Recruiting software helps dial back the time you need to spend posting job listings and screening candidates, automating much of the process. One contender is Recruiterbox, which recently rebranded itself to Trakstar Hire. It includes extensive applicant and offers management systems to streamline your hiring team’s tasks. While it’s good at what it does, Recruiterbox’s pricey plans and somewhat lackluster interface keep it off our list of the best recruiting software options.
Compare Recruiterbox to The Best Recruiting Software
Recruiterbox didn’t make our top picks, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an option to consider for your business. The software certainly does have some perks, like its automated candidate profile creation and collaboration tools that keep everything organized across your team and the hiring process. Plus, the tool is easy to pick up and start using, even for beginners. The downside is that it’s pricey and can feel outdated compared to other options.
We tested dozens of other recruiting software to determine the best for most businesses and specific business situations. Our list should help you narrow your picks to the top tools that make sense for your team. See all of our top picks.
Recruiterbox: The Good and The Bad
The Good
Easy for Beginners: Recruiting software usually has at least some learning curve for those who have never used a similar service. However, Recruiterbox is relatively simple compared to others, so beginners should find it fairly self-explanatory. Although the interface is barebones and far from dazzling, that’s a good thing when it comes to finding what you need and getting hiring tasks done quickly.
Scalable Service: Recruiterbox has plans that cater to businesses of all sizes, including ultra-small companies and enterprise organizations. You can always start with a low-tier plan for basic features and flat rates per job posting. Then, as you grow, move onto a more scalable plan with access to unlimited hiring managers, unlimited job postings, and features that will save your company time throughout the hiring process.
Automated Candidate Organization: Organizing candidates is a breeze with Recruiterbox’s automated system. It gathers data from applications across the various job posting sites and applies it to an applicant’s profile. From there, hiring managers can search the profiles to find candidates that match specific skills or characteristics. The hiring team can also customize their workflow to automate more of the process at each step.
Collaboration-Friendly: Large hiring teams can work together to find suitable candidates and streamline the hiring process with Recruiterbox. Users can add notes in candidate profiles, create and request interview assessments, and receive email notifications when a hiring phase has been completed. The solutions may even let you cut down or eliminate the need for hiring team meetings.
Regular Updates & Improvements: Recruiterbox began in 2011 and has since grown exponentially in popularity. With that growth has come consistent improvements to the software’s core functions and usability. One of the most exciting updates happened in May 2021 with enhanced candidate profile merging. The feature details what information will merge and creates a unique indicator for profiles that have merged. Stay on top of other new updates on the Recruiterbox website.
Customizable Notifications: Get notified as much or as little as you want through the hiring process. Recruiterbox allows you to set up email notifications at each step or as reminders, like scheduling an interview or marking a candidate’s application. These alerts keep your team updated and on track, and it only takes a few clicks to change them if they’re overloading your inbox.
Free Demo Available: Businesses can receive a free live demo of Recruiterbox to learn how it works and view its features. Sign up for a demo led by the Recruiterbox team to see how applicant tracking, performance management, learning management, or all three features work before you decide to buy the software.
The Bad
Candidate Organization Hiccups: Recruiterbox continuously listens to user suggestions and implements necessary updates, but candidate organization—the crux of the software—still has far to go to be as intuitive as it should be. For example, sorting profiles alphabetically or by location isn’t possible, and merging candidates is only possible with applicants using the same email address rather than other contact information, like phone number or address.
System Slows with Mass Tasks: Mass tasks with candidate profiles, like moving batches of applicants to another stage in the hiring process, can slow down the Recruiterbox system. Hangups don’t occur as consistently when completing tasks with a handful of profiles, but large companies with hundreds or thousands of applicants might find that the system can’t keep up with demand.
Limited Integrations: Recruiterbox integrates with some of today’s most popular tools, like Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), Quickbooks, and Outlook/Office 365. Still, its options are limited compared to other recruiting software. For example, other options connect to testing software, employer branding tools, and multiple payroll services, ensuring that your team can work seamlessly with the tools they’re already using.
No Flags for Candidates: Being able to skip candidate profiles from people who reapply for a position they’re not a fit for can save your team time during screening. Unfortunately, Recruiterbox will allow these people back into your system, as there’s currently no flag or tag that indicates a candidate has already been turned down. Essentially, you need to create another way of noting an applicant’s rejection, like attaching a note to the profile.
Pricey and Non-Transparent Plans: To know how much you’ll need to pay for a Recruiterbox subscription, you’ll need to contact a company agent. Non-transparent prices can be a deal-breaker for decision-makers who want to make quick comparisons between tools. The website mentions that pricing begins at $3,499 annually, which is high for small businesses and pricier than plans from other tools geared toward medium and large companies.
Outdated Interface: While Recruiterbox’s interface is clean and straightforward, it doesn’t pack the punch that others do. In fact, it’s a far cry from modern software with smooth lines, eye-catching navigation, and branded colors. Although it may not be a drawback for some teams, others might find it too outdated for their preferences.
Recruiterbox Pricing and Options
Recruiterbox offers solutions for businesses of all sizes, whether yours is a small business with 10 employees or a massive organization with thousands of employees.
Pricing for Recruiterbox depends on the number of employees your company has. Small businesses can probably use the lowest package tier with a pay-per-job model just fine. But larger companies will want unlimited job postings and hiring managers, customizable workflows, and other helpful features for managing the recruiting process.
