roles, but you’ll thank yourself for avoiding potential headaches and unexpected costs in the future.

Types of recruitment tools you should consider

Have a recruitment challenge? There’s a tool for that. 

Your team won’t need every type of recruitment tool on this list, and there’s lots of overlap from one tool category to the next, so only choose the combination of tools that makes sense for your HR tech stack.

1. Applicant Tracking Systems

An applicant tracking system (ATS)  is a centralised hub for all your recruiting activities. An ATS allows you to source, evaluate, track, and hire candidates all in one place—making it an essential tool for any recruiter. 

As it’s the broadest category of recruitment tool, each ATS differs from the next, but most have end-to-end recruitment features such as:

• Branded careers/job portals
• Automated posting to external job boards
• Integration of candidate skills assessments
• Interview scheduling, templates, and evaluation forms
• AI-powered candidate ranking
• Video screening capabilities
• Custom workflows
• Integrations with other recruitment tools
• Reporting capabilities

Therefore, many of the other tool categories on our list can be found within the most feature-rich ATS solutions.

Benefits: 

Because ATSs are so wide-reaching in capabilities, they can help you achieve any recruitment goal, from improving time-to-hire, to better screening candidates, to improving quality of hire.

Challenges: 

For the same reason as above, choosing the right ATS is the most significant technology choice you’ll make as an HR department. With hundreds to choose from, it comes down to finding the tool that fits your budget, suits your organization size, and integrates with existing tools and processes. In some cases, you may be able to get richer features from combining individual tools rather than trying to get an ATS that can do it all.

Pricing: 

Asking how much an ATS costs is almost like asking how much a car or a house costs. It depends on what you’re looking for from your investment. ATS solutions can be priced by recruiter, position, employee, or feature module. They can range from as little as $100 per month to thousands of dollars per month if you have many open roles or require many users.

2. Candidate Relationship Management Tools

A candidate relationship management tool (CRM) is a system that lets you engage with candidates who apply to your company, most often through automated email sequences.

For example, you can use CRMs to engage current and past candidates by periodically sending them updates on new roles, hiring fairs, or other employer-branding-related news. 

You can also use your CRM to search for past candidates who have the necessary skills or experience that match a new role, at which point you can reach out to them with the new opportunity.

Benefits: 

CRMs allow you to engage your existing talent pool more easily, reducing the need to source new candidates for every open role. This creates time and cost savings, reducing the pressure on your hiring team.

Challenges: 

While the benefits of nurturing candidates with a CRM are evident, it can be a lot of work to get right. Candidate nurturing requires creating email campaigns that are suited to your audience, which may require engagement with your marketing team or even an external agency. Personalization can also be a challenge in that you only want to send out potential roles to a candidate that are relevant to their interests.

Pricing: 

Most recruitment CRMs are now integrated into applicant tracking systems and are priced by either active job slots or number of recruiters. They typically range from $100 to thousands of dollars per month.

3. Job Description Tools

Unless you’re a well-known brand, the first touch-point most candidates will have with your company is by finding one of your job postings on a third-party job board. Therefore, your job descriptions are your only chance to make a good first impression. 

“Job description tools” is a loosely defined group of tools that allow you to write more accurate and more compelling job descriptions.

These may include:

• Job evaluation tools that create job descriptions to align with benchmarks
• Job description templates and guides
• Tools that detect gender bias or non-inclusive language
• ADA-compliance assessment tools
• AI-powered language evaluators that analyze job descriptions against your company values while detecting buzzwords or cliches seen to reduce applications
• SEO tools that help your descriptions rank for the right keywords

Benefits: 

Bias-free and inclusive job descriptions can help your diversity recruiting efforts. Well-defined job descriptions also help inform pay grades, give candidates a clear understanding of the role, and properly set expectations.

Challenges: 

There aren’t any current one-size-fits-all job description solutions, so you’ll have to work out a process for combining these tools to your advantage.

Pricing: 

These tools vary widely, and so do the prices. There are plenty of free SEO and gendered language tools available, while augmented writing recruitment tools can cost thousands.

4. Recruitment Marketing & Employer Brand Management Tools

Developing your employer brand – how candidates perceive your organization—should be a critical part of your recruitment strategy. Recruitment marketing allows you to show off your employer brand by using marketing tactics such as a careers website, social media posts, email campaigns, ads on job boards, employee testimonials, events, and more.

While you can cobble together a high-performing recruitment marketing strategy with a strong careers website, job aggregator, and ATS/CRM, there are also dedicated recruitment marketing platforms (RMP). These platforms are marketing automation systems specifically designed for marketing to candidates. 

