Unbiased Zoho Recruit Review—Automate Your Hiring With AI

Zoho Recruit is a cloud-based hiring software with an applicant tracking system (ATS) and candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities. It aims to help recruiters and HR reps streamline their hiring practices to reach better candidates and provide them with a positive recruitment experience.

The platform boasts various features that can be used to automate job posting, candidate communication, applicant matching, and various other processes—some of which are AI-assisted.

Source: Zoho Recruit

Does Zoho have what it takes to be your go-to recruiting software?

In this objective review, we’ll explore Zoho Recruit’s key hiring features and pricing to help you determine if it’s a good fit for you. We’ll also discuss an alternative ATS for SMBs that might work better for your hiring needs.

Zoho Recruit Features

The platform serves two types of clients and has different features and price plans for each:

• Internal HR Teams
• Staffing Agencies

While staffing agencies get some extra options, such as client portals and territory management, we’ll explore the core features Zoho Recruit provides to both groups:

1. Source & Attract—improving and streamlining your candidate sourcing process
2. Track & Engage—providing a comprehensive view of your hiring process
3. Automate & Hire—automating manual tasks with AI-powered matchmaking

Source & Attract

Candidate sourcing is the first and most crucial part of any hiring process. Many recruiters struggle to build a long-term sourcing strategy—but Zoho Recruit simplifies this task by eliminating a lot of manual work with online job boards.

Traditionally, HR reps would write a job description and then spend hours registering and manually posting their ad on dozens of digital job boards. Zoho Recruit provides an easier way—once you have your job description, you can distribute it to 60+ job boards in one click.

The platform supports free job boards that don’t charge you anything for the ads, along with paid boards and niche job boards specializing in specific industries. Zoho Recruit lets you target all of them to increase your reach and lower your manual workload simultaneously.

You can also use Zoho Recruit to create a Careers page—the platform provides a customizable template you can quickly tailor to your needs. It’s visually basic, and you can’t change the page aesthetics much, but it’s clean and functional. This page can get the job done if you want to improve your employer brand without investing in web designers. It shows all your current vacancies in one place while providing applicants with an in-depth company profile and an overview of the culture.

Zoho Recruit offers a shortcut for finding the best candidates—Source Boosters. This proprietary candidate sourcing system lets you enter the desired job requirements and find matching resumes quickly.

Track & Engage

The crux of Zoho Recruit’s ATS lies in the platform’s visual hiring pipelines that divide your hiring process into stages such as screening, interview, submissions, offer, and hire.

You can use the platform’s default pipeline stages or customize them according to your company’s hiring process. Whatever you choose, you’ll get a bird’s-eye view of your recruitment efforts for every vacancy, allowing you to easily track the progress of all applicants across different stages.

The pipeline is also available as a widget, visible in every part of the Zoho Recruit interface, so you always have the big picture in mind when making hiring decisions.

The platform saves HR reps from hours of manual data entry with an automatic resume parser that can sift through hundreds of resumes in minutes, extract the necessary information, and standardize the structure for easier navigation.

Organizing a candidate database can be a nightmare, especially when dealing with data from various sources. As Zoho Recruit is powered by AI, you can import candidate data from different job boards, employee referrals, web forms, and emails to create a centralized database in seconds. Zia (Zoho Recruit’s AI assistant) analyzes this database and matches the candidates’ skills with those required in your job description(s) to help you pick the best people.

Zoho Recruit boasts assessment features for evaluating candidates. Here are the four Zoho Recruit screening options:

1. Pre-screening: Ask your candidates questions as they apply, assign point values, and rate candidates based on their qualifications
2. Behavioral screening: Check your candidates’ soft skills and see if they match your company’s culture
3. Background screening: Understand your candidates’ education and previous employment
4. General screening: Determine your candidates’ personality, skillsets, goals, and background

Zoho Recruit’s assessments revolve around asking candidates questions—the platform doesn’t offer an option for creating work sample tests.

Automate & Hire

Efficient candidate communication is the backbone of any successful recruitment drive—many top performers slip through the cracks because of miscommunication. Zoho Recruit helps HR reps solve this problem through automation and AI.

Zoho recruitment software allows you to create custom workflows using rules, alerts, and tasks and advance the right candidates through the hiring pipeline with auto-responders (automated replies and follow-up emails).

Once you’ve found the right candidate, you can automatically generate and send them an offer with your e-signature, which you can set up within the platform. You can create your own offer letter or use a template to save even more time.

Zoho Recruit’s powerful analysis features enable you to monitor how successful your hiring processes are, create custom reports, and identify bottlenecks for better decision-making in the future. Focus on essential recruiting KPIs and dig deep into your past recruitment data to optimize your processes, estimate industry trends, and stay ahead of the competition.

Zoho Recruit Reviews

User reviews can paint a realistic picture of a platform’s functionality and help you decide if it matches your company’s needs. Let’s see what users say about Zoho Recruit.

More than one Zoho Recruit review praised its automation options—the platform streamlines routine tasks and helps users save time and focus on more critical aspects of the recruiting process.

Another reason why people enjoy Zoho Recruit is its comprehensiveness and all-in-one nature. You can manage and control every aspect of the recruiting process and organize your info within the same platform.

Customizability also stands out as one of Zoho Recruit’s key strengths. You can create custom workflows that align with your company and source and hire the best candidates.

