Four Recruiting Platforms Compared, and Why Cascadia Runs Yours for You

Ask each vendor for a figure at your own headcount, and compare what that figure includes. Workable lists two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month on Standard, five hundred and ninety nine on Premier, and seven hundred and nineteen on Enterprise, all quoted at one to twenty employees. Greenhouse, Lever, and iCIMS price each account individually. The inclusion gaps are real. Greenhouse puts texting and automation on its middle tier, Lever sells onboarding and candidate insights as separate modules, and iCIMS sells the tracker, the sourcing CRM, and the career site as three products. Hand every vendor the same headcount and expected hires, or the figures will not line up.

Rarely on the software. Trouble shows up in the stages and in the handover, and no license covers either one. Somebody capable spends two weeks configuring something genuinely useful, hiring managers come to rely on it, and then that person changes role. Nobody left can safely add a requisition type. A pipeline that fitted the first six months also stops fitting in the year you open a second office, and the fixes get bolted on sideways. Before you ask what it costs, ask who maintains it.

You do. We did not negotiate that as a clause on your behalf. The Zoho account is in your name and billed to you, we do not resell the licenses, and every candidate record, note, scorecard, and offer stays inside it. Stop paying us and nothing switches off. With candidate data this matters more than usual, since retention obligations cannot be discharged from somebody else’s account. A subject access request is a bad day to find out whose login the data sat under.

For plenty of businesses, yes, and we would rather say so here than after an invoice. Hire a handful of people a year with someone in the office happy to run the pipeline, and Workable Standard at two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month does the job without our fee. The arithmetic turns on volume and enforcement. Think of enough openings that screening becomes somebody’s second job, enough hiring managers that the process must be enforced instead of suggested, and enough integration that a signed offer reaches payroll and IT without retyping. No platform price includes that somebody.

Likely Workable, for a small company. Two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month at one to twenty employees is the lowest number on this page, and it climbs through nine employee bands from there, with eighty nine more for texting, one hundred and nine for video interviews, and fifty nine for assessments if you want them on Standard. Greenhouse, Lever, and iCIMS price by plan, team size, and hiring volume, so run them with your own numbers. Our fee differs in kind: it includes a person who runs the system for you.

A subscription covers the platform. It does not cover what you configured on it, and nearly everything that goes wrong is configured. Say a candidate sits stuck in a stage because of how an automation was scoped. Their support desk cannot fix that, because somebody scoped it. Here you get one company and one number, fixes sit inside the fee instead of being quoted, and when Zoho ships a platform change that breaks a workflow you depend on, the problem lands on us before it reaches you.

No, and most should not. Start with the role you hire most often. The time comes back soonest there, and you learn fast whether the stages match how you actually decide. The rest follows once that one runs. A senior search that runs on three conversations and a shared document can stay that way, with no reason to hurry it. Move everything in one quarter and you end up running two half finished processes, trusting neither.

Often, and it is real work, not a tidy up. We read the pipelines and their stages, the screening and scoring rules, the automations and templates, the permission sets, the job board connections, and the reports nobody has opened in a year. Then we say plainly what is worth keeping and what should be rebuilt. Inherited trackers tend to be sound where somebody tested them and quietly wrong where nobody did. Sorting out which is which takes most of the first month.

Four to ten weeks for most businesses, longer where several managers disagree about how a decision actually gets made. Order of work: candidate structure, then pipelines and permissions, then the career site and job board publishing, then screening, offers, and reporting. Configuration starts the week we begin, with no separately billed discovery phase first. People rarely notice the software first. They notice that nobody is asking which spreadsheet holds the current shortlist.

Quite possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. A recruiter who owns the process and keeps it current covers most of it. Where we help alongside one is the work that was never their job: the pipeline structure that is expensive to change later, the Deluge scripting, the permission design, the retention rules, the integration into the rest of Zoho so a hire reaches your books and your CRM, and noticing the week a job board feed stops. Plenty of clients keep the recruiter and hire us for the engineering around them.

Two cases, both common. Hire twice a year, both times through somebody you already know, and a cheap plan or nothing at all will do, because there is no process worth managing. Or suppose you need the whole employee record instead of the hiring end of it: payroll, leave, reviews, and everything after day one. Stretching a recruiting tool to cover that is an expensive way to reach somewhere a proper HR platform already is.

We will say so before taking your money. Chaotic hiring is usually chaotic because two managers disagree about who makes the final call, and the tracker is rarely the slow part. A fair number of these conversations end with one agreed process, one person accountable for the decision, and no new software at all.

One published monthly plan, from $250 a month and priced by hours of Zoho work rather than by users. It covers the candidate database, the pipelines and their stages, the career site and job board publishing, the screening and assessment steps, the offers and their approvals, the role based permissions, and integration with the rest of your Zoho environment. Zoho bills your licenses to you separately, since we do not resell them. Opening more roles or hiring more people changes nothing in our figure.

Cancel any time and the service runs to the last business day of that month. No partial refunds. Nothing is stranded, because the Zoho account, the configuration, and every candidate record in it were always yours and always billed to you. There is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. The pipelines keep running, the automations keep firing, and the career site keeps taking applications. You give up the person who would have noticed the week one of them stopped.

Bring whatever you are hiring out of now, in whatever state it is in. Add read access to wherever the candidate records live, a copy of the last few job descriptions and offer letters, and an hour with whoever actually runs an interview loop, not whoever owns hiring on the org chart. Once you sign up, we review what you have first, and you get a plain answer on whether Zoho Recruit suits the job or you want something else entirely.