Over the past few years, I’ve noticed something funny—every time I’m speaking to a recruiting audience and a slide pops up with a tech logo on it, the phones come out. Everyone’s scrambling to snap a picture, trying to grab the name of whatever company I might be mentioning. Honestly, I’ve thought about just doing a complete presentation of nothing but logos! All you want is for me to tell you what the 2025 Top Recruiting Technologies are!

It makes sense. I’ve become known as someone who sees a lot of recruiting tech, so chances are good I’ll mention something folks haven’t heard of yet. The recruiting and TA tech space is enormous, and new companies are constantly launching. So, I figured—why not just put together a list of the ones I like best?

You’re probably wondering: what’s this list actually based on?

These are tools I’ve used myself, seen others use effectively, or demoed and thought, yeah, I could see myself using that. The common thread? I’ve personally interacted with the tech in some way and gathered feedback, whether from my own experience or through the work my team at HRU is doing with clients across the country.

And I’ll say this—I’d put my team at HRU against any of these recruiting teams. They live and breathe this space. If recruiting technology had a fantasy league, they’d be the first-round draft picks. We serve companies in nearly any industry and have the tech, process, and experience in place to help you hire better, faster, and smarter.

Like any list, some of these you’ll agree with, some you won’t—and that’s okay. It’s not your list. It’s my list.

This is a curated list of 100 recruiting and TA products I really like. There are thousands out there, and yes, I had to leave off plenty that I still think are great. But these are the 100 that stood out.

