How to choose recruiting software for your small business

Small businesses hire differently from their enterprise counterparts. It’s a fact tied to the operational realities of smaller organizations: they have leaner teams and tend to hire only when necessary, rather than running scaled, continuous recruiting processes. What’s more, they may not have a dedicated HR specialist making decisions about how to best run hiring workflows.  

So, when it comes time to select recruiting software, small business owners are often on their own, navigating a market laden with enterprise-forward tools that aren’t tailored to their needs. This guide aims to make the search easier, taking a practical look at what categories of recruiting software work for small businesses and how to evaluate fit without overbuying. 

What does recruiting software do?

Recruiting software refers to the tech stack that recruiting teams use to manage the hiring process. 

For many teams, this stack revolves around an applicant tracking system (ATS). Additional tools, like those for sourcing candidates, scheduling interviews, communications, and onboarding handoffs, are layered on top. But the shape of the stack can look different for teams that aren’t running heavy inbound recruiting workflows. An outbound recruiter might spend most of their time using a sourcing tool, with the ATS as a downstream destination for candidate data.

Regardless of the shape of the stack, some of the most common workflows recruiting software handles include: 

• Posting jobs (to multiple boards)
• Candidate tracking in a single pipeline
• Resume parsing
• Candidate screening
• Sourcing passive talent
• Hiring metric reporting

Why do small businesses benefit from recruiting software?

When businesses are just getting started, spreadsheets and email inboxes work for most candidate tracking needs. The team is small, and hiring is low-volume. But as hiring scales, informal tracking systems become untenable. Candidate context gets lost or buried, and communication between the company and its applicants suffers as a result. In the worst of cases, the organization misses out on hiring a great-fit candidate because it didn’t take an organized approach to moving through the hiring process.

Recruiting software offers growing businesses a variety of practical benefits: better organization, faster hiring cycles, a stronger candidate experience, and features for compliance and reporting needs that scale as the business does.

The team also stops relying on memory and manual research (i.e., digging back through emails for context) in the recruitment process. With recruiting software, the team gains a centralized location for candidate data and search tools or custom dashboards that can quickly surface precise information.

What categories of recruiting software are best for small businesses?

Most small teams don’t need multiple types of recruitment software to get started. They can often start with a single platform and a handful of key integrations. Here are some common types of tools to consider.

Applicant tracking systems (ATS)

Your ATS is the foundational layer of the recruiting software stack. Here, you can track applicants, post jobs, manage screening workflows, and track your hiring pipeline. 

Some ATSs play better with the needs of small businesses than others. If you’re building out a buyer consideration set, the following options are worth evaluating: 

• Workable: Includes a broad feature set; an option for recruiters who want sourcing built in. 
• BambooHR: A solid contender if you need HRIS functions out of the box. 
• JazzHR: Affordable pricing tiers and offers straightforward implementation and use for recruiters. 
• Breezy HR: Packs a visual pipeline that smaller teams rate highly.
• Zoho Recruit: If you’re already in the Zoho ecosystem, this is plug and play. 
• Recruitee: Emphasizes collaborative hiring features. 

Sourcing platforms

Sourcing platforms surface candidates who aren’t already in your ATS by searching professional databases for profiles that match your hiring mandates. The strongest tools can also pull contact information for candidates they find. 

Most small businesses—especially if they’re already getting enough qualified applicants from inbound talent acquisition sources, like job boards and employee referrals—don’t need this piece straight away. Candidate sourcing platforms become necessary when inbound lags. Maybe you’re trying to fill a niche, technical, or senior role and coming up empty-handed. Maybe your hiring pace is actually just outrunning what the inbound status quo can provide. Juicebox is built for this moment. You describe the candidate you're looking for in everyday language, and the platform’s AI agent searches across more than 800 million profiles from over 30 data sources to return a ranked shortlist.

Screening, scheduling, and communication tools

This category covers a range of supporting tools: technical assessment platforms, interview scheduling tools, and talent communication tools, to name a few. 

Typical ATS platforms can cover basic scheduling and communications needs for most small businesses. So most can defer these until hiring volume or role specialization reaches a critical mass. 

