10 Best Applicant Tracking Software in 2023

When the first applicant tracking software appeared over two decades ago, they completely revolutionized how HR professionals approached recruiting.

Thanks to applicant tracking software, people could now finally get rid of tons of paperwork and spreadsheets and instead use HR software to help them recruit.

Due to the popularity of applicant tracking software, choosing the one that works for you and your needs is not easy.

There are so many options available on the market that it may quickly become overwhelming for most people. Thus, in this post, we will show the four best applicant tracking software and help make that choosing process easier for you.

We were focusing on several indicators to choose the best applicant tracking software for 2023:

User experience – How easy is it compared to Avature?
Standout features – What are they, and are they worth it?
Pricing – Does the software justify its price?
Customer support effectiveness – How is the company’s customer support?

We picked the ones that are suitable for different use cases:

Applicant tracking software #1: Recruiteze
Applicant tracking software #2: Lever
Applicant tracking software #3: BreezyHR
Applicant tracking software #4: iSmartRecruit
Applicant tracking software #5: Manatal
Applicant tracking software #6: Homerun
Applicant tracking software #7: Recruitee
Applicant tracking software #8 Workable
Applicant tracking software #9: Bullhorn
Applicant tracking software #10: Zoho Recruit

What is an applicant tracking software, and why do you need one?

Before showing you the best applicant tracking software, we need to define what it is and why would you — as an HR professional or business owner — need one for your company.

Additional reads:

What is an applicant tracking software?

Applicant tracking software provides you with recruiting and hiring features. They are software programs that automate and optimize much of a recruiter’s hiring processes. Among many of the features they offer, these systems collect and sort thousands of resumes.

When a person applies for a job online, their resume usually is not going directly to a hiring manager or a recruiter. The resume first gets processed by an applicant tracking software or ATS for short.

By definition, an applicant tracking software is a software that acts as a database for job applicants. Companies use applicant tracking software to organize, search, and communicate with applicants.

An applicant tracking software’s main purpose is to make life easier for people that recruit at companies.

Many times, companies hire for multiple positions at once and usually receive hundreds if not thousands of applicants for each job opening. If a recruiter or a hiring manager gets that number of resumes, carefully reading each one is likely not going to happen, at least not soon.

Thanks to applicant tracking software, searching and organizing resumes is easier or even automated, saving a lot of time while also avoiding human error.

Why do you need an applicant tracking software?

Applicant tracking software is designed to improve and streamline your hiring process.

By streamlining resume storing, processing, and screening, applicant tracking software can save you a lot of time, money, and energy. With the help of applicant tracking software, you or your recruiters can effectively increase the speed and quality of the work they do.

Check our articles on Top reasons why you should use recruitment software for more information.

Applicant tracking software #1:Recruiteze

Recruiteze is an ultra-modern applicant tracking software that will help you make your recruiting processes faster and more effective by helping you track, organize, and sort your online applicant data.

With Recruiteze, you can reduce your hiring costs by reaching a larger pool of candidates and hire some of the best employees.

This is one of the best applicant tracking software because it include great features that help you manage your career portal, quickly sift through numerous applications using customizable workflows and so much more.

Recruiteze is particularly suitable for small businesses and staffing agencies due to its simplicity and focus on core recruitment tasks. It can also be a good fit for organizations that value ease of use and straightforward features over more complex, advanced functionalities.

Advantages of Recruiteze

Automated Job Posting: Recruiteze allows users to post jobs automatically to free job boards, the company’s careers page, and social media. This can save time and broaden your reach to potential applicants.
Format-Free Resume Parsing: Recruiteze can parse resumes regardless of their format, whether they’re in PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, HTML, or TXT. It then creates a formatted online version that’s easy to navigate and standardizes all candidate information for easy comparison.
Candidate Workflow Management: It provides customizable candidate workflows, which allow you to manage each step of the hiring process effectively.
Flexible Access Control: Recruiteze offers multiple user access levels, which lets you decide who can view and manage certain information in the system. This can be useful for managing privacy and confidentiality.
Seamless integration with iReformat: iReformat is a resume formatting tool, and pairing it with Recruiteze allows you to reformat dozens of resumes in bulk, saving you hours of time in manual reformatting.

Using Recruiteze, you can easily broadcast your job to hundreds or even thousands of people and watch how they seamlessly flow into an online database where you can then track and organize their applications with ease.

You can also streamline your recruiting process by creating a workflow in your portal that matches your hiring process, then track resumes and candidates through each stage of the process:

Streamlined Processes: Custom workflows allow you to design the stages of the hiring process to align with your specific needs. This can streamline the process, reducing inefficiencies and potentially speeding up the time-to-hire.
Consistency: By establishing a custom workflow, you can ensure that every candidate goes through the same process. This helps you create a more consistent and fair hiring process, reducing the risk of bias or oversight.
Responsibility Assignment: Within your custom workflow, you can assign tasks or stages to specific team members, ensuring that everyone knows what they need to do and when.
Automated Actions: For example, when a candidate moves from one stage to the next, you can automatically trigger an email notification or the sending of a task to a team member.
Tracking and Reporting: Custom workflows can make it easier to track the progress of each candidate and generate reports on the hiring process.

Recruiteze adapts to your workflow, not vice versa.

Because Recruiteze is a cloud-based software, it is available to you wherever with an internet connection.

