When recruiting for open job positions, HR teams can make use of applicant tracking software (ATS) to save time and to improve organization. Among ATS tools, Workable is one of the best all-around options. It excels in a variety of areas, giving companies the ability to find, track, and eventually hire the top applicants.
Who Needs Workable?
Because of the versatility Workable offers, it will work for companies of almost any size. With such a large number of useful features, Workable will save time for HR departments as they go through the hiring process. It’s a good selection for a company that may struggle to attract a wide range of candidates.
For those companies looking to integrate Workable into an existing HR system, though, this software primarily works as a standalone ATS. It doesn’t have extra tools that give HR departments an all-around solution from one HR software interface.
The #1 Best Thing About Workable
Workable’s greatest strength lies in its ability to handle all aspects of hiring. Its set of tools helps companies advertise their jobs, track the applicants, and schedule interviews. Team members can collaborate on the candidates within Workable too. It simplifies the process of tracking all of the information about a single candidate in one place.
Workable Sourcing and Attracting Candidates
ATS packages are great for tracking potential hires. However, if the company struggles to attract candidates, the ATS won’t have anything to track. Workable has several features aimed at helping companies find and attract candidates.
Online job seekers looking for an ideal fit with an employer will do a lot of research. Companies need a strong online presence that sells the opportunity to attract the best candidates. Workable has multiple features to aid in this area.
Workable can help a company source potential candidates too. The software uses its search functions on social media, job boards, and other sources to find candidates.
Features & Benefits
Workable uses an automated tool called AI Recruiter to help companies source candidates. It uses data pulled from past jobs Workable customers posted to find the avenues to success in sourcing the best candidates. AI Recruiter excels in helping companies find passive candidates, who are people not actively job seeking, but who may be a great fit for a certain position.
Those companies interested in using social media to source candidates can use the Google Chrome extension in Workable to simplify the process. When a hiring manager finds a potential candidate on Twitter or LinkedIn, he or she clicks the Workable extension button in Chrome. Workable then pulls that person’s profile information into Workable.
Workable has excellent features for attracting candidates too. The page builder feature in Workable allows a hiring manager to create a web page that shows open jobs. It can accept applications through the page too.
Just as importantly, the page showcases the aspects that make the company special. A job seeker doing research can learn more about the company, hopefully becoming interested in joining the team.
The software has built-in areas that help a company use its current employees to help with attracting job candidates. Current employees can make recommendations for people they know to fill open jobs, which is a great source of candidates. Additionally, Workable has a feature aimed at attracting internal candidates seeking a new challenge or a promotion.
Pros
- Allows companies to scale recruiting plans as needed
- Searches multiple online sources for passive candidates
- Helps companies develop their online presence
- Includes hundreds of job description templates
Cons
- Advanced recruiting features are lacking
- Doesn’t integrate easily with some existing HR platforms
- Chrome extension may not easily integrate with other browsers
Pricing & Plans
The Paygo pricing tier with Workable offers the basic sourcing features that companies need. It includes automated sourcing, job board distribution, referral tracking, and job description templates. Paygo costs $99 per month per job listed.
All of these features are available in the upper three pay tiers as well. (The Core, Growth, and Premier tiers require contacting Workable for a custom price quote.)
Those seeking integrated recruiting through LinkedIn and advanced referral tracking from current employees will need to upgrade to the Growth or Premier pricing tier.
Workable Evaluating and Collaborating on Candidates
Once a company has job candidates, evaluating them can be extremely time-consuming. For a popular job opening, a company may have a couple of hundred candidates. Managing this list requires detailed tracking capabilities, which is a key reason that companies turn to an ATS for help.
Workable offers multiple features that help hiring managers perform the initial evaluation of candidates. After narrowing the list, companies can use Workable to aid in the interview process.
Features & Benefits
Companies that need to ensure objective hiring decisions can take advantage of Workable’s evaluation features. The anonymized screening process can hide the candidate’s name, phone number, and address from view during initial resume screenings.