Rank	Logo	Technology	What do they do?	Why did I rank them?
01		Paradox.ai	High volume recruiting automation	The feedback I continuously get from users is, “they just work”. There is no higher praise in our industry.
02		LinkedIn.com	Job board-ish, professional network	Every single person in our space uses them. Go ahead and be mad they’re ranked this high. You’ll still use them.
03		Indeed.com	Job board-ish, minus the networking.	See above. Most of your hires come from here. You hate you’re addicted to them, but you are.
04		Greenhouse.com	Applicant Tracking ATS	Arguably the best of breed ATS on the planet. I love their founders and think they build the right stuff and thoughtfully care about recruiters and candidates.
05		appcast.io	Programmatic Job Advertising	I love all the programmatic techs, but they are tops on my list of those types of technologies, and I believe advertising just works in recruiting.
06		HireEZ.com	All-in-one-recruiting automation (Sourcing)	Started as Sourcing and just kept building cool things for recruiters. Again, a team that really digs into how recruiters work and what they really need to succeed.
07		Crosschq.com	Hiring Intelligence	Not enough people know about them and how they can transform your talent acquisition function. Everyone I know that sees their TalentWall wants it.
08		workday.com	ATS/CRM	Yep, it’s there and you hate the ranking, yet over 5,000 large organizations are using them to hire millions of candidates a year. You combine Workday ATS, Candidate Engagement and HiredScore and it’s actually a really good recruiting platform.
09		Apriora.ai	AI Candidate Screening	I like them so much I invested my own money. I love that any TA shop can now give 100% of their candidates an at bat, a chance. It doesn’t get more inclusive than that.
10		Cliquify	Employer branding platform	One of the easiest and best ways to actually amplify your employer brand and have the data to show what you’re actually doing.
11		Gem.com	All-in-one recruiting platform/automation	Gem is easier to use than most of the big, complex CRMs in our space. It’s more what an everyday recruiter wants and needs.
12		JobSync.com	Hiring Operations	JobSync is invisible-ware, it’s the tech you don’t see that actually makes all the other stuff you have work the way it should. Like making it easier for candidates to apply to your bad process.
13		SmartRecruiters.com	ATS	Global best of breed ATS that is pushing AI beyond what many in our space are doing.
14		Erinapp.com	Employee Referral	This might be the most underutilized, highest ROI recruiting tech on the planet, and it’s perplexing why more aren’t using it.
15		Visier.com	People Analytics	I love a lot of the recruiting analytics technologies and Visier might be the best of them all.
16		Hirevue.com	Interview tech	HireVue is the OG in this space and honestly is far beyond where they started, and most people have no idea how good they really are today. I also put them this high to piss off Chad and Cheese! LOL
17		Loxo.com	Recruiting Platform	This is the recruiting tech that my own team at HRU Tech uses. I’ve yet to find another in our space that gives you more bang for the buck!
18		Phenom.com	Recruiting Platform/CRM	Phenom might be the most advanced recruiting tech company around AI and Agents in our space. Big enterprise recruiting tech. Usually sits on top of big HCM recruiting modules and does all the stuff they don’t do.
19		Workable.com	ATS	SMB ATS that has a ton of great recruiting tech and functionality for a fairly low cost.
20		Dalia.co	Candidate Conversion Platform	We have so many candidates who come to our careers site that never convert. Dalia helps with that.
21		socialtalent.com	Recruiter training	Love them, my entire team has gone through this. Might be my most recommended tech, because we all suck at training our recruiting teams!
22		skillscout.com	Employment branding	Amazing video storytelling by a team that kills it every single time. I could not recommend them enough.
23		Avature.net	ATS/CRM/Etc.	I call them the RFP recruiting tech because they check all the boxes, and they are the one ATS in our space who actually loves to customize for you.
24		eightfold.ai	CRM	Eightfold is Phenom-like in that they basically were built to sit on top of Big HCM recruiting modules and make them work like you hoped the big HCM recruiting would work, but it didn’t. They basically do it all.
25		talentllama.ai	AI screening	Like Apriora, another proven AI screening that allows you to let all candidates really get into your process.
26		BrightHire.com	Interviewing tech	Like Pillar, but maybe a little less flexible, but still a very solid player in this space, and a definite market leader.
27		Seekout.com	Sourcing tech	I like Seekout and their leadership team, they have a new Agent (like everyone) but they are doing it differently than most. Some will love it, some won’t.
28		Sapia.ai	High volume hirings	Similar to Fountain, hiring automation for high volume, screening, scheduling, etc.
29		Fountain.com	Frontline hiring	Fountain has evolved a bit from just high volume to frontline workforce management, but still mostly hiring.
30		humanly.io	High volume hiring	Another tech in the Paradox-like universe that helps you tackle large amounts of applicants and hire better, faster.
31		Recruitics.com	Programmtic	All-in-one recruitment marketing. Attract, convert, etc. I really like the data side of what they do.
32		PandoLogic.com	Programmatic	Advertise, attract, and engage. Really were early on the AI side of this. They now want to be called Veritone Hire, but no one knows who that is.
33		reelist.com	Social Media Job advertising	You want to recruit on social media – this is the tech to help you.
34		JuiceBox.ai	Sourcing	One of the newest sourcing technologies on the market and they are very good. ChatGPT-like interface makes it light and easy to use.
35		Fectcher.ai	Sourcing	Started out as a tech sourcing platform, evolved into all sourcing. Source, outreach, measure.
36		Findem.ai	Sourcing	Sourcing, candidate match/review, ATS database rediscovery and marketing automation.
37		Codesignal.com	Assessment and Job Samples	This used to be all tech assessment stuff, but now with AI you can basically build realistic job samples for almost anything.
38		Canitech.io	Assessment and Job Samples	Kind of like Codesignal but newer to the space. Job simulation tests for much more than just tech jobs.
39		PeopleInsight by HireRoad.com	People Analytics	TA data analytics dashboards and data capture from multiple systems. I love this stuff.
40		Datapeople.io	Recruiter Productivity	Produce great job ads and get the data behind what is working and what is not.
41		HappyDance.love.com	Careersites	Most of our careers sites are fine, but they don’t have great tech to show you if or how they are working or not working. HappyDance solves this.
42		Oracle.com (ORC)	HCM Recruiting Module	Like Workday the largest organizations on the planet use big HCM recruiting tech. Oracle Recruiting Cloud is better than its predecessor (Taleo), and for giant orgs it works but has limited features.
43		iCims.com	ATS	iCims has kind of been known as the big ATS people buy if they don’t want the big HCM ATS. They seem to do a lot, but leadership just continues to churn over there, so honestly, I haven’t seen anything in a while.
44		SAP.com (Success Factors)	HCM Recruiting Module	Big HCM recruiting (see Workday and Oracle), but the vendors love working with SAP considerably more than the other two. Why? Probably because SuccessFactors is a bit more of Frankenstein than the other two. Makes it easy for to plug a lot of stuff in to make it work the way you want.