You don’t need to manage an IT infrastructure, and there are many other features over an on-premise ATS. This makes the recruiting process even more comfortable, as there are no costs or needs to manage servers or databases.

Shortcomings of Recruiteze

Recruiteze is primarily built for SMBs, as opposed to enterprises.

While it doesn’t support numerous integrations, it ultimately focuses on providing the perfect experience on the most essential every-day features.

Recruiteze’s pricing

At the moment, Recruiteze is available in 3 different plans — Startup, Business, and Custom Plan.

You can test the software out during an amazing 15-day trial, no credit card is needed. You can choose between monthly and annual payment options with annual plans having a special discount.

Test Recruiteze now.

Recruiteze’s ratings as the best applicant tracking software

User experience: 5/5
Standout features: 4.5/5
Pricing: 5/5
Customer support effectiveness: 5/5

Total: 4.87/5

Lever

Lever is an applicant tracking software packed with built-in CRM functions that help businesses in the hiring process. The main purpose of Lever is to automate applicant tracking and to form the relationship with the right candidates. Lever offers features like candidate sourcing and management, collaborations, resume parsing, customizable pipelines and workflows, and more.

Lever is a good fit for medium to large-sized organizations that need a comprehensive, feature-rich recruitment solution. It’s particularly suitable for businesses that want to leverage data analytics to improve their recruitment efforts and those that value building and maintaining relationships with candidates over time.

Advantages of Lever

Lever Nurture: One of Lever’s standout features is Lever Nurture, which is designed to automate and personalize communication with candidates. This can help to engage passive candidates and build relationships over time, which can ultimately lead to better hiring outcomes.
Chrome Extension: Lever’s Chrome extension allows recruiters to source candidates directly from LinkedIn, GitHub, and other websites. The extension automatically pulls in relevant candidate data, reducing manual data entry and streamlining the sourcing process.
Robust Reporting: Lever provides comprehensive reporting features, including real-time reports and visual dashboards. These can provide valuable insights into your recruitment process and help you make data-driven decisions.
Candidate Relationship Management (CRM): Lever’s integrated CRM capabilities allow you to build and maintain relationships with potential candidates, even if they’re not currently applying for a job. This can help to create a pipeline of talent for future vacancies.

Lever offers an applicant tracking system, CRM, and a branded job website, as well as a robust set of pre-built reports and quality data visualization. With Lever, you can use a mobile-ready interview feedback system and robust approval workflows, as well as personalized email campaigns.

You can also use Lever to maximize existing relationships with past candidates by reconnecting with them and refine the recommendations they can give to you. Lever also provides intuitive reports to help users track and optimize campaigns as well as detailed reports.

Shortcomings of Lever

Learning Curve: While Lever is a powerful tool, its wide range of features and capabilities can make it complex to learn, particularly for users who are new to ATS or CRM systems.
Customization Limitations: Some users have reported limitations in the ability to customize certain aspects of the system, such as email templates and workflows.
Cost: Lever’s advanced features and comprehensive capabilities come at a cost, which may be prohibitive for smaller organizations or those with a tight budget.

Lever can be a little slow, as scheduling is not intuitive, it lacks familiarity if you have never used similar software before. Also, the lack of formatting options in the feedback text boxes is weird and usually results in garbled text.

Lever’s pricing

Lever’s pricing is not publicly available. You need to contact Lever for a direct quote.

Lever’s ratings as the best applicant tracking software

User experience: 4/5
Standout features: 4/5
Pricing: 4/5
Customer support effectiveness: 5/5

Total: 4.25/5

BreezyHR

Breezy HR is an applicant tracking software designed to help people that are recruiting efficiently streamline their hiring process.

Recruiters can use BreezyHR to manage their hiring pipeline by dragging and dropping candidate information throughout various stages. Additionally, you can use BreezyHR to invite other team members to get their feedback on candidates with a real-time comment stream.

Advantages of BreezyHR

With BreezyHR, you can automate the distribution of job positions to various career sites. There is also a dedicated portal so that your recruiters can manage the recruiting process throughout it.

There is also a career portal that can include information, videos, and photos about your company. You can add your benefits and open positions here. BreezyHR can be integrated with a few HRIS apps including BambooHR, Namely, Zenefits, and more.

When it comes to candidate management, BreezyHR offers a customized pipeline that can automate each stage of the hiring process. You can also use BreezyHR to parse resumes, automate references, and have candidate scorecards with open-ended feedback.

Shortcomings of BreezyHR

Even though BreezyHR is an excellent software, it is not without its flaws. Their menu is a bit crowded, a lot of the features are not available out of the box, and require you to buy an add-on. Screening out the resumes that don’t match the qualifications is not great.

BreezyHR’s pricing

BreezyHR is available in 4 plans — Bootstrap, Startup, Growth, and Business. All of the plans can be paid annually or monthly, and if you want to enhance your plan, you can add add-ons.

BreezyHR’s ratings as the best applicant tracking software

User experience: 5/5
Standout features: 3/5
Pricing: 3/5
Customer support effectiveness: 5/5

Total: 4/5

Another worthy mention we fill should be included here is VCV Digital Recruitment that offers various solutions like:

High-volume hiring
Graduate recruiting
Internal recruiting
Professional recruiting
so on.

Their 4 step ensures your HR team doesn’t waste time but efficiently hires the best possible candidates (based on their best performance).