Some RMPs are stand-alone tools, whereas others integrate into your ATS. Most RMPs offer the following features:

• Distribution of open job listings on job sites and social media
• A careers site/page content management system (CMS)
• A CRM to manage and engage with candidates
• Marketing automation to nurture and remarket to candidates
• Attribution tracking to assess your most productive recruitment channels

Benefits: 

An effective employer branding strategy allows you to showcase your company culture, tell your company story, reach a greater number and diversity of candidates, attract passive candidates, and improve the overall candidate experience—ultimately leading to better hires. Using a recruitment marketing platform allows you to reduce the efforts involved with employer branding significantly.

Challenges: 

Employer branding is a long-term, proactive effort. Upfront costs may not pay off for several months, which isn’t always an easy sell to management. Even with an RMP, attribution of which channels your best candidates came from can be tough to measure.

Pricing: 

Entry-level pricing for recruitment marketing platforms starts around $20 to $30 per recruiter per month.

5. Job Boards & Job Aggregator Tools

Job boards are third-party platforms where employers can post their open job listings. Job aggregators automatically pull job postings from these job boards—like a search engine. Many job aggregators also double as a job board, allowing you to post jobs directly (for a fee).

Candidates love job aggregators as they put thousands of open roles in one place, saving them considerable time and effort in their job search.

As a recruiter, that unfortunately means you’re often bound to posting your roles to the most popular job boards and aggregators. This not only comes with a hefty price tag, but it also comes with being at the mercy of the aggregators’ search algorithms, formatting, and guidelines.

When we talk about job aggregator tools for recruiters, we’re referring to software solutions that allow you to automatically push out one or all of your job postings to the most popular job boards and aggregators.

Most ATS solutions provide the functionality to post directly to free job aggregators and create paid job campaigns through third-party integrations with paid job boards.

Benefits: 

Job aggregators are by far the fastest way to get your open job postings in front of as many people as possible within minutes.

Challenges: 

On top of the sometimes exorbitant listing costs, job aggregators may also impact how you write your job descriptions. You have to ensure your job titles and descriptions are keyword optimised so they can be found in candidates’ searches. You may also face challenges in listing a location for your role (for example, a remote role), as many aggregators sort jobs by individual cities. Job listings can also be caught in spam filters.

Pricing: 

There are plenty of free job boards and aggregators, however, the most popular aggregators and job boards require you to pay for a listing. Pricing can either be by click on a job posting (e.g. $0.10-$5 per click), per role per month (e.g. $250 per month for one job), or subscription-based (e.g. $1000 per month for five jobs).

6. Talent Sourcing Tools

Talent sourcing tools are recruitment platforms that allow you to proactively identify and source candidates for your open roles, filling the top of your recruitment funnel. These tools generate lists of potential candidates by matching your role requirements against databases from the open web and third-party platforms. 

These tools also typically include reaching out to candidates, asking them screening questions, and scheduling interviews. 

Sourcing tools are a great tool in the arsenal of in-house recruiters—especially if you’re having trouble finding the right candidates for a tricky role or you simply need to increase the overall volume of your recruiting efforts.

There’s also an emerging sector of technology-enabled talent sourcing services, where you can hand over your ideal candidate profile to a third-party company, and they’ll use AI-enabled tools to source potential candidates. This allows you to ramp up and down your sourcing efforts easily or take sourcing off your plate altogether if you’d rather focus on interviewing and screening.

Talent sourcing can also sometimes refer to programmatic advertising, which means running online ads to target your ideal candidate profile.

Benefits: 

Talent sourcing tools allow you to increase your overall volume of candidates to supercharge your talent pool. This decreases your time to fill a role because you don’t have to manually build your own candidate pipelines or depend solely on organic applications. 

Challenges: 

While talent sourcing tools effectively fill your candidate pipeline, they typically come with a high price tag.

Pricing: 

Pricing models vary quite considerably. Pricing is typically tiered by features and can be on a flat-rate monthly subscription basis (e.g. $79 per month for pulling contact information or $169 per month to engage candidates as well), per role (e.g. $200-600 per role), per user (e.g. $100-$200 per user per month), and/or per hire (e.g. $9,500 per hire).

7. Resume Screening Tools

Resume screening tools—also called candidate screening software—filter and prioritize job applicants based on the contents of their resume matched up against job requirements.

Resume screening software typically works by looking for specific keywords in a candidate’s resume. 