Workable also offers an Assessments feature that uses cognitive and personality tests to assign scores to candidates. These tests remove some of the personal bias of a hiring manager in providing an initial assessment to a candidate.
For a company that has multiple people involved in hiring for a position, Workable simplifies the process of discussing candidates. There’s no need to set up multiple meetings or to have a lengthy email chain to discuss candidates.
Managers can leave notes for each other in the software that they can read at a convenient time. All information regarding the candidate, as well as records of all contact with the candidate, appears on this page.
Should one team member need to complete a task to keep the hiring process moving forward for a candidate, assigning of tasks happens through the Workable interface.
Pros
- Workable delivers calendar synching for appointments
- Easy to see each candidate’s timeline of events
- Assign tasks to different team members
- Delivers one-way video interview capabilities
Cons
- Hiring managers may feel overwhelmed with information
- Tricky to personalize initial communications with candidates
Pricing & Plans
The Paygo tier of Workable offers many key features related to evaluating job candidates, including calendar synching, interview scorecards, and interview question templates. When hiring managers need to check on the progress of filling a particular job position from outside the office, the high-quality mobile app is available in the Paygo tier as well.
The three custom pricing tiers (Core, Growth, and Premier) all offer the same evaluation features of Paygo. The Core tier (along with Growth and Premier) allows for self-scheduling of one-way interviews for potential candidates.
For those seeking to customize the hiring pipeline, the Growth and Premier tiers offer this feature. To remove bias from the initial screening of candidate resumes, these two tiers include anonymized resume screening capabilities.
A company that needs a detailed hiring plan or five different native language options will have to go with the Premier tier.
Workable Hiring Process
Once the company has decided to offer the job to a candidate, Workable automates the hiring process. This automation eliminates manual tracking requirements, saving time whether the company is hiring one or 100 candidates.
The software includes offer letter templates, which streamline the process of issuing an offer. For the job candidate, Workable uses integrations with DocuSign and HelloSign to allow for e-signatures from candidates.
Workable has multiple features that help a company study its hiring process after making a job offer. This data can be invaluable for helping the company find better ways to hire that improve results and reduce hiring costs.
Features & Benefits
For those companies that must adhere to compliance regulations in hiring, Workable can track all of this data. Whether the company needs to follow local, regional, national, or international regulations, Workable delivers this information.
Along those same lines, Workable can send surveys to job candidates to collect data that can satisfy compliance regulations. The data also helps with finding which areas of the company’s hiring pipeline are working smoothly.
To speed up the process of sending out job offers, Workable has multiple templates for offer letters. Rather than crafting each job offer letter manually, the templates speed up the process. This could be the difference in reaching a highly sought-after candidate with an offer before another company makes an offer.
After hiring a candidate, Workable offers multiple types of reports that can help hiring managers determine which hiring techniques may need some tweaking. Custom reporting options are available too.
Pros
- Multiple reports available to measure success
- Automates the issuance and acceptance of job offers
- Take surveys of job candidates to collect hiring data
- Track the cost of filling jobs for budgeting purposes
Cons
- Fewer onboarding features than some would like
- Advanced reporting features only found in higher pricing tiers
Pricing & Plans
All of the Workable pricing tiers, including the lowest-priced Paygo tier, include the ability to send job offer letters and accept e-signatures. All tiers offer basic reporting functions too.
For those who want to offer surveys to candidates about the hiring process, they’ll have to subscribe to the Core, Growth, or Premier tiers. All three of these tiers require contacting Workable for a custom pricing quote.
Workable allows any user to make an electronic offer to a job candidate. Or, in the Growth or Premier tiers, companies can require that an administrator signs off on these offers. Compliance with EEO and OFCCP is available in these tiers too.
What Do Users Think of Workable?
Workable generally receives favorable online reviews from actual customers. It’s not a perfect ATS for every company, but its customers typically report positive experiences.