45		GoodTime.io	Scheduling	Probably the top interview scheduling play on the market. People love using this type of technology, even though every ATS has scheduling, this is so much more.
46		Jobcase.com	Online hiring community	Post jobs and hire workers quickly. 120 million registered users. Great relationship with Workday.
47		Handshake.com	Early Career	We all have run into Handshake. We want it to be something more and easier. But at this point, it’s what we’ve got to try and find candidates on campus.
48		Beamery.com	CRM	I would say Beamery probably is the most complete CRM in our space, which also makes them the most complex. They got caught in the skills stuff, which hasn’t helped in the complexity department.
49		Noon.ai	Sourcing	I’m going to assume they’re breaking every LinkedIn’s Terms of Service to do what they’re doing, but it’s pretty good until they get shut down! Also, they are super sketch about who their founders are, which is weird.
50		AmazingHiring.com	Sourcing	You need candidates. Like other sourcing products, they help you, and say they pull from 50+ networks, but mostly LinkedIn, like everyone else.
51		Vonq.com	Programmtic	Europe-based, recruitment advertising and marketing platform, a bit more full function.
52		horseflyAnalytics.com	Labor Market Analytics	We all need some workforce analytics. Most people just Google stuff and it’s awful. Horsefly makes it easy to pull great labor insights.
53		Talkpush.com	Recruitment Automation	All the automation you need to hire candidates faster at scale.
54		HumanMagic.com	Employer Branding	Formerly Ph.Creative which was one of the top employer brand agencies on the planet, but let’s throw that brand down the drain and start a new one no one knows.
55		Sensehq.com	All-in-one recruiting	Source, match, nurture, outreach, etc., using AI. You want to hire better, they can do that.
56		Match2.jobs	Talent engagement	New tech what kind of works to combat AI applications through matching profiles to jobs. I like it!
57		Searchlight.ai	All-in-one recruiting	A little more focus here on quality and getting through all the candidates to the best ones.
58		Grayscaleapp.com	High Volume recruiting	Started as text recruiting, moved into conversational apply, helps you move through large numbers of applicants.
59		Emissary.ai	tax recruiting	Turns out texting candidates still works!
60		Talentify.io	Recruitment marketing	You need better results from Indeed, job boards, social media – they help with all that.
61		JobPixel.com	Video recruitment marketing	Social media video job marketing. Light weight, easy to use, even for small and medium sized businesses.
62		Jobvite.com (by (Employ)	ATS	Big company full feature ATS – they really compete against iCIMS and Greenhouse.
63		Talentegy.com	People analytics	Bring in all your talent data to one spot and have great dashboards to deliver amazing insights.
64		Teamtailor.com	ATS	Newer player in the ATS space. Kind of have this all-in-one recruitment platform vibe.
65		Recruitee.com	ATS	When you run a TA shop that needs to collaborate a lot with hiring managers, these guys kind of designed their tech to help with this.
66		Poetryhr.com	Recruiting orchestration	In recruiting we use a lot of different stuff to get our jobs done. What if we just had one place where we kept all of that?
67		HackerRank.com	Assessment	OG tech assessment platform.
68		Rival-hr.com	All-in-one Recruiting	They bought sourcing tool Entelo and candidate outreach Conveyiq and built a platform around all of that.
69		JazzHR.com	ATS	SMB ATS that is packed with features for a low price.
70		Yello.co	Early Careers	OG early careers, job fair tech that has stuck around because no one really services this space well.
71		SHL.com	Interviewing tech	Interviewing assessment skills, full functioning two-sided interview tech.
72		Vetty.co	Background Checking and Onboarding	We like to think of background checking as a commodity, but there is a difference!
73		GoBoon.co	Community- driven hiring	Started as employee referral tech, which evolved into “community” it’s still all about getting more referral hires.
74		Ashby.com	ATS	Maybe the hottest new ATS on the market in the SMB to mid-enterprise space. The startup community seems to love them.
75		Wedgehr.com	Video interviewing	Light weight, inexpensive, easy to use. The world still needs pure easy to use point solutions.
76		Sparkhire.com	Video Interviewing	They were like Wedge above, but got tricked into buying an ATS, but they are still mostly video interviewing.
77		SparcStart.com	Video recruitment marketing	One of the early entries in this space that makes it easy to use short videos to recruit more talent.
78		BambooHR.com	HCM	25K customers – 15k using them for recruiting. That makes them one of largest recruiting players in our space no one knows about.
79		Lever.co	ATS	The OG tech community go-to ATS because it was designed around collaboration with hiring managers.
80		Breezy.hr	ATS	Great SMB ATS that is inexpensive and jammed with great features.
81		Metaview.ai	Recruiting scribe tech	Different from most interview techs in that Meta captures all the notes for every conversation you have as a recruiter and uses AI to help you make sense of it all.
82		Radancy.com	Employer branding	A classic employer brand agency that purchased Acendify CRM, which kind of makes them an all-in-one, also events, also programmatic. Throw in careers sites and EVP, and you tell me what this is.
83		Harri.com	Frontline hiring	Started out as a restaurant hiring tech, has evolved a bit to add in almost everything, but still really good at frontline hiring.
84		Shaker.com	Recruitment Marketing and Programmatic	Full-service RM firm backed with really good programmatic technology.
85		Hireko.ai	AI Screening	Digital twin/AI agent for recruiting.
86		Checkr.com	Background Screening	Background screening with trust and safety insights.
87		Hirebrain.com	Hiring enablement	What does that mean? Basically, they help you build the right job design, so you hire the right people and everyone is happy.
88		Flockity.com	Social media recruitment marketing	Influencer marketing meets recruitment marketing. Uses social to hire more people.
89		hiresweet.com	All-in-one recruitment	ATS + CRM – easily nurture candidate pools and process them through.
90		Xor.ai	All-in-one recruitment	Source, screen, schedule, oh my. AI enabled recruiting automation.
91		Karat.com	Tech talent hiring automation	Designed specifically for organizations that hire a lot of tech talent. Screen, interview, gain insights.
92		Draup.com	Labor market analytics	Workforce planning labor data insights.
93		Compa.ai	Compensation AI	When you don’t have a comp team or they’re too slow for recruiting, we all need comp data and we need it now.
94		Fama.io	Candidate screening	Beyond the background check, do we know if the person we’re about to interview or hire has a history of misconduct?
95		Teamable.com	All-in-one recruiting	Started out in employee referral, evolved into recruiting automation using AI.
96		Turbohire.co	All-in-one recruiting	Use AI to source, screen, move fast, and get all the data to make the right decisions.
97		Ribbon.com	AI screener	AI-driven interviewing and screening to give everyone a shot to find the best talent faster.
98		Recruitbot.com	All-in-one recruiting	Source, connect, hire. Fast, easy, you know the drill.
99		SourceWhale.com	Sourcing	Sourcing, outreach, AI layered in to help you do more with less.
100		Daxtra.com	Resume Parsing	No one really knows who they are because this is one of those invisible techs that so many people are using and have no idea they are using them. Basically, resume parsing for so many of the ATSs. But also match, screen and engage.

