Top 6 Recruiting Automation Tools and Why You Need Them
HR Management and Recruitment Tips and Resources

Top 6 Recruiting Automation Tools and Why You Need Them

Avantika Mishra
Avantika Mishra

Table of Contents

We’re now inching closer to dealing with the Coronavirus health crisis as the COVID-19 vaccination across the globe gains momentum.

While this may seem like a good marker to say that things will go back to ‘normal’ soon, we need to address a phenomenal change under process during this period.

The year 2020 reshaped the hiring trends for the coming year, and an unprecedented change in the future of recruiting is already underway. For example, businesses around the world are busy streamlining their hiring cycles with the help of AI.

As a result, automation functions in recruitment are gaining momentum. Hiring effectively is crucial, and this article will talk about the top recruitment automation tools that can make the recruitment process more effective.

According to a Fortune survey, 59% of CEOs implemented hiring freezes during the coronavirus pandemic. It is expected that the early months of 2021 will witness a hiring surge in almost 60-70% of organizations, opening a lot of avenues for candidates to explore.

As things run on the 5th gear to make up for the gaps created last year, recruiting teams need to be prepared for higher volumes and will have to spend more time sourcing, screening, and interviewing talent moving forward.

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Hiring Trends to Plan for in 2021 - Blog
The pandemic proved to be a historic change agent and transformed the recruiting landscape. As virtual recruiting and onboarding a remote workforce became the norm for many, changes expected to take years happened in months instead.And so the big question- Will post COVID-19 hiring be like before?

An important focus of this change will be re-inventing the interview process for businesses moving forward. Let us take a look at how ‘better employee experience’ tops the hiring trend list of Linkedin’s 2020 global trend report:

Hiring trends for 2021: Linkedin Insights. Employee experience, people analytics, internal recruiting, etc.
Linkedin Insights throws light on trends that are most important to the future of recruiting. 

An SHRM survey found that the average cost per hire can be over $4,000. Let’s weigh that with the fact that $11,000 is how much companies can save annually for each employee that works remotely half-time. Owing to such tectonic shifts in hiring trends, it becomes pivotal to think about the most effective ways of engaging the right talent and ensuring that you retain them.

A company must spend significant time and money to search for the best talent through advertising, recruitment agencies, screening, interviewing, and hiring. But sometimes employees leave. A study by Employee Benefits News on employee retention found that the average cost of losing an employee is a staggering 33% of their annual salary.

In other words, when an employee leaves, you haven’t just lost talent or time;  you’ve lost valuable money for your company.

This is where Recruiting Automation tools come into the picture. An effective automation tool can not only help you scout the right talent, but also help you create better retention stats.

While most companies and individuals are somewhat familiar with HR software, the landscape is rapidly changing with the addition of new best-of-breed apps to keep pace with the ways changing technology affects how users want to interact with software.

What is Recruitment Software and Why do You Need it?

“It’s not like I need their job. If it takes them a week to respond to a resume like mine for a job of this importance, they’re not the kind of company I want to work for. I move fast, and I can already see that my style wouldn’t fit their culture.”
                                                                                    Wind River Associates

According to Robert Half research, most Australian hiring managers (97%) say it is hard to find candidates that fit a vacancy perfectly. Speed of your hiring cycle is most important when you are competing for “in-high-demand” top talent. In fact, delayed hiring processes are among the top reasons for reduced productivity.

Recruitment software can help with that by automating tasks that otherwise take a lot of human back-and-forths and thus consume valuable resources that could otherwise focus on the quality of a candidate’s potential.

Recruiting software is traditionally a category of human resources management (HRM) that takes care of HR processes like posting jobs and attracting top talent for positions within a company. Today, they can do a lot more than recruiting and can help HR manage teams more effectively.

A report from Intelligence Group’s HR Technology Survey gives interesting insights into what Human Resources (HR) professionals care about most:

  • HR managers spend a majority of their time working on HR analytics and reporting.
  • Time spent on manual data input (50%) was among the biggest obstacles to meeting reporting deadlines, followed by time spent on manual adjustments (30.6%) and lack of standardized HR tools across the organization (27.4%).

Spending so much time juggling with data is one of the top time-consuming factors. By automating such tasks, HR teams can focus on ensuring a healthy, productive work environment and thus, happier employees.