Benefits: 

Resume screening tools can help manage a large volume of candidate applications and save you time on the manual work associated with sifting through resumes.

Challenges: 

Resume screening tools are controversial as they generate lots of false positives and false negatives. For example, a perfectly qualified candidate may be screened out because they use an unrecognised resume format or don’t use a particular keyword. Candidates can also game the system by purposely injecting keywords into their resumes. Screening tools can also introduce bias into your hiring process because of a too narrowly prescriptive list of qualifications that may not reflect a great candidate. Pre-employment assessment tools are now considered a better alternative to resume screening.

Pricing: 

Most ATS solutions have built-in resume screening, meaning there’s generally not an independent cost. AI-based resume screening tools provide monthly subscriptions for approximately $5-20 per month per job.

8. Pre-Employment Assessment Tools

Pre-employment assessment tools allow you to screen candidates faster, easier, and with less bias than traditional resume screening methods, which is why 82% of companies use pre-employment assessments in their hiring process.

With tools like The Principle Group, you can create assessments of multiple pre-employment skills tests to evaluate candidates on skills necessary for success in the open role.

These assessments include:

• Language proficiency – such as English (proficient/C1), Swedish (intermediate/B1), and Spanish (upper intermediate/B2).
• Programming and Software skills tests – such as Flutter and AutoCAD
• Role-specific skills test- such as tests for outside sales reps or social media managers
• Personality and culture tests – such as culture add or the Enneagram
• Cognitive ability test – such as verbal reasoning or spatial reasoning.
• Soft skills and situational judgement tests – such as communication or time management

Testing candidates on these skills gives you the hard evidence that a candidate actually has the skills listed on their resume, as research shows that experience doesn’t predict a new hire’s success.

Benefits: 

Using pre-employment assessments with multiple test types has been shown to reduce hiring costs, improve hiring time, and reduce company turnover by hiring higher-quality and better-suited candidates. They also help you reduce hiring bias by removing the step of subjectively scanning resumes or evaluating candidates’ interviews based on gut feel.

Challenges: 

Identifying the necessary skills for a role and then creating tests that accurately measure each of these skills is a challenging process. To help you create candidate assessments, The Principle Group has a library of pre-made tests catered to each role, with the ability to customise your own assessments.

Pricing: 

The Principle Group has four pricing tiers, including a free plan with up to 10 free tests per month. Pricing then ranges from $25/month for 100 candidates/year, up to $2,000/month for 12,500 candidates/year.

9. Social Media Recruitment Tools

“Social media recruitment tools” is a broad category of social platforms that help you create robust social media campaigns to fill your candidate pipeline.

There are plenty of generic social media management tools not specific to recruitment that have deep feature sets to manage your social media accounts. You can pre-schedule posts to multiple platforms at once, respond to comments and messages, track engagement, and identify influencers in your industry.

There’s also social media advertising, which allows you to pay to promote roles on popular platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

There are also a variety of other social-related tools that will perform functions, such as screening candidates’ LinkedIn profiles or aggregating a candidate’s social accounts. However, we’d recommend using these tools with caution. 

Benefits: 

Social media is a quick way to boost your employer brand and advertise open roles. Social media recruitment tools can drastically increase the efficiency of your social strategy and may help you reach otherwise niche networks.

Challenges: 

Social media has an unpredictable return on your time and money investment. For example, you may spend hours crafting posts, but nobody may find them without an existing audience on your social profiles. However, a complete lack of a social presence may be a red flag to candidates. It’s best to use social media in balance with other recruiting and sourcing strategies.

Pricing: 

Many social media management tools offer free plans for one user. Multiple users may cost up to $100 per month for basic functionality. For advertising, your budget will include a monthly spend, depending on how many clicks you want, plus the management fee of the company running your ads (unless you run them yourself).

10. Networking Tools

Sometimes, good old-fashioned networking is what it takes to find the right candidates. There are a variety of networking tools you can use to boost your online and offline networking efforts.

For example, there are event-scheduling tools to schedule job fairs, happy hours, or networking events. There are also websites for local meet-ups centred around particular interests that may help you source niche candidates.

You can also use social media platforms to network, such as Facebook groups, sub-Reddit’s, or web forums.

Benefits: 

Networking tools are typically free or low-cost.

Challenges: 

Networking in person has proven challenging since the emergence of COVID-19. It also has unpredictable results, as you could sink lots of time into creating connections that don’t pan out.

Pricing: 

Most online networking forums are free, whereas event scheduling tools may have a nominal fee. Some networking groups may charge for attendance.