End Notes:

*For Chris Hoyt at CareerXroads – no one paid me to be on this list! I know that’s important to Chris; he gets all hot and bothered by this stuff. XOXO

**For all those pissed off you didn’t make the list – all that means is I don’t know you enough. Change that. You control that, not me.

***Why are you ranked where you are? I don’t know; I made this list off the top of my head. Be grateful you’re one of thousands, and celebrate it!

****For all the analyst magic quadrant type folks – see, this is what you could have done.

*****For all those asking for this list to be broken down by category and ranked – f*ck off and do some work on your own.

******For all those who want me to tell them what they should use, call me, maybe.

Manufacturing jobs are back on American soil. The factories are running. The roles are open. 

But the workers? They’re missing.

In this solo episode, Tim Sackett unpacks the growing gap between opportunity and desire in today’s labor market. Why did generations of proud factory families embrace these jobs – and why do today’s young workers turn away? 

From cultural shifts and education gaps to lifestyle choices and societal stigma, Tim explores the uncomfortable reasons behind this silent rejection.

Is it a temporary hesitation… or a permanent shift? 

And if manufacturing jobs no longer inspire the next workforce, what does that mean for America’s future?

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Intro  

00:03:02 – Should America bring back manufacturing?

00:07:44 – The pride and reality of factory jobs

00:12:40 – Why younger generations don’t want these jobs

00:20:54 – Ghost towns and the cost of offshoring

00:22:58 – The recruiting tech problem: why all-in-one dominates

00:26:48 – Can point solutions survive in HR tech?

I did a brief stint in the casual dining industry. My friends laugh at me when I bring up old HR war stories from my days at Applebee’s, but the reality is I loved that work. Over the years, I’ve tried to figure out why. 

First, it was a constant challenge. The moment you figured out one location, another one needed help. Second, I loved the people. Guest service-focused. They wanted to deliver an experience people enjoyed. I love eating out, and so do so many people. It was an experience you could immediately relate to. So given my background and personal affinity towards the restaurant industry, I was immediately intrigued when I saw the National Restaurant Association recently released its Workforce Technology Report, discussing the challenges the industry faces today. The report served talent leaders from 17 different major restaurant organizations, including Chipotle, Potbelly, and Flynn Group (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s). 