Here are the top 5 reasons why HR professionals prefer recruiting automation tools:

  • A faster, more efficient recruitment and employee onboarding process
  • Get valuable analytics and insights on risk management
  • Reduced HR budgets. Cruise through the day to day HR processes with unprecedented consistency
  • Employee training

Top 6 Recruiting Automation Tools to Know in 2021

With dozens of recruiting software companies out there, we’ve made our top picks based on the company size and have listed the top 6 recruiting automation software tools you should know of in 2021.

For Enterprises

Recruitment automation needs strong collaboration features that allow smooth workflow regarding sharing applicant data and receiving feedback from hiring managers.

Most enterprises prefer to invest in a recruitment automation solution that can offer additional powerful features like an application portal, a branded careers page, internal job board, etc.

Features like these can also help facilitate internal hiring and employee referral programs.

Here are the top enterprise recruiting platforms selected based on automation, recruitment marketing, analytics, and candidate assessment features.


Workday HRM software allows businesses to manage people-related tasks in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. With features like self-service, you can organize, staff, pay your employees, and manage activities ranging from hiring cycles to retirement policies.

With Workday, you can keep track of your workforce and retrieve analytics based on salary, history, position, and other dimensions. Workday allows you to model any kind of company, department, or matrix independently (and simultaneously), set workflow, manage staff and restructure policies.

Workday is an effective HRM solution that helps in recruitment automation
Workday is a HRM platform that helps recruiters keep a track of employee performance and analytics 

You can also gain valuable insight into employee performance and compensation. This allows you to design or restructure your compensation programs, utilize data from variable pay, equity, allowances, and more, helping you devise better compensation plans based on individual/team effort, organization, and more.

With tools that help you manage tasks like absences & leaves, time-offs, and scheduling, Workday’s interface is comparatively easy-to-use and can help you streamline your HR processes.


Jobvite is a favorite amongst enterprises for leading the next wave of recruitment innovation- Continuous Candidate Engagement (CCE).

CCE is a candidate-centric recruitment model that lets companies engage candidates meaningfully with valuable experiences in every stage of their journey with the company--right from the first day.

The Jobvite platform combines intelligence and automation into today’s expanded recruitment cycles. This allows hiring managers to speed up while filtering the right quality in a cost-effective manner.

Jobvite for automation softwares for hiring in 2021
Jobvite is leading the recruitment automation market with its Continuous Candidate Engagement solutions

Hailed by many as the ‘industry-leading software’, Jobvite can accelerate recruiting with an Application Tracking System (ATS) that is easy to use and comes with social recruiting capabilities.

Moreover, it comes loaded with features like mobile-optimized branded career sites, recruiting marketing solutions, on-demand video screening, candidate texting solutions, onboarding, advanced analytics, and much more.

Some of the popular names that use Jobvite are LinkedIn, Schneider Electric, Premise Health, Zappos, and Blizzard Entertainment.

For Agencies

While recruiting agencies require many of the same features as an enterprise business would, they need additional financial functionality owing to their client-facing positioning.

An agency’s recruitment automation solution should ideally allow them to store and search large amounts of data. Functions like advanced custom filtering and email integration are also important for agency recruiters.

Furthermore, the fact that agencies have to go a step further and also manage their client details, requires automation solutions that have CRM functionality.

Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit is an applicant tracking system that helps streamline recruitment processes.

With solutions for both staffing agencies and in-house recruiters, Zoho Recruit can help you source, track and hire the best talent without having to juggle across different media.

Zoho Recruit's applicant tracking system makes it an effective recruitment automation software to streamline hiring processes

Its automation solutions let you customize everyday workflows and automate tasks like updating task status, sending emails, etc. You can also plan better hiring strategies by using Zoho Recruit’s reports and analytics.

Other key features include capabilities to publish to premium job boards, create your company’s careers page, workflow automation, and tracking hiring cycles with Hiring Pipeline, etc.


WIth Greenhouse companies can find qualified candidates, conduct interviews, and make data-driven hiring decisions. Their recruiting software platform assists hiring managers in the multiple phases of recruitment, including planning, sourcing, and interviewing.

Greenhouse facilitates better collaboration by allowing two-way communication on tasks and data results. For example, each job assigns one or more people the role of the Hiring Manager, Recruiter, Coordinator, or Sourcer.

