The questions we get asked.

A recruitment CRM is a lightweight system for managing relationships with candidates before and during the hiring process. Unlike a full ATS, it focuses on keeping track of who's who, where they are in your pipeline, and what needs to happen next.

For most small teams, the line between CRM and ATS is blurry — you just need one place to see candidates, move them through stages, and keep notes that don't get lost. That's what Recruit Flow does: a simple candidate pipeline with a timeline, not a contact database that requires a consultant to set up.

Greenhouse is built for high-volume hiring at scale — requisition workflows, compliance modules, scorecards for every interviewer, and integrations with everything in your HR stack. If you're hiring fifty people a quarter across six departments, that complexity earns its keep.

Recruit Flow is for teams that hire occasionally and need a pipeline they can understand in five minutes. No requisitions, no permission matrices, no mandatory scorecards. Just candidates, stages, and a timeline. If Greenhouse feels like wearing a suit to a coffee shop, Recruit Flow is the clean jacket you actually reach for.

Lever is a strong ATS with a polished interface and good team collaboration tools. It's priced and packaged for startups that are scaling quickly and need structured interview plans, feedback forms, and offer approvals.

Recruit Flow skips the structure you don't need yet. There's no interview plan builder, no feedback form designer, and no offer-approval chain. Instead you get a drag-and-drop board, a real candidate timeline, and CSV in/out. Teams that find Lever 'almost right but slightly too much' usually feel at home here.

BambooHR is an HRIS first and a recruiting tool second. Its hiring module is usable for basic applicant tracking, but it's designed around employees who already exist in your HR system. That makes sense if recruiting and HR are the same person.

Recruit Flow is built for the hiring workflow specifically — pipeline stages, source tracking, time-in-stage alerts, and a timeline that works whether or not you have an HRIS. If BambooHR's recruiting module feels like an afterthought, that's because it is. This isn't.

The best applicant tracking system for a small team is the one everyone actually uses. That usually means: fast to set up, obvious to navigate, and flexible enough to handle a few open roles without forcing you into enterprise workflows.

Recruit Flow fits that description — one plan, no tiers, no features locked behind upgrade prompts. But the honest answer is that some teams are fine in a spreadsheet for longer than they think. The right time to switch is when you start losing track of candidates, not when a vendor tells you to.

Start by deciding what you need that the spreadsheet isn't giving you. Usually it's one of three things: a visual pipeline so you can see who's stuck, automated reminders so nobody goes stale, or a shared timeline so the next interviewer has context.

A simple hiring tracker gives you all three without the weight of a full ATS. Upload your existing spreadsheet, pick clean stages, and let the tool handle the timestamps. The goal isn't to replace the spreadsheet with something fancier — it's to replace the work of managing the spreadsheet with something that manages itself.

A practical hiring pipeline has five stages that everyone on the team can name and use consistently: Applied, Phone Screen, Interview, Offer, and Hired.

Applied means the candidate is in your system but nothing else has happened. Phone Screen is an early conversation for basic fit. Interview is your real evaluation loop. Offer is verbal or written offer extended. Hired is signed and dated. Rejected is a state, not a stage — keep it separate or your board turns into a graveyard.

Set a maximum number of days per stage — five for Applied, seven for Phone Screen, ten for Interview — and flag anyone who's overdue. That's the single highest-leverage habit a small team can adopt.

Recruiting software pricing ranges from free spreadsheets to thousands per month for enterprise ATS platforms. Most modern tools charge per user, per job, or per hire, which means costs scale with your volume whether or not your budget does.

Recruit Flow is $149 per month for everything — unlimited candidates, unlimited collaborators, every feature. One plan means no calculator required to figure out what you'll pay when you add a hiring manager or open a second role. For teams hiring one to ten people a year, that's usually less than the per-seat pricing of comparable tools.