Zoho Recruit boasts mainly positive reviews, but we have to turn the other side of the coin and see the potential drawbacks users pointed out.

One user mentioned they found the dashboard clunky and hard to navigate. They spent a lot of time figuring out how to use the dashboard, which made it difficult to sail smoothly through the Zoho ATS. Another user had a similar observation about the UI—they said the interface takes some getting used to.

Occasional glitches are also a potential drawback. One user mentioned they experienced performance issues with Zoho Recruit, which disrupted the company’s workflow efficiency.

Zoho Recruit Pricing

The Zoho Recruit price structure is complex, but the company offers price transparency and customization, which is a benefit for larger organizations that need a variety of features. The company divides its clients into staffing agencies and internal HR teams, with two different pricing systems for each group.

The pricing system for corporate HR teams features three options:

1. Free
2. Standard: €25/month per recruiter (billed annually)
3. Enterprise: €50/month per recruiter (billed annually)

Here’s how the system looks for staffing agencies:

1. Forever Free
2. Standard: €25/month per user (billed annually)
3. Professional: €50/month per user (billed annually)
4. Enterprise: €75/month per user (billed annually)

Here’s what they have in common:

1. A 15-day free trial where you get access to all Enterprise features
2. A limited free tier with one active vacancy and no option to use add-ons
3. The choice between monthly and yearly billing; the latter comes with a discount

The main differences between the two groups are:

1. A fourth “Professional” tier that’s only available to staffing agencies
2. Different paid add-ons

The Professional tier for staffing agencies is equivalent to the Enterprise tier for corporate HRs. The most advanced Zoho Recruit plan that staffing agencies can opt for is the Enterprise tier, which comes with territory management, client and staffing portals, and other features internal HR reps don’t need.

In terms of add-ons, corporate HRs have three options:

1. Employee License: €10/month (billed annually)
2. Vendor Portal: €6/month (billed annually)
3. Video Interviews: €12/job opening(billed annually)

Staffing agencies have the following two options:

1. Client Portal: €6/license/month (billed annually)
2. Video Interviews: €12/license/month (billed annually)

Zoho Recruit Integrations

The platform supports an impressive number of API integrations with third-party software and other tools in the Zoho ecosystem. Here’s a list of some of the supported integrations:

• Zoho Analytics
• Zoho CRM
• Zoho People
• Zoho Campaigns
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Twilio
• BT
• AT&T
• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• Evernote
• Screen Magic
• Message Media
• Clickatell
• Zoho Sign
• DocuSign
• Adobe Sign
• Zoho Mail
• Outlook
• G Suite
• Monster
• Indeed
• CareerBuilder
• Zapier
• Slack
• Mailchimp

Zoho Recruit Customers

Zoho Recruit has been used by over 8,000 companies and staffing agencies worldwide, including:

• Yokohama
• Bosch
• Allianz
• Scientific Games
• Deloitte
• A1 Telekom Austria Group
• PWC
• Saint-Gobain
• Xceptional
• The Business House
• Seattle BC Group
• Thyssenkrupp
• CareerUp
• ActualizeConsulting
• Full Stack Talent
• Ah Cacao
• Teaching Nomad

Zoho Recruit Alternatives

You can choose from dozens of alternative ATS platforms if you’re looking for a more affordable and straightforward hiring solution than Zoho Recruit. We’ve reviewed the major ones below. Feel free to check out our other ATS reviews and make an informed choice:

Workello—The Best Zoho Recruit Alternative for SMBs

While Zoho Recruit does an excellent job catering to the specific needs of staffing agencies and internal HR teams, it doesn’t quite manage to pack its features into a platform that’s cost-effective and easy to use.

Are you interested in a more affordable platform perfectly optimized for efficient high-volume recruiting? In that case, Workello is the textbook example of a fantastic Zoho Recruit alternative.

Source: Workello

This platform has all the hiring automation features you need but makes them easily accessible from a simple one-page dashboard.

Workello’s stand-out feature is the pre-interview assessments. These aren’t generic questionnaires like the ones you get with Zoho Recruit—instead, you get practical skill tests carefully written by industry experts for various professions, like content writers and marketing experts.

Based on our experience and available research, the test-first-interview-later approach is more cost-efficient and enhances the chances of hiring the top 1%.

Pre-hire assessments aren’t the only valuable feature Workello brings to the table. You get email automation, a candidate status page, and customizable templates. Combine that with an easy setup, customizability, and a transparent pricing structure, and you get the perfect ATS for small and medium-sized teams.

Zoho Recruit vs. Workello—Overview

Here are the two platforms’ features and prices, side-by-side:

Make the Right ATS Decision

Zoho Recruit is a valuable tool with plenty of options for sourcing, tracking, and engaging candidates to hire the best ones. It’s a part of the Zoho ecosystem, which opens the door for handy integrations and streamlining processes.

While functional, Zoho Recruit can be expensive and, more importantly, doesn’t provide built-in practical skills tests, which give you the most accurate candidate quality insights.

Workello provides expertly crafted skill tests, email automation, no-frills setup, and a simple, user-friendly interface. You get all that for a fraction of Zoho Recruit’s price, with easy-to-understand subscriptions that always give you access to all the features.

Sign up for a free trial today and see Workello work its magic on your hiring process! Soon enough, you’ll start hiring the top 1% of applicants effortlessly!