How hiring works day to day with recruiting software

Most hiring workflows with recruiting software follow a similar pattern: a need arises, so teams write up a job description. They publish the role to various job boards from inside the ATS. These get pushed to platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn, or wherever else they syndicate. 

Applications come back through a single pipeline. Software automatically parses the resumes, so there’s no need to retype data. Candidates move seamlessly through hiring stages, from application to screening, and interview to offer acceptance. 

The real-time savings are generated in the workflow layer, which keeps the gears turning on the whole hiring process. Status updates are sent automatically when candidates progress from one stage to the next. Interview scheduling checks your calendar for you, eliminating endless email threads back-and-forth with candidates while one of you offers to “find some time on the calendar.” Your interviewers leave detailed feedback in the same record that the hiring manager has access to. When candidates sign their offer letters, the system ports their data over to your HRIS and payroll without a hassle. 

As many small businesses can attest, the real value of recruitment software compounds as increasing hiring activity runs through the same system. Each step that doesn’t require a manual handoff is one less for recruiters to remember, and one place less where prospective job seekers can get lost. 

How much does small business recruiting software cost?

Pricing models for recruiting software each fit different hiring cadences; pricing, as a result, varies considerably. Some of the primary pricing models to know include:

• Per-user/per-seat pricing: Works best for small, stable recruiting teams with a steady volume of hires. Per-user pricing can get expensive for scaling teams that will need to pay to add each new member to the subscription.
• Per-job or active-job pricing: Works best for businesses with more sporadic hiring needs, as you only pay for what you need—whether that’s per role posted or by a certain number of roles you have open at once.
• Flat-rate pricing: Predictable, easy to budget; often a solid choice for SMBs that don’t want to dedicate much thought to pricing. 

Most platforms offer free trials. The best fits for small businesses will offer free tiers for low-volume hiring needs, which enable users to evaluate a tool before committing, lowering the risk of paying for a tool that won’t meet the team’s needs. 

On the setup side, there are three primary factors to consider. The first is time-to-first-job-post, which tells you how quickly the tool will start creating value. The second is training overhead for non-HR users (managers, founders, engineers), as, at small businesses, leaders are often already overtasked and don’t have the time to adequately onboard others. Finally, focus on integrations with the tools you already use (job boards, Google or Microsoft Outlook calendar, payroll systems, and HRIS), as these connectors will enable the new software to connect up with existing systems without requiring a manual data migration.

Our recommendation: Prioritize the platforms with self-serve onboarding. Small businesses rarely have the bandwidth for lengthy, months-long implementations, and most modern tools geared toward the SMB market are built to have you posting your first role on day one.

Where does Juicebox fit into the small business recruiting stack?

If you’re finding that the right candidates aren’t dropping into your lap, consider Juicebox, which is a sourcing platform, not an ATS. So while it might not be the first cog in your larger recruiting software machine, it integrates with whatever ATS you’re already using, rather than replacing it. 

Juicebox runs plain-language searches across more than 800 million candidate profiles pulled from over 30 data sources. Plans are self-serve, which is ideal for small business’ operational needs. And the platform integrates with more than 50 different ATS and CRM systems, so sourced candidates flow right into the pipeline you’re already running. 

Get started with Juicebox and check out available plans here. 

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between recruiting software and ATS?

Recruiting software refers to the broader stack of recruitment-related tools. Normally, an ATS sits at the center of a company’s recruiting software stack, serving as the system of record for candidate data. The ATS also manages the prospective talent already in your pipeline. Other recruiting software tools supplement the ATS with capabilities around sourcing, scorecards, screening, scheduling, and communication. 

Do small businesses need a sourcing platform on top of an ATS?

Not always. If inbound applications are doing enough to fill up your pipeline, then sourcing isn’t really a concern. But if inbound starts to falter, your hiring needs are growing faster than your pipelines are, or you need advanced search capabilities to reach passive or highly specialized candidates, a sourcing platform can help. 

How quickly can a small business get set up on recruiting software?

Most SMB-focused recruitment platforms are purpose-built for self-serve customers. Self-service means faster onboarding and faster times-to-first-job-post. A more robust setup for custom needs (deep integrations, custom workflows, team rollout training) can take several weeks to bring online, depending on the platform.