Turns out, not much has changed since I left Applebee’s:

• High turnover
• Hard to recruit
• Hard to retain your best

Over 75% of restaurant leaders say recruiting and retaining employees are a “significant” challenge to their business. If you’ve been to a restaurant since the pandemic, you’ve probably seen this in action. You see full sections of a restaurant open, but you can’t be seated. Signs saying “please be patient,” so you try to find a manager to speak to but you can’t find one because the manager is probably on the line helping cook everyone’s meals.

I had a field operations leader I used to work with who loved telling his general managers, “Staff for the business you want, not the business you have!” The point being, if a customer comes in and has a bad experience because we’re understaffed, they probably don’t come back. You saved a little bit of money by running lean, but you cost yourself a returning customer. Sure, it costs a little more to be properly staffed, but you can then deliver an amazing experience, and those people will keep coming back multiple times.

Given all the challenges, it feels like most restaurants today aren’t appropriately staffed. I have some ideas on how to fix that… 

Click here for the fix! (Ugh, don’t you just hate clickbait!?!)

I had to do this one for the kids.

Too often, I make pop culture references from the late 80s and 90s and it’s lost on too many people. Too many times I’ll say the phrase, “Because I’m good enough, and I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” The GenXers know this as daily affirmations with Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live.

So, why not Daily Affirmations from Tim Sackett? I’m also not a licensed therapist or even a Life Coach!

So, here goes –

You deserve hiring manager feedback.

There I said it! It’s out in the open.

For too long, we’ve beaten ourselves up, thinking it must be something we’ve done. Maybe we are unlovable. Perhaps we just aren’t pretty enough.

Well, I’m here to say you are lovable and gorgeous! It’s not us. It’s them!

We aren’t some second-class peer. We’re a full, first-class peer like everyone else. You know who doesn’t deserve our best candidates?! Yeah, those managers who don’t give us feedback. We need to just stick those good candidates back in that super secret good candidates folder we hide away for those special times when we get real pressure!

So, next time you don’t get the manager feedback you need on a candidate, you tell them they’re no longer getting your best talent!

Because you’re good enough, and you’re smart enough, and doggone it, candidates like you!

AI agents aren’t coming for recruiting.

They’re already here – and they don’t care how many reqs you filled last quarter. In this episode, Tim Sackett sits down with Jason Roberts, SVP of Tech & Analytics at Cielo, to break down what AI is actually doing inside RPOs and staffing firms – and why the old recruiting playbook is about to get torched.

From sourcing automation that 5x’s recruiter output to building a fully operational AI agent of yourself, Jason pulls back the curtain on the tools reshaping talent acquisition in real-time.

They talk agentic workflows, how execs are chasing 50% AI-driven recruiting models, and why most CRMs still suck. The future of recruiting isn’t theoretical – it’s operational. And if you think your job’s safe because you “build relationships”?

Think again.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Intro

00:01:33 – Intro: Tim Sackett Welcomes Jason Roberts from Cielo

00:03:14 – The Agent Idea: AI That Calls You Like an Assistant

00:04:37 – What Agents Actually Do (vs. ChatGPT)

00:06:57 – The Difference Between LLMs and Agentic AI

00:10:32 – Building Digital Clones of Yourself and Loved Ones

00:14:41 – The Future of RPO: 50% AI-Driven Recruiting?

00:18:61 → (Adjusted to 19:01) – Why Some Tools Are Winning: Paradox, HireEZ & CRM Simplicity

00:22:35 – Why Campus Recruiting Still Sucks

00:26:26 – The Only Recruiting Metric That Matters: Hires

00:29:37 – Automation vs. Human Touch in Recruiting

00:32:43 – The Real Value of RPOs and Performance Gaps

00:37:36 – Why TA Leaders Need to Know Their Capacity

00:42:10 – Tech Makes Average Recruiters Great – If Managers Know How to Use It

00:45:00 – Favorite AI Recruiting Tools: SourceEngage, HireEZ & CodeSignal

00:49:04 – Where to Find Jason (and Tim)

Next Connect with Jason Roberts –

Follow Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasrober

Learn more about Cielo: https://www.cielotalent.com

We love to believe that misconduct is something “other people” do—some other company, some other bad hire, some other culture. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: misconduct isn’t just a character flaw. It’s contagious. And if you’re in HR, you’re either the shield or the open gate. There’s no middle ground.

