10 Best Applicant Tracking Systems Of 2025

100Hires’ entry-level Start plan serves new businesses and small companies that may feel shut out of high-priced applicant tracking systems. For only $99 a month, Start provides access to free and premium job boards and to the company’s extensive database containing more than 500 job descriptions for 28 different industries and job categories. Other lower-priced products in our rankings can’t match these and other features available from 100Hires.

While the Start plan is limited to three jobs and 100 candidates, it gives new operations a leg up in their efforts to attract quality job applicants using such advanced tools as candidate profile shortcuts, two-way email and calendar sync, a Chrome extension for bulk resume imports and the company’s AI-powered resume parser that generates candidate scores and profiles automatically. Once your company is ready to start hiring, you can upgrade to 100Hires’ Advanced or Pro plans at any time.

Hiring managers rely on automated resume parsing to prequalify candidates for their open positions, but the initial screening can still leave them with dozens of applicants to sift through. 100Hires’ AI-generated candidate scores help evaluators pare the list of potential hires by automatically parsing resumes to create candidate profiles that include ratings in specific categories relevant to the job.

The resume parser included with all 100Hires applicant tracking plans uses AI to generate scores representing the candidate’s abilities in specific areas.

When I tried out the resume parser, it took a while for me to become acclimated to the cluttered, text-heavy 100Hires interface. I also noticed some errors when I uploaded a resume to the service, such as adding the wrong first and last names of the applicant as “Page First.” Once you get up to speed on the product’s interface, however, it helps you quickly work through a stack of resumes by listing keyboard shortcuts for rating and qualifying candidates and performing other actions when you press the Shift key.

Still, the overall feel of the product reminded me of a software development toolkit: screens are so jam-packed with options that you have to scroll the pages to view them all. One exception is 100Hires’ reporting screen, which graphs six hiring metrics with a single click, including time to hire, current pipeline and disqualifications by stage and reason.

Hiring teams can quickly get lost in the applicant-tracking process as they coordinate their separate interviews and other activities with multiple candidates, and often multiple open positions. With JazzHR’s team messaging features and other quality collaboration tools, they get a centralized view of the entire team’s actions and applicant assessments, including the ability to create custom ranking systems for candidates and coordinate multiple calendars for interview scheduling and team meetings.

JazzHR gives small businesses a chance to scale their recruiting operations as they grow, starting with the Hero plan that costs $75 a month with an annual contract and lets you recruit three jobs at a time (each additional job search costs $9 a month). Hero comes with job posting and syndication, as well as custom recruiting workflows.

As your company grows, you can move up to the midrange Plus package for $269 a month with an annual contract that supports 200 active jobs. The Plus plan features AI-based candidate matching and reporting, but only JazzHR’s high-end Pro plan comes with a custom report builder, e-signature capability and an offer letter generator. However, candidate texting is sold as an add-on for all three plans.

JazzHR helps companies quickly form a hiring team and helps teams stay on the same page through the recruiting process. The level of permissions granularity possible with JazzHR’s roles and permissions exceeds those available with other applicant tracking systems in our rankings.

In particular, I was impressed by JazzHR’s ability to set roles and privileges for various members of a hiring team. They include administrators with full permissions, super users with fewer privileges and users with limited access to tools and data. All three user categories support internal (staff) and external (recruiter) participants.

JazzHR hiring team members can be assigned one of seven different roles with corresponding privileges.

While most applicant tracking systems require that you add people to the team individually, JazzHR saves your hiring team time by assigning entire groups to the team with a single click. The variety of roles you can assign team members give you more granularity than is available in other applicant tracking systems. For example, internal administrators have access to billing and account information that recruiting administrators can’t access, and super users and users see only the candidates for the jobs they’re assigned to rather than all of the company’s open jobs and applicant database.

Many of the applicant tracking software vendors in our rankings sell white label solutions to recruiting services and staffing agencies. AvaHR stands out by offering its own Autopilot hiring service that handles all aspects of recruiting and onboarding new hires. The service supports any number of job postings, candidates and U.S. locations. It comes with your own career site, scheduling of on-site interviews, pre-employment checks and candidate skills assessments.

However, the Autopilot service doesn’t make actual job offers, it doesn’t call references and it won’t help your business hire independent contractors. It does provide a dedicated account manager who works with you to create your job postings so they represent your company culture.

The more I found out about AvaHR while attempting to test its applicant tracking system, the less likely I was to recommend the product. The uneasy feeling began while attempting to sign up for the vendor’s seven-day free trial, which requires providing your credit card information. You don’t find out about this requirement until after you’ve created an account with the company.

Another unpleasant surprise was learning about the company’s fees for targeted campaigns on popular job boards, such as Monster and Glassdoor, that range from $99 to $299 for one month. There’s no reference to these fees on AvaHR’s pricing page, which states only that its plans include posting jobs to “50+ free job boards.”

AvaHR’s fees for targeted job advertising on popular job boards are out of reach for most small businesses.