11. Chat-bots

Being inundated with candidates may seem like a good problem to have, but being unable to answer candidates’ questions promptly can create a negative candidate experience.

Chat-bots have recently emerged as a popular recruitment tool, as they allow candidates to ask questions before applying for a role. These are AI-powered support agents that can be pre-programmed with common questions and answers.

For example, candidates could ask your chat-bot if a specific role is available remotely or what the salary is for a given role. It’s likely your wheels are already turning, thinking about all the repetitive questions you receive daily. A chat-bot could take all of that off your plate.

Benefits: 

A chat-bot can take a lot of the workload of asking basic questions on your HR team’s plate. Some chat-bots also include the ability to chat with a “live agent,” giving candidates an easy way to ask you questions in real-time.

Challenges: 

Most chat-bots are by default created for sales and marketing purposes, therefore they’re still maturing as a tool for recruiters. However, companies can create custom chat-bots to answer their most frequently asked questions.

Pricing: 

Chat-bots can run from $15 to $50 per month, depending on the number of users and customisation.

12. Interview Tools

Conducting job interviews is a complicated and often unscientific process that takes years of experience to get right. Interviewer bias can cloud your judgement, especially if the conversation with a candidate flows naturally—it may distract you from their actual qualifications.

Therefore, any interview tools that can increase the efficacy of your interviews should be a welcomed addition to your recruitment tool stack. 

With in-person interviews more of a rarity these days, video interview tools have emerged that provide more capabilities than a basic Zoom link. These platforms offer features such as interview builders, interview assessments, branded videos, and interview scheduling. Some offer pre-recorded one-way interviews with text and video-based questions that limit think time or restrict answer length while limiting the number of takes a candidate can make.

There are also interview evaluation tools, typically built into your ATS or video interview platform, that allow you to create interview question templates, take notes during the interview, and rate candidates.

Benefits: 

Interview tools help add structure to your interviews, ensuring you provide the same interview experience for each candidate. One-way interviews can also eliminate interview bias or avoid leading questions. They also offer a collaborative method for evaluating candidates. 

Challenges: 

Over-relying on a tool during a live interview could create a negative candidate experience if you’re buried in your laptop screen. New-age interviewing tools also carry a hefty price tag.

Pricing: 

If not already included in your ATS, most video interviewing tools start at approximately $120 per month for a single job or $250 per month for five jobs. Other platforms include a one-time licensing fee starting at $35,000.

13. Background Check Tools

Depending on your industry, you may require in-depth candidate screening. Background check tools help create confidence that you’re bringing in the right people to your organization. 

These tools and services can include background checks and reports on criminal records, driving records, drug testing, sex offender registries, credit checks, healthcare sanctions, motor vehicle records, social media history, and more.

Benefits: 

If you require specific background knowledge about a potential hire, these tools can get the job done.

Challenges: 

Make sure you’re complying with local laws relating to employee privacy.

Pricing: 

Most background check tools or services charge per candidate, with pricing dependent on what you’re researching.

14. On-boarding Tools

While some aspects of onboarding aren’t strictly part of recruitment, many hiring managers and recruiters are also responsible for employee onboarding.

Plus, solid onboarding of the great hires you bring in can significantly improve the new employee experience, leading to better retention and less strain on your recruitment team down the line.

On-boarding tools provide features for managing onboarding paperwork, gathering signatures, customising preboarding packages, automating welcome emails, and creating onboarding and IT checklists for every new hire.

Benefits: 

On-boarding tools can help you close on new hires more quickly, improving time-to-hire and time-to-productivity. And in a world where many companies are now remote-first, great onboarding tools are needed to provide a fantastic first-day experience. 

Challenges: 

Adopting a new onboarding tool is a significant undertaking as it impacts finance, IT, and your operations teams. If your ATS doesn’t include onboarding tools, you’ll also have to ensure the two tools can integrate seamlessly.

Pricing: 

Most onboarding tools use a per-employee, per-month pricing model, ranging from approximately $5 to $10 per employee per month, depending on features and company size.

15. Employee Referral Tools

Every hiring team knows the value of employee referrals, as they’re a reliable source for high-quality hires in many organisations.

Employee referral tools offer automated solutions for helping your employees make referrals more conveniently for new roles. Common features include:

• Notifications to employees for new roles
• Auto sharing of new roles to employees’ social profiles
• Referral suggestions from employees’ social networks
• The ability for employees to endorse friends and track their progress
• Automatic referral bonuses
• Diversity incentives
• Analytics dashboards to track program success

Benefits: 

At many companies, the combined social following of your employees will be much greater than your company’s business profile. Automated employee referrals can help fill your sourcing pipeline in just a few clicks. Your team will also appreciate the referral bonuses!

