Breathe Review—Breathing Optimization Into Your Recruitment Process

Breathe is an HR platform for SMBs in the United Kingdom, although they also offer limited support to companies based in New Zealand and Australia. It’s an all-encompassing HR software that has features for creating HR reports and managing employees’ absence, performance, payroll, and work location or model (office, hybrid, or remote).

Source: Breathe

Breathe also offers an optional recruitment module—an applicant tracking system (ATS)—that comes with an added fee. In this review, we’ll focus on Breathe’s ATS and its features. We’ll also introduce Workello, a standalone ATS that combines an applicant tracking platform with pre-hire candidate assessment software.

Breathe—Key Features

Breathe offers two optional modules for hiring. These modules are available only if you get the Core HR version, i.e., you can’t use the ATS only. The modules are:

1. Recruitment—2 job posts, £5 per month
2. Recruitment Pro—Unlimited job posts, £20 per month 

As for its capabilities, Breathe’s ATS allows you to create a job post quickly using its job post builder. The post will show up on your website’s careers page automatically (if you already have one and have linked it to your Breathe account). It uses a built-in, mobile-friendly application form that allows for uniform applications. In other words, regardless of where candidates apply from, all applications will be in the same format.

Once applications start heading your way, Breathe will create a candidate database for you to review and compare applicants. You can access each candidate’s profile and add notes, reject an application, archive it, shortlist the candidate, and schedule an interview.

Once you find the perfect candidate, all you need to do is change their status to “Employee,” and their data will transfer to your employee-management section of the platform.

Breathe—Downsides

Breathe’s ATS module is helpful if you don’t want to add another software to your HR department and still have something that would optimize your applicant tracking. Still, when you look at it outside of other HR services Breathe offers, it’s an ATS you wouldn’t write home about. While its price is competitive, it’s impossible to pay only for the ATS, and the features are not comparable to some standalone ATS solutions.

Breathe’s recruitment platform lacks a careers page builder, CV parsing (taking out information from resumes automatically), prescreening questions, and assessment methods other than interviews.

You’ll find that it also lacks the automated messaging that many other ATS solutions have. This way, you may miss out on the perfect candidate because you failed to respond to an email—something that other platforms do for you.

Another issue is integration with job boards. Breathe doesn’t support any job board integrations, and you have to distribute your job post manually.

Breathe doesn’t have an external page that candidates can visit to learn about their application status either. Coupled with the lack of automated correspondence, this makes the platform substandard in terms of candidate experience.

Breathe—Pricing

Breathe offers 14 days of free trial to check out the software. After that, you’ll need to choose a plan depending on your company size. They have one plan, Core HR, with a varying price and two add-ons you can buy on top:

1. Rota, Time & Attendance—Scheduling shifts, creating timetables, and planning events
2. Learn—Employee education

Check out the table below to see how the pricing works. Note that all prices listed are per month per account.

It’s important to mention that neither of the abovementioned plans includes recruitment features, which can be bought as an optional module. Breathe offers four optional modules:

Source: Breathe

If you’re a company with 11–20 employees and want to unlock all Breathe features, your monthly price would be £81.

Breathe—Integrations

Breathe has an app marketplace where you can pick and choose which integrations work for you so you don’t get cluttered with apps you’d never use. Some of the integrations Breathe supports are:

• hireful
• Engagement Multiplier
• LivePay
• WeThrive
• AdviceSheet
• ELMO
• Perkbox
• Posture People
• RotaCloud
• Webonboarding

Breathe—Customers

Breathe focuses on companies from the United Kingdom, and the only available language is English. If you’re outside of the UK, you won’t be able to use Breathe. Australian and New Zealand companies have access to limited features. 

Breathe boasts over 11,000 British customers, some of which are:

• Fargro
• Crunch
• Natives
• Born Free Foundation
• Reward
• The Writer
• Natives
• PBD Biotech
• Ridgeview Wine Estate
• Small Batch Coffee Roasters
• Park City Consulting
• Dorset Wildlife Trust
• Clarke Banks Group
• Lead Tech
• SafeSite Facilities
• C&C Training

Alternatives to Breathe

If you want an ATS that focuses on recruitment instead of being an add-on to HR software, Breathe may not be the right choice for you, especially if you are not from the U.K. Don’t worry—there are hundreds of other platforms you can choose from. Take a look at our other ATS reviews:

Workello vs. Breathe

Workello is a standalone ATS that combines applicant tracking with a pre-hire assessment platform to optimize the hiring process for high-volume recruiting. Unlike Breathe, it’s not an HR platform that has some recruitment features but dedicated software to make your hiring funnel fully optimized and automated.

Workello helps you distribute your job ad to major job boards and uses CV parsing to create a skimmable candidate database. From Workello’s dashboard, you can move candidates through the funnel by changing their candidate status from the drop-down menu. With a single click, you can review resumes, send and assess tests, interview applicants, reject them, and hire the top candidate. Workello adds writing tests as another layer of assessment, allowing you to gauge a candidate’s quality of work before hiring them.

To help you speed up the process of setting up your funnel, Workello has a library of test, email, and job description templates.

Another difference is the pricing model. All of Workello’s features are available in the introductory plan, regardless of your company size. The only difference between the plans is in the number of assessments and the billing period:

1. Growth—$299, billed quarterly (up to 30 assessments)
2. Scale—$597, billed annually (up to 300 assessments)

Breathe vs. Workello: Pricing and Features

Check out the table below to see how Workello and Breathe compare:

Final Thoughts

Breathe is an HR platform for British companies with an ATS feature, which is an optional module and covers the basics of recruitment needs. It’s not the most advanced recruitment platform, and if that’s your primary concern, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere for a solution.

Workello is an easy-to-use ATS that you can set up in under 3 minutes thanks to the preconfigured settings and finish the entire hiring process without leaving the single-page dashboard. Sign up for Workello for free to start receiving applications and assessing your candidates effortlessly and cost-effectively.