Before I was able to find out anything about AvaHR’s applicant tracking options, I had to repeat an onerous registration process for the seven-day free trial three times because in my first two attempts, the email with the link to confirm my registration failed to arrive. Only after a successful third attempt did I find out that I would be charged automatically for the plan I chose to test after the trial period ended. Thanks but no thanks, AvaHR.

Anyone who has conducted a job interview knows that the introductions and Q&A pass so quickly that you can’t possibly remember the specifics of everything that occurred. A primary benefit of Lever’s AI Interview Companion is being able to relax while interviewing candidates and focus on the person rather than on furious note-taking.

At the conclusion of the job interview, the AI Interview Companion delivers a summary and overall score for the candidate based on their answers and sentiment in areas such as humility, communication and goal orientation. It also lists the highlights of the interview and where in the accompanying interview video the highlight occurs. Members of the hiring team receive immediate feedback on their interview skills, including suggestions for intuiting and responding to candidate’s feelings and reactions during the interview.

I was impressed with Lever’s AI-assisted interview analyzer, which made it easy for me to fill in the blanks by providing near total recall of the interview highlights. For each interview, the system generates an overall score along with a list of the person’s qualifications based on their answers. I also liked the fact that you get a candidate summary based on the interview transcript and a list of the interview highlights.

Lever’s AI-powered interview assistant captures important information about the candidate that human note-taking misses.

In addition to collecting interview feedback in real time, the AI Interview Companion helpfully assisted in my interview preparation by suggesting skills-based questions to ask the candidate and providing a level of standardization that helped prevent bias during the interview. I found that hiring team members will benefit from the system’s feedback that points out the interview interactions that they can improve, such as how to read and react to the candidate’s feelings and demeanor during the interview. This level of feedback isn’t available in the other applicant tracking systems in our rankings.

A company risks losing top candidates for its open jobs if its recruiting pipeline stalls, leaving applicants wondering whether they’re still in the running. With TeamTailor’s triggers, hiring teams are able to notify candidates automatically when their application progresses through each stage of the hiring process. This feature is a key component of TeamTailor’s candidate relationship management system that places all the information about job applicants on a single candidate card, including their resume, work history, interview notes, chat transcripts and all interactions with the candidate.

An advantage TeamTailor has over the other applicant tracking vendors in our rankings is its nurture campaigns that generate personalized messages to candidates automatically. Hiring managers are able to establish relationships with candidates early in the process and get them excited about joining their team. The campaigns are configured by assigning touch points and wait times that let you choreograph your contacts with applicants while promoting your team and your brand.

The trigger feature in TeamTailor’s applicant tracking systems saves hiring managers time while ensuring that job candidates are kept informed of their status as they proceed through the hiring process. For example, once an applicant passes the initial screening, you can set a trigger that sends the person an email notifying them of the next steps and asking for more information.

Let candidates know they’ve moved to the second phase of the recruitment process by activating a trigger that automates notifications and includes tests or requests for more information.

The trigger can be based on one of the company’s preconfigured templates that you customize to include aptitude and skills tests or to request job-related information. Triggers can be used by the hiring team to solicit comments on applicants, share schedules and to-do lists, and move candidates through the hiring pipeline automatically based on their answers to questions or other criteria.

I found the process of activating and applying triggers clear and straightforward despite the abundance of options presented through its nested menus and multi-option dialog boxes. You have to invest some time to learn to use triggers to automate actions, but once the triggers are in place, they promise to save hiring teams time while keeping applicants up to date on their status.

iSmart Recruit approaches a company’s candidate search as part detective work and part sales pitch. The detective sniffs out the best applicants by nosing around their favorite hangouts, which in this case are job boards. Identifying candidates is the lead-in to the real work of pitching your organization’s attributes to potential employees. iSmart Recruit’s recruitment marketing is designed to help hiring managers close the deal.

To ensure you reach as many qualified candidates as possible, iSmart Recruit links your open positions to more than 500 job platforms, from big names such as Monster and ZipRecruiter to lesser-known sites that include boards operating in Latin America, India and other countries, as well as sites specializing in education, energy fields and the hospitality industry. Its tools to assist in marketing your brand to applicants communicate your company’s values, culture and opportunities through its career pages, social media and email marketing efforts.

iSmart Recruit’s design demonstrates the principle of placing the most important thing front and center. The first module that appears at the top of the iSmart Recruit dashboard is a list of your company’s active jobs, which opens the product’s Jobs module. Here you’ll see at a glance the status of all positions you’re currently recruiting for, including the number of active and rejected applicants and successful hires. Options in this module let you share the job post on social media, request employee referrals and conduct passive searches for candidates using the candidate-match feature.

From the candidate module you can import resumes that match open jobs directly from email inboxes, spreadsheets or job boards such as Indeed and LinkedIn.

iSmart Recruit’s one-click resume import feature links automatically to popular job boards and email systems.

Other import options let you create a candidate database or add to an existing database by importing resumes directly from Excel spreadsheets. You can search the database for candidate matches using fuzzy searches and proximity searches, both of which identify close matches without requiring exact keywords.