Objective Factorial Review—Automate Your HR Processes

A competitive and efficient hiring process can make all the difference between a successful growing company and another failed startup. Factorial is an HR platform with plenty of features that streamline the work of an HR department—including recruitment. 

The software, developed by a successful Barcelona-based startup, has a robust applicant tracking system (ATS) with workflow automations, careers pages, and templates. But does it make a real difference in practice? Throughout our in-depth review, we’ll see whether Factorial can improve your hiring, explain its pricing structure, and touch on alternative ATS for SMBs with some features Factorial prominently lacks. 

Factorial—Key Features

All of Factorial’s features for HR reps were designed to accomplish three primary goals:

1. Automate HR processes 
2. Centralize up-to-date information in one easily accessible place
3. Help decision-makers with accurate reports

The platform achieves this through features like:

• Time Management—options for shift scheduling, individual time tracking, and PTO management
• Talent Management—onboarding assistance, applicant tracking system, and employee performance tracking
• Legal and Finance—payroll management features, expense tracking, and electronic document signing to speed up digitization

Some of Factorial’s features can be used by individual employees and the company management. However, it primarily aims to be a comprehensive digital environment for your HR staff. In this review, we’ll focus on Factorial’s hiring features, i.e., the Talent Management cluster, and see how much they make recruiters’ lives easier. 

Factorial’s Applicant Tracking System

Factorial’s applicant tracking system does two critical things: 

1. Centralizing information
2. Automating workflows with triggers and templates

Centralizing Information—Careers Page

The platform provides templates for your company’s careers page, which can increase engagement with candidates. You don’t have to know any coding or web design to create a careers page through Factorial—just customize the text to fit your brand voice and upload your logo and other graphics. 

These careers pages are a great way to showcase your company culture and provide potential candidates with all the info they need about open positions. You can use one to advertise all job openings from different online job boards in one place—places like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, or Indeed. 

Having one also streamlines candidate communication for recruiters because they don’t have to spend time on frequently asked questions; all relevant info will already be on the careers page. 

Centralizing Information—Candidate Profiles

The modern recruitment process that relies on digital job boards provides HR reps with more candidates than ever. The flip side is that managing information and communication with hundreds of candidates from different platforms can be challenging, at the very least. 

Factorial changes that with its candidate profiles. You can upload all documents (like resumes and cover letters) and info about your applicants to one central candidate page; any other HR reps and managers can always pull it up and quickly find what they need. 

This saves a lot of time your team would otherwise spend searching for a specific piece of candidate information across different communication channels. 

Workflow Automation—Email Templates

We’ve already covered how Factorial makes creating engaging careers pages easier with its templates. The same goes for email communication—Factorial provides customizable email templates for every step of your hiring pipeline, like:

• Confirming an application has been received
• Interview invitations
• Disqualifying candidates
• Job offers

Workflow Automation—Triggers

Factorial’s goal is to eliminate any manual work that HR reps spend a lot of time on and allow them to focus on critical hiring decisions instead. The templates mentioned above are one side of that coin—Factorial’s trigger-based automation system is another. 

Once you’ve customized those email templates, you can create triggers that automatically send emails to the relevant applicants at appropriate times. For example, when you mark a candidate as rejected, they’ll automatically receive an email that informs them of their elimination.

Most of these triggers are activated when candidates are moved from one recruitment phase to another—from the Evaluation phase to the Interview phase, for instance. When you create a new job opening in Factorial, you can define and edit these phases according to the specifics of your hiring process. 

When coupled with a phase-based workflow, email automation dramatically speeds up the hiring process. It also eliminates the possibility of any candidate not receiving a response or having their application lost in the chaos of traditional hiring processes. 

Downsides of Factorial

Factorial can make your HR work more cost-effective and streamlined. However, the platform has a few notable downsides regarding recruitment. 

First of all, Factorial doesn’t provide any candidate assessment features. You can schedule interviews through Factorial, but any skill tests or questionnaires must be run separately on third-party platforms. Unfortunately, that undermines the entire “one platform for all HR work” idea and makes the platform less enticing to growth-oriented companies and recruiters. 

Secondly, Factorial uses a per-employee pricing method. Any successful hire raises your yearly subscription, making recruitment expensive for smaller companies with tighter budgets. There’s also a minimal subscription equivalent to what you’d pay for a team of 15 employees. So, think again if you believe you’ll save money because you’re running a close-knit five-person operation right now. 

The platform’s pricing is even more unattractive due to all recruitment features being locked behind an additional subscription. 

Factorial Pricing

Factorial’s pricing structure is relatively complex. There are three different subscriptions to choose from, depending on which features you need:

• Core HR + Time Hub—essential HR features and time management, $5.25 per employee per month
• Core HR + Talent Hub—essential HR features and employee management, $5.25 per employee per month
• Complete Bundle—all of the above, $7.5 per employee per month

Apart from the standard Business subscription, there’s also a custom Enterprise tier with additional employee data and facial recognition support.

If you’re getting Factorial for its hiring features, you won’t be pleased to learn that all recruitment features are only available as a paid add-on. And if you want unlimited job offers, the add-on costs $129 per month! 

If all of this sounds complex, Factorial does provide a subscription calculator on its price page. Still, the fact that you need a separate calculator to understand how much the platform costs doesn’t bode well for price transparency. 

Factorial Integrations

Factorial supports API integrations with the following platforms:

• Gmail
• Slack
• Microsoft Outlook
• Apple Calendar
• Microsoft Outlook Calendar
• Google Calendar
• Microsoft Teams
• Suprema
• Power BI
• Indeed
• Recruitee
• Workable
• Breezy HR
• Greenhouse
• Zapier

Factorial Customers

According to the Factorial website, this HR management software has been used by over 7,000 companies—primarily small and medium-sized enterprises. The platform was created by a Spanish startup based in Barcelona, and it supports the following languages:

• English 
• German
• French 
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Russian 
• Spanish

Apart from Barcelona, the company maintains offices in Ciudad de México, Sao Paulo, and Miami—along with remote teams across the world.

Here are some of their most well-known clients:

• Wetaca
• Crisalix
• Teresa Carles
• Voicemod
• ABA English
• CoverWallet
• Sentisis
• Whisbi
• CEX
• Ground Burger
• Beso Beach
• Deporvillage

Factorial Alternatives

Factorial doesn’t provide many recruitment features—and the ones it does are locked behind a premium add-on. 

If you want to check out how other ATS platforms compare to Factorial, we’ve reviewed the most popular ones here:

Workello vs. Factorial

If you want an HR platform with transparent pricing designed for high-volume recruiting, Factorial isn’t a perfect choice. Fortunately, Workello is an ideal alternative. 

Like Factorial, Workello provides email and job description templates, as well as trigger-based automations. The core of the platform, however, is candidate assessment. It provides pre-made skill assessments designed by industry experts to test various kinds of candidates in practice.

Factorial’s recruitment features pale in comparison—and it doesn’t help that you have to pay an additional subscription to access any of them. Luckily, you won’t need an econ degree or a separate calculator to understand Workello’s price structure. 

You can choose from two subscriptions—each gives you all the features, but the second provides more yearly assessments. You won’t be charged per employee, making Workello a much more budget-friendly choice. 

Factorial vs. Workello—Overview 

Here’s a feature comparison between the two platforms:

Bottom Line

Factorial provides tons of helpful HR features—at a steep price. The regular subscription doesn’t include hiring features; they’re only available as a paid add-on. 

Workello provides a much better hiring experience at a far lower (and more transparent) price. If you want to increase your hiring ROI and hire top talent with skill assessments—sign up for Workello’s free trial today and see the platform in practice!