So, what is misconduct? It’s everything you hope your team isn’t doing: harassment, threats, intolerance, violence, drugs, fraud—you name it. The ugly stuff that keeps you up at night and ends up in headlines. But what most leaders miss is how easy it is for normal people to drift into misconduct. It starts small: exposure → acceptance → advocacy → participation. That’s the journey. And it’s scarily fast.

Here’s a stat from Fama’s State of Misconduct 2024 Research that should punch you in the gut: financial advisors are 37% more likely to commit misconduct if they work alongside someone else who has. Why? Because misconduct has a social multiplier of 1.59. It spreads. People mirror what they see. Culture is contagious—for better or worse.

Let’s talk about Financial Services for a minute. It’s a pressure cooker. High stakes, job insecurity, layoffs, and return-to-office stress. In that environment, misconduct doesn’t just thrive—it evolves. And guess who sees it first? Not the CEO. Not your corporate policy manual. It’s your middle managers. They’re 2.5x more effective at spotting misconduct than your policies. Yet we train them the least on how to deal with it.

And your TA team? They’re your first and best shot at prevention. But right now, most TA teams are screening like it’s still 2012. We run a background check, maybe scan a resume, and call it a day. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 Financial Services candidates already show online warning signs of misconduct—before we even onboard them. And the average FiServ candidate flagged by Fama has 28 instances of problematic online behavior. Trolling. Harassment. Threats.

Think about that. They’re making it all the way to the offer stage without anyone knowing they’re already waving red flags online. Why? Because those screens aren’t happening early enough.

It’s time to evolve:

1. Build Cultures of Accountability.
Misconduct should never feel normal. Set the tone at the top. But more importantly—empower your middle managers to call it out, address it, and report it without fear.

2. Expand Your Screening Process.
Old-school background checks aren’t enough. Tools like Fama bring behavior intelligence into the process, identifying patterns of misconduct from publicly available online content—before they become an HR nightmare.

3. Listen and Check Often.
Misconduct doesn’t stop at the offer letter. Current employees commit 26% of workplace violence. Ongoing checks matter. Fama has literally stopped a workplace shooting by flagging a manifesto. That’s real. That’s the human side of what we do.

TA and HR are the gatekeepers. You can wait for misconduct to become a crisis—or you can stop it before it starts.

Your call.

Download the State of Misconduct 2024 Research from Fama.

Okay, look, each year vendors wet their pants waiting for Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to come out. The reality is that a lot of less-than-robust (err. lazy) researched professionals use the quadrant as their go-to to pick technology. Also, a reality, if I’m a CHRO or CPO, do I really have the time to go look at a bunch of tech or am I going to assume a trusted-partner like Gartner will do all of that work for me?

Honestly, in some past years, I’ve seen the magic quadrant and thought to myself, “Yeah, all the major players are there. Maybe some aren’t where I think they should be, but they didn’t miss anyone.” In the 2025 Magic Quadrant, I want to believe that either the analyst(s) that worked on this died or got fired halfway through the project, and someone at Gartner let this get out by mistake!

Okay – What did Gartner get right?

First, let me say, by Gartner’s own definition, this is a review of ATS technology for enterprise (large employers).

• Workday, Oracle, & SAP all have to be on the grid. They’re the big three by a mile. Love them or hate them, if you’re an enterprise TA shop, you probably use one of these techs.

• Cornerstone, Avature, and Phenom aren’t really ATSs. Cornerstone is primarily learning. Avature and Phenom are CRM, website, etc. Can you use them as an ATS? Yes. But most enterprise orgs layer them onto the Big 3.

• SmartRecruiters and Greenhouse are amazing best-of-breed ATSs with some larger clients. But most in the industry wouldn’t necessarily consider them large enterprise ATSs. Still, great tech, most TA teams would love to have.

• Darwinbox and PageUp I’m guessing are on here because they are mostly global players outside the US. They are not considered an enterprise, nor would I put them in best-of-breed. “Just because you name him Darren doesn’t mean he belongs to Darren” – Katt Williams

• iCIMS is another best-of-breed ATS that does a bit more enterprise clients. So again, makes sense they are on the list.

11 total “ATSs” on the Magic Quadrant. Seems super light. Was it too much work to get 20 or 25? I could probably give you 50 off the top of my head!

Who did Gartner miss?

• Eightfold. If you’re putting Phenom on this list, how do you not have Eightfold?

• Paradox. One of the fastest growing high-volume hiring technologies that many of the largest enterprise employers are already using today.

• Beamery. One of the best CRMs on the market that competes with Eightfold, Avature, and Phenom. That can also run as an ATS. So, why aren’t they on the list?

