Workable is a cloud-based Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that allows hiring teams to easily find candidates, track applicants, and collaborate. Reasonably priced and extremely easy to use, it has a host of features that will make life easier for employers and candidates alike. Workable’s primary market is small to medium-sized businesses, allowing them to coordinate, streamline, and ultimately scale their recruitment processes. While it’s not the right ATS for everyone, it’s well worth knowing about.
Workable: The Good and The Bad
There’s plenty to like about Workable and only a handful of downsides. Following are some of the pros and cons to give you a better sense of whether it might be the right ATS for your needs.
The Good
Ease of use: Time and again, users lean on terms like “intuitive,” “accessible,” and “easy to navigate” to describe their experience with Workable. The interface is well designed and makes it easy to monitor the flow of candidates through the process pipeline. This makes it a great choice for companies that haven’t used an ATS before or don’t want to spend a lot of time getting employees up to speed. Workable’s highly responsive customer support also gets rave reviews from users.
Emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI): Workable is doing its best to help companies find diverse candidates and remove bias from the hiring process. It does this through inclusive job description templates, anonymized screening, standardized questions and scorecards, and data on candidate demographics. The platform also offers a selection of cognitive and personality tests for candidates to take, which gives employers another source of unbiased data for making fair and impartial hiring decisions.
Scalability: Workable emphasizes its ability to scale—and with good reason. If you’re a growing company that needs to expand its workforce quickly, Workable makes it easy to ramp up your hiring process without wasting time. It provides a centralized hiring workspace that keeps stakeholders informed and aligned, while user permissions allow you to grow your team without compromising sensitive data. Tasks such as creating reports, managing compliance, and approving workflows can be easily automated. The result is a more streamlined process that allows your team to optimize their time and adapt easily to changes.
Integrations: Workable gives users the ability to connect to over 70 popular recruiting and HR tools, including HRIS, background check, video, email & calendar, assessment, referral, advertising, and sourcing software. These integrations won’t cover everything for everybody, but they do cover enough to mean more scalability and better customization for the majority of users.
Candidate-finding features: Workable makes it easy to post your job on both free and premium job sites, but it doesn’t stop there. It takes candidate sourcing a step further by using artificial intelligence (AI) to search public online profiles and source the best candidates for your position. Toss in branded career pages, multi-lingual options, employee referrals, and even a browser extension that allows you to add likely candidates with a click, and you’re in an exceptionally strong position to find the best people for the job.
Reporting & analytics: Curious to know which platforms are producing the most applicants? Or, for that matter, the best applicants? How about measuring each hiring team’s productivity or each manager’s average time-to-hire? Workable’s reporting and analytics tools let you see what’s working … and what isn’t. This kind of data allows you to make better decisions in the future that can save you time and money. Reports are easy to find, read, and share, and if you want to dig deeper, integrations with business intelligence tools such as Tableau allow users to measure custom KPIs.
The Bad
Minimal onboarding capabilities: Unfortunately, Workable’s utility largely ends once an offer letter has been sent. It provides e-signature capabilities, but don’t look to it for background checks recording, benefits administration, payroll, or training schedules. For the basic paperwork, it’s fine, but employers with an extended onboarding process may find Workable a little light.
Workable does offer integration with a selection of HRIS, onboarding, and background check platforms, but if you don’t already use one of them, you may have to move new hires over manually.
Limited search functions: While users can search through candidate resumes and CVs, the functionality is limited. Similarly, Workable offers a hashtag system that can be used to tag applicants so users can easily find categories of candidates, e.g., #salesperson. Unfortunately, there’s no way to standardize it, so multiple users may end up creating multiple tags with the same meaning—think #sales, #salesrep, #salesrepresentative, and so on.
Workable Pricing and Options
Workable offers three service plans. Overall, we’d rate their pricing as “middle of the road” for recruiting software.
It might seem a little high at first blush, but Workable is very transparent about the cost of their service. They don’t try and hit you with a low sticker price and then add on costs.
Many of the other lower-cost competitors offer stripped down versions of their ATS as an entry-level plan. These are missing critical features designed to force you to upgrade. Workable, on the other hand, offers a complete recruiting platform with all of their plans.
You can purchase the Workable Starter plan for $149 per month. This is a great option for smaller companies that only need to hire occasionally. With over 1,000 job description templates, access to 200+ job boards, and AI-powered sourcing capabilities, it makes finding qualified candidates a breeze.
We very much liked how Workable makes these features available to companies that hire infrequently.
You won’t have to upgrade to access EEO, OFCCP, and CCPA compliance tools, or take advantage of anonymized screening to promote DEI in your workplace.
