Introduction
Today is an exciting time to be hiring software engineers. With the digital transformation, it’s no longer just tech companies who are hiring software engineers—thousands of companies in the finance, healthcare, retail, and government sectors are actively recruiting skilled technical talent.
On top of that, rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, are changing what it means to be a software engineer and what skills are needed to succeed in the role. How companies assess talent will also change as a result of AI.
What does all this mean for companies hiring software engineers? Now more than ever, recruiters and hiring teams need the right platforms and tools to identify, evaluate, and land the right candidates.
This guide will give you the pros and cons of top tech recruiting platforms in each of these areas to help you find the right tools to supercharge your tech hiring.
Table of contents
- What is a tech hiring platform?
- Top applicant tracking systems (ATS)
- Top technical interview and assessment platforms
- Top sourcing platforms
- Top recruiting automation tools
- Final thoughts
What is a tech hiring platform?
A tech hiring platform or tech recruiting platform is a piece of software used by both hiring teams and candidates designed specifically to facilitate the recruitment process for software engineers and other technical talent. It essentially serves as a bridge between companies looking to hire technical talent and potential candidates seeking employment opportunities in technical roles.
Tech recruiting platforms generally fall into a few categories:
- Applicant tracking systems (ATS), which recruiters and hiring teams use to track each candidate’s stage in the hiring funnel and manage candidate communications
- Technical interview and assessments platforms, which hiring teams use to assess candidates’ technical knowledge and skills in a live interview or asynchronous assessment environment
- Sourcing platforms to identify qualified technical talent and invite them to apply to your open roles
- Recruiting automation tools that speed up hiring processes, especially for high-volume candidate pipelines
What sets tech hiring platforms apart from generic job portals is their focus on the unique needs and challenges of hiring for technical roles. They may include features that assess technical skills through asynchronous technical assessments and/or live interviews conducted in a collaborative coding environment. A tech hiring platform streamlines the hiring process and helps both organizations and job seekers navigate the competitive tech job market more efficiently.
To inform our recommendations for tech recruiting platforms, we pulled from current, publicly available information on companies’ websites, as well as review sites like G2.
Top applicant tracking systems (ATS)
Oracle Taleo Cloud
Oracle Taleo Cloud is an enterprise-grade applicant tracking system designed for large businesses, specifically multinational corporations with high-volume and complex recruitment needs. This robust platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools for recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and learning, making it an excellent choice for organizations seeking an all-in-one solution.
Pros and cons
Pros of Oracle Taleo Cloud include its extensive functionality, customizable workflows, and integration capabilities with other Oracle products and third-party systems. However, its cons are its complexity, which can pose a steep learning curve for users, and its higher cost relative to other platforms, which may make it less ideal for smaller businesses or startups.
iCIMS
iCIMS is a leading ATS platform suitable for businesses of all sizes, although it tends to be a favorite among medium to large-sized companies due to its scalability. It offers comprehensive recruitment solutions, including job board posting, resume parsing, candidate relationship management, and onboarding capabilities.
Pros and cons
Pros of iCIMS include its intuitive interface, extensive customization options, and robust reporting features. The cons, however, include limited integrations with non-HR systems and occasional issues with system performance and speed.
SAP SuccessFactors
SAP SuccessFactors is an integrated, cloud-based HR management system, perfect for large enterprise companies. It offers comprehensive recruitment and talent management solutions, including workforce planning and onboarding, and is a preferred choice for companies seeking to optimize their entire HR process.
Pros and cons
Pros of SAP SuccessFactors include its scalability, wide range of features, and ability to integrate with other SAP software products. Its cons include a somewhat complicated interface, higher cost, and the need for extensive training to use the platform effectively.
Workday
Workday is a cloud-based ATS and human capital management (HCM) platform suited for a wide range of businesses, from startups to large enterprise companies. It offers comprehensive functionality for recruiting teams and HR teams, with services for payroll, time tracking, and talent management.
Pros and cons
Pros of Workday include its user-friendly interface, strong analytics capabilities, and high level of configurability. However, the cons are its less robust recruitment-specific features compared to other dedicated ATSs, and limited customer support.
Greenhouse
Greenhouse is a popular ATS for tech startups and high-growth companies due to its modern, user-friendly design, and focus on providing a better candidate experience. It supports every part of the hiring process, from sourcing and interviewing to making data-driven hiring decisions.