• Gem. Another one of these ATSs, CRM, we-do-it-all technologies used by large companies.

• Jobvite & Lever. If you have Smart, Greenhouse, and iCIMS, why stop adding other best-of-breed ATSs that also work with mid-enterprise?

• HireEZ and Seekout. If you’re going to put someone like Cornerstone on your list, both of these techs can be used as ATSs and would be exponentially more effective and useful.

• Ashby, Loxo, Clear Co, Workable, BreezyHR, Pinpoint, TeamTailor, JazzHR, Fountain, Humanly, and Bullhorn (I could go on for days). There are hundreds of ATSs on the market. The Gartner team didn’t even scratch the surface of this market.

• Infor, UKG, Dayforce, iSolved, all the Payroll techs. If you’re going to add HCM recruiting modules, then why stop at three? There are others out there who also work with large organizations that help them do their recruiting.

Gartner will tell you this is an “independent” survey of the market. No one pays to be placed on the magic quadrant. With all that said, I think everyone in our space gets the game. I’m going to assume Phenom actually works with Gartner and pays them for research reports, etc. But Phenom did not pay to be on the quadrant. I’m also going to assume that Eightfold does not. Why? Becuase these two are giant competitors! It makes no sense that one would be on and one isn’t.

Also, you’ll notice only one company is in the bottom quadrant, Cornerstone – which doesn’t even compete in the ATS space. This is done by design. “Hey, Cornerstone, we are putting you in the top quadrant for learning, but since you did a bit of TA, we’ll put you in the bottom for that.” But don’t worry, you sell learning. There are plenty of crappy ATSs on the market to put in the bottom quadrant! But, saying someone sucks, isn’t good for business.

Look, I love recruiting technology. Those who made it onto the quadrant all have good technology. There are also a ton of others that have good technology and should be on there. I’d love to know the analyst(s) who actually did this research. When I asked around to the 200+ people I know who cover this space, no one knew who it was.

Over the past weeks, I’ve gotten a chance to see the latest and greatest inside of Workday Recruiting. There have been some amazing transformations happening over the past 18 months or so with the product. The obvious acquisition of HiredScore and the launch of their own CRM product, Candidate Engagement. These two alone make the product look and feel drastically different, in an excellent way.

Big HCM recruiting modules get a bad rap for being slow to adapt to new technology. What’s usually not said with that is there are very good reasons for this. You’re talking about a client base that is the most prominent brands and employers across the planet. They tend to only work with proven commodities in everything they do. These products tend to hold a lot of weight from the sheer market size they’ve captured. They have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of users globally. For so many, this is the only window in talent acquisition technology they’ll ever have.

What’s new and what did I like?

• When you combine Workday Recruiting, Candidate Engagement (their internal CRM product), and HiredScore (a recent acquisition with deep integrations), the technology you see feels and acts very Best-of-Breed-like.

• Candidate Engagement is much more candidate marketing automation than a full-blown CRM. This is a very good thing. It’s a product that recruiters can easily use in their daily work. There is no need for a full recruitment marketing team to run a CRM.

• The HiredScore piece will make Workday Recruiting stand alone amongst their large enterprise recruiting tech competitors. They now have full match capabilities within the internal database with “Fetch”, and clients using it are seeing almost unbelievable hiring increases from it. Like 75% of hires come from their own active past candidates. Time to fill dropping by half. Improved source accuracy near 100%. All these metrics immediately speak to a speedy ROI on the tech being used.

• The Workday Screen of Death (Create a profile screen) will soon be going away! Workday is launching social sign-on later this year across all of their clients. Again, haters will ask why this took so long. The reality is, with almost 5,000 clients globally, any seemingly small change has major ripples.

• Like any big recruiting product, each client has to build it out as will work best for them. What I saw with the combination of products is a recruiting platform that a recruiter would live and work in on a daily basis, without the need to have to log into other technology to be effective and efficient.

• As you can imagine, the Workday Recruiting roadmap is loaded with AI and Agentic AI. They are adding a Conversational AI Assistant, which leads me to believe they want to capture some of that high-volume hiring that many of their clients have layered in Paradox for. They have an Agentic Recruiting Coach in the works that will do much of the Agent recruiting automation we are seeing from many best-of-breed players. And many more types of recruiting specific use agents in development. Workday is extremely conscious about AI ethics and governance. You can assume they’ll take a little more time to ensure their clients are 100% confident using the AI that is being launched and developed in-house.