At $149 per month, there are certainly cheaper options out there, but if you have only a handful of job openings to fill, Workable’s ease of use may be worth it.
The Workable Standard plan allows you to recruit for an unlimited number of jobs. Pricing starts at $299 per month, which means that if you have to hire more than three people a month, the Standard plan will be more cost-effective than the Starter plan.
Upgrading to the Premier lets hiring managers create requisitions when they need to hire, follow standard or custom approval workflows, and track requisitions, manage approvals, and review budgeting data in real time. The Department Hierarchy feature makes it easy to manage your hiring structure as your company grows.
Workable offers a 15-day free trial of any plan, so you can get your feet wet with absolutely no risk.
Workable Offerings
Workable offers a range of features to help employers find and hire the right people. These break down into 3 categories, each with its own set of features:
Workable Source & Attract
Arguably Workable’s greatest strength is its ability to help companies find potential candidates. Once a job has been created, employers can pick from over 200 free and premium job boards, such as Indeed, Monster, and ZipRecruiter, as well as social media sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
Posting jobs is made easier with 1,000+ SEO-optimized job description templates that you can customize to your needs, and AI Recruiter provides you with a list of the top passive candidates for every job you post. Employers can also take a more active approach and search for candidates using auto-suggestions, keywords, or location searches.
And if you happen to stumble across a likely candidate while scrolling through LinkedIn or Twitter? Workable’s Chrome extension allows you to add them to your pipeline with a simple click.
You can also get the word out using one of Workable’s branded career page options. All payment tiers have access to an easy-to-build, drag-and-drop careers page hosted by Workable with a customizable subdomain.
Higher-level users can take advantage of the advanced careers page option, which offers more customization. Companies that already have a careers page can use Workable’s widget to easily add a branded list of open jobs.
Workable also lets you harness the power of one of your most valuable resources: your own people. You can alert current employees to openings in your company and allow them to make referrals and track any rewards you’re offering.
Finally, one of Workable’s premium features is Texting, which allows users to message candidates directly from the platform or app and track responses on the candidate timeline. This feature includes text message templates designed for different stages of the recruiting pipeline which can be easily customized.
Workable Evaluate & Collaborate
Workable brings teams together through trackable communication, real-time calendar sync, a top-rated mobile app, interview kits, and scorecards. Bulk emails and templates, self-scheduling interview functionality, and automated offer letters and approvals also help reduce time to hire.
One useful feature is the personality and cognitive pre-employment assessments, which candidates can complete anywhere, anytime, and from any device, and which provide the hiring team with objective criteria they can use to compare applicants.
Another is the one-way video interview option, which allows you to select questions for candidates, who can record their answers on video. Your hiring team can then leave and compare feedback on any schedule that works for them. Two-way interviewing is also available through integrations with Google hangouts and Zoom.
Workable Automate & Hire
Once qualified candidates have been found and assessed, it’s time to start making decisions. Workable makes this easier by letting you automate repetitive tasks and personalizing bulk communication. For example, you can delay-send disqualification emails and personalize thank you notes.
Offer letter templates, one-way video interviewing, approval workflows, and built-in e-signatures on mobile and desktop make it easy to move quickly. And as roles are filled and new jobs opened, your hiring performance report updates automatically, so you can track changes, make adjustments, and forecast your hiring budget for the year.
Workable also makes sure you’re in compliance with local, national, and international data privacy and employment regulations, including GDPR and EEOC/OFCCP.
How Workable Ranks
Workable is a solid option for smaller to mid-sized companies, but it lacks some onboarding features and the search functions could be a lot better. If you want to see other options, Workable is certainly not the only game in town. There are other applicant tracking systems that are less expensive, more industry-specific, or offer more integrations.
Want to see what else is available? Check out our Best Applicant Tracking Systems list. Our top picks contenders are:
- Jobvite – Best for most
- Greenhouse – Best for scaling your hiring process
- Pinpoint – Best for in-house recruitment teams
- SmartRecruiters – Best for enterprise recruiting
- Recruiterbox – Best for collaborative hiring
- APS – Best for simple onboarding
Summary
So, is Workable worthwhile? Overall, we think it’s worth checking out.
Workable is an affordable option that’s especially attractive if you’re new to using an ATS and are maybe a little intimidated by the thought of getting started. While it doesn’t offer all the features and integrations we’d like to see, its ease of use makes it a strong contender, especially for smaller companies.
Our primary reservation is the limited onboarding options, but if you’re comfortable with the integrations it offers, it could be a good choice.
Still not sure? Give Workable a try with a free 15-day trial!