Pros and cons
Pros of Greenhouse include its clean, intuitive interface, robust integration ecosystem, and excellent customer service. However, its cons include a higher price point compared to other ATS platforms geared towards smaller businesses, and limited advanced reporting capabilities.
Top technical interview and assessment platforms
CodeSignal
CodeSignal is a comprehensive technical interview and assessment platform ideal for large enterprises and organizations seeking to optimize their technical hiring process. Offering a state-of-the-art integrated development environment (IDE) and solutions for pre-screening, live technical screening, and live collaborative interviewing, CodeSignal streamlines the technical assessment process and ensures that top talent doesn’t fall through the cracks.
Pros and cons
A significant advantage of CodeSignal is its Certified Evaluations, which are role-relevant assessments that are written and maintained by subject matter experts and validated by Industrial-Organizational (IO) Psychologists. Certified Evaluations provide an objective measure of a candidate’s coding skills, helping to reduce unconscious bias in hiring. The CodeSignal platform also supports real-time collaborative coding interviews. CodeSignal’s robust capabilities make it the top choice for enterprises looking to optimize their technical hiring process.
CoderPad
CoderPad is a straightforward and efficient platform often chosen by small to medium-sized businesses for its real-time collaborative coding environment. It provides a seamless experience for both interviewers and candidates, replicating the environment developers work in every day.
Pros and cons
Pros of CoderPad include its simplicity, wide range of supported programming languages, and easy setup. However, it lacks the breadth of features and automated assessments found in more comprehensive solutions like CodeSignal. Additionally, it has limited reporting and analytics capabilities.
HackerRank
HackerRank is a widely-used technical assessment platform that offers a broad range of pre-set coding challenges. Its primary focus is to help businesses of all sizes streamline their tech recruiting process, and to help candidates practice their coding skills.
Pros and cons
The benefits of HackerRank include its extensive problem library and community resources, making it a popular tool for screening candidates. However, it lacks some of the more advanced features of CodeSignal, such as in-depth coding reports detailing candidates’ performance in specific areas and full-service proctoring to minimize incidents of cheating.
Codility
Codility is a technical assessment platform commonly used by small to medium-sized businesses. It provides a suite of coding challenges and online tests to assess candidates’ skills in a controlled environment.
Pros and cons
While Codility does offer a good range of problems and decent assessment capabilities, it doesn’t quite match up to CodeSignal’s robust feature set and versatility. Cons of Codility include a limited ability to scale for enterprise companies and lack of in-depth skill insights in its pass/fail scoring system.
Test Gorilla
TestGorilla is a comprehensive assessment tool designed to streamline the hiring process for companies. It offers a wide variety of tests, from coding exercises to personality assessments, and allows companies to customize their tests to best fit their needs. Test Gorilla assessments are not specific to software engineering or technical roles.
Pros and cons
Pros of TestGorilla include its flexibility, extensive test library, and strong focus on providing a comprehensive picture of candidate skills, from technical abilities to personality traits and cognitive aptitude. However, when compared to tools designed for assessing technical skills like CodeSignal, it lacks depth and rigor in its coding assessments, which consist mainly of multiple-choice questions. Furthermore, while TestGorilla does have anti-cheating measures, they aren’t as robust as those in platforms with full-service proctoring capabilities.
Top sourcing platforms
LinkedIn Talent Solutions
LinkedIn Talent Solutions is an industry-leading talent sourcing platform that leverages the vast LinkedIn network. This makes it an ideal choice for companies of all sizes that want to reach a broad and diverse pool of talent.
Pros and cons
The major advantage of LinkedIn Talent Solutions is its enormous active user base, providing access to a wide range of professionals across various industries. Its advanced search and filtering tools also allow recruiters to target potential candidates with precision. However, it comes at a higher cost compared to other platforms and presents occasional complexities in managing campaigns.
Ripplematch
RippleMatch is a talent sourcing platform that excels at connecting employers with a diverse group of early-career candidates, making it perfect for businesses seeking entry-level talent—especially for software engineering and other technical roles.
Pros and cons
RippleMatch stands out with its focus on reducing bias in the hiring process and its algorithm that matches companies with students and recent graduates based on mutual compatibility. The downside is its narrower focus on early-career talent, which makes it less suitable for roles requiring more experience.
