Unbiased Zoho Recruit Review—Automate Your Hiring With AI 

Zoho Recruit is a cloud-based hiring software with an ATS (applicant tracking system). It helps recruiters and HR reps streamline their hiring practices to reach better candidates. The platform achieves this by automating job posting, candidate communication, applicant matching, and various other processes—some of which Zoho improves through AI-powered tech.

Does Zoho impress compared to other ATS for SMBs? We’ll explore Zoho Recruit’s key hiring features and pricing throughout our objective review to find out! 

Zoho Recruit—Key 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 have some extra options—such as client portals and territory management—we’ll explore the set of 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 that 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 many of the best job boards in one click. 

The platform supports free job boards that don’t charge you anything for the ads, along with premium and niche job boards specializing in individual industries. Zoho Recruit lets you target both, increasing your reach and lowering your manual workload simultaneously. 

You can also use Zoho Recruit to create a careers website—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. If you want to improve your employer brand without investing in web designers, this page can get the job done. It shows all of your current vacancies in one place while also providing applicants with an in-depth company profile and an overview of its culture. 

Track & Engage

The crux of Zoho Recruit’s ATS lies in the platform’s visual hiring pipelines. They divide your hiring process into stages such as:

1. Screening
2. Submissions
3. Interview
4. Offer 
5. Hire

You can customize the names and number of stages according to your company’s specific hiring process. It’s the perfect bird’s-eye view of your recruitment efforts for every vacancy, and you can easily use it to 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; you always have the big picture in mind when making hiring decisions. 

The platform also eliminates hours of manual data entry that HR reps do while processing candidate resumes. Zoho Recruit gives you an automatic resume parser that can sift through hundreds of resumes in minutes and extract the necessary information. 

This candidate data is automatically saved to applicants’ profiles on Zoho Recruit. You just upload the resume file, and the profile is instantly populated with the candidates’:

• Job skills
• Education history
• Job records
• Contact information

Of course, resumes aren’t the only source of valuable candidate info. Recruiters collect this data from their profiles on various online platforms too—which also takes a lot of time if you do it manually. 

Luckily, Zoho Recruit has a Google Chrome extension—their proprietary Resume Extractor. This extension can parse candidate data from websites and automatically import it into Zoho Recruit. It takes one click, substantially reducing the amount of data entry your recruiters otherwise have to do.

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 with its AI-based chatbot—Zia. 

The chatbot provides automatic responses to frequently asked questions, updates about job availability, and the current status of candidate applications. This significantly elevates the candidate experience and gives them vital info. It also frees up HR reps because they’re not constantly distracted from other duties by questions that the chatbot can answer.

Zoho Recruit automates candidate matching too. When you create a job vacancy on the platform, you can select the skills you’re looking for in the ideal candidate. Then, the platform automatically ranks candidates from the database based on how well they match those requirements. 

This is another great time-saving feature as recruiters don’t have to manually compare the job requirements to the candidates’ resumes and cover letters. 

Zoho Recruit Downsides

By most accounts, Zoho Recruit is a well-made platform—particularly if you use other HR and workplace software developed by the same company. However, you should be aware of a few notable downsides. 

For one, Zoho Recruit doesn’t support practical skill assessments. It relies on resumes, which aren’t easy to verify, and simple candidate questionnaires, which rarely paint the complete picture of applicants’ skills. 

According to some users, the other problem is an overly complex UI and an overabundance of features. The company has released different versions of Zoho’s workplace software for over 20 years, and each new iteration has been built upon the past ones. The result is a valuable but sometimes overly complicated melting pot of features. 

Zoho Recruit Pricing

Zoho Recruit divides its clients into staffing agencies and internal HR teams, with two different pricing systems for each of the two groups. 

Here’s the price breakdown for corporate HR teams:

And here’s the equivalent for staffing agencies:

Here’s what they have in common:

1. A 15-day free trial for every tier
2. A limited free tier with one active vacancy and no 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 is equivalent to the Enterprise tier for corporate HRs. On the other hand, the Enterprise tier for staffing agencies comes with territory management, staffing portals, and other features that internal HR reps don’t need. 

Ultimately, the Zoho Recruit price plans are complex and expensive but fair. The paid add-ons don’t contain any essential features, which are rightly available with the base subscriptions. Here’s a list of all the paid add-ons:

• Client Portals
• Video Interviews
• Vendor Portals
• Employee Licenses

The “free” tier boils down to another trial version of the software—it only lets you advertise one vacancy at a time and provides access to free job boards and candidate management features. 

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 the complete list of all supported integrations:

• Zoho Analytics
• Zoho CRM
• Zoho People
• 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
• HireSelect
• Jobma
• Sparkhire
• HireRight
• Verified First
• Checkr
• LinkMatch
• Daxtra
• SignalHire

Zoho Recruit Customers

Zoho Recruit has been used by over 8,000 companies and staffing agencies worldwide. The platform’s creator, a Chennai-based company of the same name (Zoho), has served some prominent corporate names like:

1. Yokohama
2. Bosch
3. Allianz
4. Scientific Games
5. Deloitte
6. A1 Telekom Austria Group
7. PWC
8. Saint-Gobain
9. NGR Recruitment
10. Xceptional
11. YourSales
12. The Business House
13. Seattle BC Group

Zoho 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 vs. Zoho Recruit

While Zoho Recruit does a great 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 great Zoho Recruit alternative. 

This platform has all the hiring automation features you need but makes them easily accessible from a simple one-page dashboard. Among them, Workello’s most significant selling point are pre-interview assessments.

These aren’t generic questionnaires—instead, you get practical skill tests carefully written by industry experts for various professionals. Combined with email automation, these skill tests help you significantly upscale your hiring without increasing costs—the perfect package for growth-oriented startups with tight budgets. 

Workello’s pricing structure is far more transparent and straightforward than that of Zoho Recruit—two simple tiers that both provide the same features but with different numbers of available candidate assessments. 

Zoho Recruit vs. Workello—Overview

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

Bottom Line

Zoho Recruit is a useful, albeit expensive hiring tool. It’s at its best when used with other Zoho software products. However, it doesn’t provide practical skill tests which give you the most accurate candidate assessments.

Workello provides expertly-crafted skill tests, email automation, 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 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!