The big HCM recruiting modules continue to grab more market share. The use of these technologies is almost inevitable if you work in large enterprise organizations, and we are increasingly seeing mid-enterprise organizations also make the moves towards this big tech.

I rarely see Workday make fast decisions or make wrong decisions. They know who they are, and they know their clients’ needs. It was nice to see the movement that has been made on the recruiting product side and the very detailed roadmap they have in front of them. I think the talent acquisition users of Workday have a bright future ahead.

(For the folks who believe I’m saying all this because Workday is paying me, sorry, that isn’t the case. I’m just a recruiting tech nerd who likes seeing progress, and I think the Workday Recruiting product team genuinely cares about delivering good stuff.)

The future of recruiting isn’t coming. It’s already here. And if you’re still relying on your legacy tech stack and spreadsheets, you’re already behind.

Enter Steven Jiang, CEO and Co-founder of HireEZ, who just dropped one of the most important AI launches in the recruiting space – EZ Agent, their agentic AI companion built to fundamentally reshape the recruiter’s role.

Forget everything you know about “copilots” and “gen AI assistants.”

EZ Agent is not just another AI tool bolted onto your ATS. It’s a fully integrated, always-on agent that plans, reasons, executes, and evolves – empowering recruiters to get out of the weeds and back into real talent relationships.

Steven joins to break down:

• Why agentic AI isn’t just better – it’s a whole new operating system for recruiting

• How recruiters move from task managers to true talent strategists

• What it means to create a white-glove candidate experience at scale

• And how EZ Agent is solving the “black hole” problem by giving 100% of candidates a shot at the plate

Steven’s built more than a product – he’s building a movement to re-humanize recruiting with AI doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

If you care about talent, inclusion, and the future of work – this is the conversation you need to hear.

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Do you know what happens after a decade of historically low unemployment?

We’ve become accustomed to selecting below-average talent and acting like it’s the best talent.

Ouch!

No! I didn’t mean you. I meant all of the other organizations. You were the one who kept super high standards and had a crystal clear vision of what great talent looked like. Everybody else just hired mouth breathers. You were fine…

That’s what we tell ourselves.

In the zeal to hire fast. Lower that time to fill. We hired warm bodies. Sometimes, we hired lukewarm bodies. Sometimes, we hired the walking dead. I mean, if we are being honest.

The ironic part of this is that your CEO is still out there telling the stakeholders, “We only hire the top talent”! Little by little, every time you hear that, a part of you dies inside. Because we know the truth, we know they hired the best of the applicants for the job when it was open, and there’s a greater than zero chance some of those hires were actually the worst talent in our market.

I bet your CEO would have a hard time telling the local news outlet about that!

Want to be better at selecting talent?

There are three things I think we can do to increase the level of talent we hire massively.

1. Job samples are the number one predictor of whether or not a person can actually perform the job. Yet, almost none of us do it. It’s hard to do, expensive, and complicated. I have hope. I’ve seen some new Agentic AI tools that can create life-like job samples for things like sales, accounting, etc.
2. Hire intelligent people. If all else fails, hire smart people. If you simply had every single applicant take an intelligence test, and you only hired the smartest, you would actually select better talent than almost everyone else in your market. If you add an assessment around agility to learn, you’ll be even better.
3. Interview like you’re a military interrogator. We’ve made interviewing too easy. “Hi! How are you? What’s your favorite color? Oh, you feel stressed? How about we just skip this part, and you can have the job!” We need to get back to truly digging in, asking tough questions, and making sure we want this person and that this person wants us. What I’ve found is that the harder you interview, the more interested the high talent gets. Talented people want to be challenged. Low talent people don’t.

I think we took our eyes off the ball.

We started just hiring skills and forgot about the rest. Yes, I need your skills, but I also need you to buy into what we are doing. Does your crazy match our crazy? Do you want to join this funny farm, or is this not right for you? We stopped trying to get people to opt out of our process, believing that everyone with the right skills is the right hire for us. That just isn’t true.

Some of our organizations have been held back because we simply moved too fast on marginal candidates. We weren’t patient. We bought into the narrative that we might not get anyone if we don’t hire this average talented person.

Even in tough talent-times, we have to move with purpose, not pace. We have to have a clear directive around what is great talent, good talent, average talent, and below-average talent. That bar can’t move, but unfortunately, we have let it move for so long that I’m not even sure if most organizations know the difference between good talent and average talent.

When we look at all the AI tech that will help us hire, and I get to dream about all this extra capacity we’ll have to work with, this is what I think about. Now, we can hire great again!