ZipRecruiter
ZipRecruiter is a popular online employment marketplace used by companies of all sizes. Its primary focus is on streamlining the process of hiring, and it does this by actively promoting job posts to a network of over 100 job boards.
Pros and cons
Pros of ZipRecruiter include its ease of use, wide reach, and proactive approach in showcasing job posts to potential candidates. However, it lacks some of the advanced filtering and candidate management features found in other platforms like LinkedIn Talent Solutions.
Indeed
Indeed is one of the largest job sites in the world, making it a go-to resource for businesses of all sizes looking to source talent. Indeed’s strengths lie in its enormous reach and its wide variety of job seekers, from entry-level to experienced professionals.
Pros and cons
The advantages of Indeed include its free basic job posting option and the vast number of resumes available in its database. However, its interface isn’t as intuitive or feature-rich as some of the other platforms, and for more advanced sourcing capabilities, costs can escalate.
JazzHR
JazzHR is a powerful recruiting software built for small to mid-sized businesses. While it offers an ATS, one of its key strengths is its suite of sourcing features, which includes job posting to premium job boards and a branded careers page.
Pros and cons
The pros of JazzHR include its user-friendly interface, extensive customization options, and integration capabilities. However, while it does offer some talent sourcing features, it doesn’t have the same extensive reach or advanced search capabilities of dedicated sourcing platforms like LinkedIn Talent Solutions.
Top recruiting automation tools
Gem
Gem is a leading recruiting automation tool widely used by recruiters to source, nurture, and track potential candidates. It’s particularly well-suited for businesses aiming to automate their candidate outreach and follow-up processes.
Pros and cons
Pros of Gem include its advanced sequencing and scheduling features, analytics capabilities, and its seamless integration with LinkedIn and email platforms. It enables recruiters to easily manage candidate pipelines and track communication. However, Gem lacks direct job posting features.
Calendly
Calendly is a scheduling automation tool that, while not exclusively built for recruiting, has significant benefits for this process. It’s ideal for businesses looking to streamline the interview scheduling process, avoiding the back-and-forth of finding suitable times for interviewers and candidates.
Pros and cons
Key advantages of Calendly include its ease of use, robust integrations with most calendars and video conferencing tools, and customizable scheduling options. On the downside, it doesn’t provide direct recruitment-focused features like candidate tracking or automated outreach.
GoodTime
GoodTime is a specialized interview logistics platform designed to automate and streamline the scheduling process for recruiters and hiring teams. It’s an excellent choice for companies of all sizes conducting high-volume recruiting.
Pros and cons
Pros of GoodTime include its ability to automatically match interviewers and candidates based on availability and qualifications, its robust analytics for monitoring and improving the interview process, and its integration with ATS platforms. However, it might be seen as overly complex for smaller companies with more basic scheduling needs.
Zapier
Zapier is a general-purpose automation tool, but it provides significant value for recruiting tasks. Its power lies in its ability to connect and automate workflows between different apps, making it useful for recruiters juggling multiple software solutions.
Pros and cons
The benefits of Zapier include its broad range of integrations, customizable automation workflows (“zaps”), and its ability to save time on repetitive tasks. However, it’s not specifically designed for recruiting and requires a bit of technical savvy to set up and optimize.
Fetcher
Fetcher is a recruiting automation tool designed to help companies proactively source passive candidates. It’s perfect for businesses looking to take a more proactive approach to their recruiting process.
Pros and cons
Pros of Fetcher include its AI-driven candidate sourcing, automated outreach capabilities, and robust analytics. It also has integration with several ATS platforms for seamless candidate management. However, its reliance on AI for candidate sourcing may not be as personalized as manual sourcing, and it doesn’t offer direct job posting capabilities.
Final thoughts
This guide has provided an overview of top platforms for 4 areas of tech recruiting: applicant tracking systems (ATS), technical interview and assessment platforms, sourcing platforms, and recruiting automation tools. Used together, these platforms can save your recruiters and hiring teams thousands of hours of manual work each year—and help your company land the software engineers and other technical talent it needs to succeed.
To learn more about how best-in-class technical interviews and assessments can transform your engineer hiring process and help you make the right hires, faster, schedule a call to talk with a tech recruiting expert at CodeSignal.