Positive Features of Workable
The most positive aspect customers found with Workable involves its ease of use. Whether customers are focusing on a few open jobs or have dozens of them to fill, Workable makes the process relatively easy to manage.
Customers appreciate Workable’s interface that contains a timeline for each candidate. This gives hiring managers the ability to see at a glance where each candidate sits in the process. As another helpful feature, customers appreciate the integrations with calendar software like Google Calendar and Outlook to set up interviews and other hiring tasks.
Additionally, customers appreciate the ability to manage all of the information from a candidate from one page. This simplifies collaboration among team members about each candidate.
Because Workable shares its job postings with so many different sites, the tracking process could become unruly quickly. However, most customers appreciate the way Workable sorts candidates, automatically pulling in and properly organizing the necessary information.
Most customers appreciated the pricing they received for Workable compared to other ATS options. However, a few customers reported canceling a Workable subscription because of pricing concerns.
One of the most common complaints about Workable is an inability to easily edit templates for sending messages to candidates. Workable is, frankly, not all that customizable throughout the stages of the hiring process, and customers definitely don’t love that about the platform.
Along those same lines, some customers would like to be able to generate a wider variety of reports. They’d also like the ability to customize the pipeline more easily.
Some Workable customers reported struggles with meshing the information from job candidates on Indeed into Workable. For example, Indeed gives candidates unique email addresses for privacy, which causes some tracking issues in Workable.
Overall, users tend to like Workable. While there are a few issues and aspects, most users seem happy with their experience and Workable’s integrations and functionality.
How Workable Measures Up to the Competition
We have compiled a list of the best applicant tracking software options, highlighting the most important features companies should consider before subscribing to an ATS.
Two of the primary competitors in the ATS space for Workable are SmartStart by SmartRecruiters and Greenhouse. Here are some comparisons of the primary areas where Workable and its main competitors operate.
Pricing
Pricing plans can have quite a bit of complexity for ATS packages. However, that’s not the case for small companies making use of SmartStart by SmartRecruiters. SmartStart is a completely free software package that works for up to 10 job postings at a time. (Those who need more job postings can receive a custom price quote for a paid version of SmartRecruit.)
Workable and Greenhouse both offer a free demo, but neither one offers a free version of the software. Workable has its Paygo tier that starts at $99 per job per month. For the other tiers of Workable and for all tiers of Greenhouse, customers must reach out for a custom price quote.
Greenhouse’s pricing structure will work better for large organizations. For smaller companies that are growing, the Greenhouse pricing tiers are higher than average, though.
Customization
For companies that need to alter the ATS to meet their needs or the needs of their industry, Greenhouse offers multiple customization options. Application of these customizations can occur anywhere along the hiring pipeline. Greenhouse excels at integrating with other types of software a company may already be using, simplifying the hiring process.
Paid customers of SmartRecruit can add on a wide range of products from the company to give the software the exact features a company needs. However, selecting these add-ons does increase the price significantly.
Workable natively offers quite a bit of versatility, so it should meet the needs of a wide range of companies as is. But it doesn’t offer very many customization options.
All-in-One Solutions
For the HR department that wants to be able to take care of every aspect of the hiring process in one place, Workable is the ideal solution. This software ensures that those doing the hiring for the company will not forget any step along the way. Workable even has an outstanding mobile app that gives managers the ability to track the progress of the hiring process from anywhere.
Considering that small companies with limited hiring needs can use it for free, SmartStart does have an impressive feature list. But it lags behind Workable in terms of versatility. The SmartStart mobile app has significant limitations as well.
Greenhouse has numerous useful tools that compare favorably to Workable. However, it does require some configuration to make it work for a particular company’s needs, which can be time-consuming.
Do We Recommend Workable?
Workable is a strong ATS that delivers results for companies of various sizes and in various industries. We would recommend Workable for those companies that need a powerful all-in-one tool with impressive versatility to improve their hiring results.