The problem is that you won’t be able to get an idea of what you’ll need to spend until you contact Recruiterbox to tell the company more about your business. Recruiterbox will let you know what solution will work best and the price you’ll pay for it.
This is vastly different from other recruiting software services, which openly display their rates on their websites. Of course, many of them have customized enterprise solutions and rates for more customized options, but regular package prices are usually shown transparently. The only clue you’ll find about your expected cost is where Recruiterbox states that the minimum annual fee is $3,499, or more than $290/month—quite a bit higher than our other top picks.
Recruiterbox Applicant Management
From tracking applications to scheduling interviews, Recruiterbox takes your hiring team through each step in the process in an organized and streamlined way.
Let’s start with candidate sourcing. Recruiterbox helps you post your job to multiple job sites quickly using the same information and description. This convenient feature saves your team time when you plan to search for candidates in various places, yet all data from filled applications go to your central system for easy access.
Then there’s the applicant tracking system (ATS). The web-based software automatically creates candidate profiles using data collected from applications from different job posting sources. Your team can search profiles for keywords and other information that leads to ideal candidates based on their experience or skills, for example. Hiring managers can see where those applicants are in the process and move them onto the next stage of hiring or archive their application.
Once you have viable candidates shortlisted, you can move them into the interview process using Recruiterbox. Schedule an interview right from a candidate’s profile, and they’ll receive an email alerting them of the interview, which they can accept, decline, or suggest a different date or time. The system syncs with other calendars, like Google Calendar, to avoid scheduling conflicts on your end.
Although the applicant and candidate management features are plentiful, Recruiterbox leaves a bit to be desired in its automation. Candidate profile creation feels a bit clunky. You might find yourself having to label data differently to ensure your database is completely searchable and organized well, as automatic importing labels can quickly go awry.
You may also need to watch out for duplicate candidate profiles. For instance, if one person applies for three jobs, you’ll end up with three separate profiles of the same candidate. Although a new update now allows enhanced profile merging, there’s no guarantee that all data will merge to the new profile. Therefore, your recruitment team will still need to stay on top of—and possibly clean up—the database regularly.
Recruiterbox Offer Management
Sending offers to candidates you’re interested in hiring is made simple with Recruiterbox’s offer management features. Rather than spend time making multiple personalized offer letters to send to candidates, you can create and upload templates to your Recruiterbox dashboard and have the system autofill a candidate’s information in matching fields.
From the offer screen, you can also add to-do tasks for your hiring team or the candidate to make sure everyone’s on the same page, review the candidate’s information, and mark the candidate as hired. Customize your workflow to allow your team to send offers at different stages of the hiring process, like after a candidate passes a test or completes a video interview.
Another notable feature is e-signature capability. Send an offer and other necessary paperwork to a candidate you’re hiring, and both parties can sign the documents electronically without the need to download or use a third-party service.
Recruiterbox Career Site Management
You can easily create your own branded career site to host your company’s job listings using Recruiterbox. The career management platform includes coding and tools for a mobile-friendly job site where applicants can apply to jobs from any device. Use the Recruiterbox jobs widget to make a separate page for your career listings using your site’s stylesheet to blend right in with the rest of your website.
The widget also makes jobs searchable by applicants, just like you’ll see on other popular job sites, like Indeed and Snagajob. Your hiring team can use email filters to forward specific types of applications to their inbox as they come through. Recruiterbox lets you customize your applications in every way, too, using premade and custom fields with various types of answers, like multiple choice or drop-down menus.
Recruiterbox Monitoring and Reporting
Recruiterbox generates reports for candidates and jobs, letting you see the bigger picture of who has applied and how your job postings are performing. Reporting especially comes in handy when you want to see what source gives you the best candidates for a particular job.
You can generate a report that displays candidate data and answers to application questions within various time ranges. This report is missing valuable features, though, like only pulling data from applicants at a specific stage. You also need to take some extra steps to pull resume data with applicant data, and the feature is only available with certain plans.
You can also generate reports of your hiring pipeline, job posting sources, coordinator activities, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) compliance. Together, these reports can help you decide if your hiring process is as efficient as possible and where to make improvements to fill positions faster.
How Recruiterbox Ranks
Because of a few kinks that still need to be worked out to make Recruiterbox a top-performing hiring platform, it didn’t make it to our list of the best recruiting software. Recruiterbox’s candidate profile hiccups and slowness with mass tasks can cause issues for large teams looking to save time when recruiting new employees.
Explore our top recruiting software picks here and learn how they stack up against one another.
- Freshteam – Best for most
- Zoho Recruit – Best software for recruiters
- JazzHR – Best for syncing recruiting with your software
- Workable – Best recruiting software for occasional hiring
- Ascendify – Best recruiting software for enterprises
- Recruiterflow – Best for staffing and recruitment agencies
- Recooty – Best applicant tracking system (ATS)
Summary
Overall, Recruiterbox is an easy-to-use tool for beginners to recruiting software. However, there are other options on the market that are just as simple, offer more features, and aren’t as pricey, especially for small teams. Medium-sized businesses will probably find Recruiterbox the most helpful. But faults with candidate profiles and a bogged-down system may make the software fall short for large companies with dozens to hundreds of job postings waiting to be filled.