Challenges: 

Employee referral programs are only as successful as the effort your leadership team puts into them. Referral tools certainly make the process easier to execute, but you’ll have to get employee buy-in for them to be effective. Some employees may also find the tools invasive.

Pricing: 

Employee referral tools are typically SaaS licenses that are billed monthly based on company size. They’ll typically cost you around $500 per month for up to 500 employees.

16. Employee Advocacy Tools

Employee advocacy tools allow you to engage your current employees to share your company’s content on their social networks.

Advocacy tools are similar in functionality to referral tools, as they push content out to your employees’ social networks. They differ from referral tools in that they’re designed to be more generalised to include other types of content—such as marketing- or sales-oriented blogs.

Hiring managers can utilize these tools by pushing content relating to open roles, company culture, employer branding, and your company careers page.

Benefits: 

In addition to helping your recruitment efforts, employee advocacy tools can also help your sales and marketing teams.

Challenges: 

These tend to be “social selling” tools rather than recruiting tools, so you’ll have to develop a strategy with your marketing team to integrate your employer content into the company’s social strategy.

Pricing: 

These tools are priced as a monthly SaaS product by employee seats and typically start around $300 for 25 to 30 users.

17. Global Employment Tools

The shift to remote hiring has opened the door to hiring people from all around the globe. However, this comes with the challenge of juggling legal and compliance requirements in multiple countries.

Global employment tools and services have emerged to help you sort through the challenges of payroll, benefits, contracts, local compliance, bilingual agreements, onboarding, background checks, and GDPR compliance on a global scale.

Benefits: 

These tools and services allow you to hire flexibly from anywhere in the world, drastically increasing your potential candidate pool.

Challenges: 

Hiring a global workforce can make other aspects of employment more challenging, such as sustaining a solid company culture or retention rates. 

Pricing: 

These services typically come in around $500 per employee per month.

18. Collaboration Tools

While not strictly a recruitment tool, collaboration tools help any team keep on top of tasks, goals, priorities, and deadlines. In most cases, it’s much more efficient to communicate through a task board than through disparate emails, chat channels, and meetings.

Many ATS solutions have collaboration tools built-in, but you may get deeper capabilities out of pure productivity or collaboration tools—such as task automation. Plus, the most popular tools typically come with API or connector capabilities that may integrate with your ATS.

Benefits: 

If you’re tight on budget, collaboration tools can likely replicate many of the capabilities of other tools on this list. For example, you could create an onboarding task template that you replicate for each new employee, sparing you from buying a standalone tool.

Challenges: 

These tools are so feature-rich that they take a lot of upfront time investment to create process workflows that work for your hiring team. However, many tools come with marketplaces with existing task boards or workflows.

Pricing: 

Most collaboration tools have basic free plans, but advanced plans with automation or integrations included will cost from $5 to $20 per month per employee.

19. Writing Tools

Writing is a crucial skill for any role, but especially for recruitment, as much of it comes down to communicating the value of a role or your organization in a persuasive manner. 

There are plenty of writing tools available that will help include your writing providing suggestions for:

• Grammar
• Sentence structure (e.g. passive voice)
• Readability level
• Emotion tells
• Run-on sentences
• Cliches
• And so on…

Some tools are available as browser extensions, whereas others come as standalone web or desktop apps.

Benefits: 

Not only can these tools save you tons of time from writing and rewriting, but they can also make your writing more persuasive to candidates and internal stakeholders. For example, writing a compelling job requisition will help any hiring manager convince stakeholders to make a new hire.

Challenges: 

The writing tools that work via browser extension read and collect all of the content you put through the tool. While these companies do their best to protect your privacy, you should check with your IT team that the tool is up to your company’s security standards.

Pricing: 

Most tools start with a free plan with basic features and range from $12 to $30 per month per user for paid plans.

Make pre-employment assessments part of your recruitment tech stack

The Principle Group gives you the tools you need to properly screen candidates and make better decisions about who you hire.

With The Principle Group, you can choose from our pre-employment tests or create your own. You can then objectively analyse and compare the best candidates for every role.

The Principle Group integrates with a growing list of applicant tracking systems and has a public API to integrate with any ATS or HRIS of your choice.

To start making better hiring decisions, get started with The Principle Group for free.