Greenhouse as a 360 degree solution for recruitment automation

Given the fact that Greenhouse has a variety of user types, it has policies and permissions that can be customized by an individual company.

The recruitment automation platform also offers ‘interview kits’ to allow prospective hirees to communicate directly with HR representatives, sync schedules, review roles, and upload CVs.

Another helpful feature is that hiring teams can directly post job vacancies to integrated job search sites like SimplyHired, Indeed, and Glassdoor. Greenhouse offers solutions for both recruiting and onboarding.

SMBs-Small and Mid-sized Businesses

Although SMBs need the same recruiting efficiency as their larger counterparts, their solutions can afford to be simpler and less expensive. They need tools that integrate with existing systems to optimize the use of their available data. This is why most SMBs prefer stand-alone tools over full HR software solutions.


JazzHR is an award-winning recruitment automation solution for SMBs and is known to aid the human side of recruiting. It comes with an intuitive applicant tracking system that can replace complicated tasks like emailing and maintaining spreadsheets. This allows hiring managers to build a scalable and effective recruiting process without having to invest in a full-blown HR automation solution.

JazzHR is also the creator of Crowd, the HR industry’s first integrated crowd-sourcing, big data, and predictive analytics initiative.

The highlight of JazzHR is that it offers unlimited users, unlike pay-per-user pricing models. Their processes are highly customizable and integrate with most of the popular HR tools like LinkedIn, Namely, Salesforce, etc.

Bamboo HR

BambooHR’s human resource information system is known for its easy-to-use UX. SMBs can benefit from its Employee self-service, Manager view, customizations, and powerful analytics.

With its real-time software, hiring managers can access current data from their HRIS software without worrying about inaccurate or old data.

With a powerful ATS and credible performance management, BambooHR can help HR teams create healthier working environments for both employer and employee.

BambooHR’s Employee Satisfaction enables HR professionals and business leaders to keep their finger on the pulse of the employee mindset, harnessing the power of employee Net Promoter Score (NPS) to provide detailed reports on employee satisfaction and ways to improve workplace culture.

Moreover, their onboarding software can help HR teams focus on key activities like outlining expectations, introducing company culture, building connections, etc.

1. A shift towards Cloud and SaaS solutions

With the onset of SaaS, things have changed quite a lot in the software vendor market. Aligning with the trend, most HR software vendors are moving away from on-premise solutions. Corporations prefer to use cloud-based systems instead of buying one-time license solutions.

SaaS based solutions is a leading HR automation trend in 2021
Corporations prefer to use cloud-based systems instead of buying one-time license solutions. Source: istock

There are a few reasons why SaaS solutions are taking over the market. One is that SaaS licensing is cheaper than hosting on-premise software, which allows smaller companies to enjoy the benefits of recruitment automation software without having to invest in on-premise software.

2. Artificial Intelligence

AI-based software solutions for businesses and HR are the most flexible solutions out there today.  Even though the depths and boundaries of AI are still being explored, companies are readily using AI solutions in recruitment to automate the recruiting process and to discover new ways of hiring talent.

AI for recruitment automation: Top trend in 2021
The power of AI is readily being incorporated into recruitment automation solutions 

An interesting example comes from Vodafone, which took AI-powered recruitment to the next level by using AI-powered software to screen its videos.

Just like regular video interviews, interviewees recorded themselves answering many questions posed to them. Computers programmed with advanced algorithms analyzed these interviews based on role requirements, other candidates, and top performers at Vodafone.

The machine assessed candidate suitability across 15,000 different dimensions, including body language, facial cues, voice intonation, and speech cadence. Only the candidates selected by the AI systems were then invited for in-person interviews.

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3. Employer’s brand and hiring

An employee’s life cycle is affected by workplace culture and company branding is a well-known fact.

Companies that plan and involve employees in positive company cultures avoid the rising cost in many areas, including employee hiring, onboarding, retention, productivity, etc.

employer's brand and hiring are closely related, and is one of the leading recruitment automation trend in 2021. 2
Employer's brand is emerging as a major brand shaping factor for companies. 

Employee engagement is increasingly becoming more inclusive with DEI, social virtual volunteering, and mental health as key factors that shape these programs.

The interesting part is that these priorities can be tracked and improved through the use of HR software, including performance management, LMS, and recruiting systems.

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