Recruitee

Recruitee, now operating under the Tellent brand, is a Dutch applicant tracking system (ATS) and collaborative hiring platform that has established itself as one of the leading European recruitment software solutions. Founded in Amsterdam in 2015 by Perry Oostdam and Pawel Smoczyk, Recruitee was built on the conviction that hiring should be a team effort rather than an isolated HR function. The platform makes it remarkably easy for hiring managers, team leads, and even department members to participate in evaluating candidates, providing feedback, and making hiring decisions together. In 2023, Recruitee joined Tellent, a European HR technology group, providing additional resources and stability while maintaining its Amsterdam headquarters and European focus.

What distinguishes Recruitee from competitors like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workable is its emphasis on simplicity and collaboration. While enterprise ATS platforms often require weeks of implementation and dedicated administrators, Recruitee can be set up and operational within days. The interface is intuitive enough for non-HR team members to use without training, which is essential for the collaborative hiring model that the platform champions. With unlimited user seats on all plans at no additional cost, Recruitee removes the financial barrier to getting the entire team involved in recruitment, which is a significant advantage over competitors that charge per seat.

The Applicant Tracking System

At its core, Recruitee provides a customizable, kanban-style recruiting pipeline that visualizes your entire hiring process. Each open position has its own pipeline with adjustable stages that can be tailored to match your specific recruitment workflow. Moving candidates between stages is as simple as dragging and dropping their cards, and each card displays a summary of the candidate's information, evaluation scores, and activity history. The visual nature of the pipeline makes it immediately obvious where bottlenecks exist, which positions have the most candidates, and which applicants are progressing through the process.

The ATS supports multiple pipelines simultaneously, which is essential for companies hiring across different departments and roles. Filters and search functionality make it easy to find specific candidates across all open positions, and bulk actions allow efficient processing of large applicant pools. The platform tracks every interaction with candidates including emails, notes, evaluations, and scheduled events, creating a comprehensive audit trail that is valuable for both operational efficiency and compliance purposes. For companies managing dozens or hundreds of open positions simultaneously, this centralized view of all recruitment activity is invaluable.

Collaborative Hiring Features

Recruitee's collaborative hiring capabilities are its defining feature and greatest strength. Every team member involved in the hiring process can access shared candidate profiles, add structured evaluations using customizable scorecards, leave real-time notes, and tag colleagues for input. The evaluation system supports both numerical ratings and qualitative feedback, which can be aggregated across multiple evaluators to provide a balanced view of each candidate. This structured approach to collaboration reduces individual bias and helps teams make more informed hiring decisions.

The platform's permission system allows administrators to control exactly what each team member can see and do. Hiring managers might have full access to their department's pipelines, while team members participating in interview panels might only see the candidates they need to evaluate. This granular control ensures that sensitive information like salary expectations and reference check results is only visible to those who need it. The unlimited user model means there is no practical limit to how many people can participate in the hiring process, which is particularly valuable for companies that value cultural fit assessments involving multiple team members.

Careers Site Builder

Recruitee includes a no-code careers site builder that enables companies to create attractive, branded career pages without any technical expertise. The builder offers customizable templates where you can showcase your company culture, team photos, benefits, and values alongside your open positions. Career pages are automatically updated as positions are opened and closed in the ATS, ensuring that your public job listings are always current. The sites are mobile-responsive and optimized for search engines, helping to attract organic traffic from candidates searching for jobs in your industry or location.

The employer branding aspect of the careers site is particularly well-executed. Companies can create content-rich pages that tell their story, highlight employee testimonials, and present their workplace in an authentic way. This goes beyond the basic job listing pages that many ATS platforms provide and helps companies compete for talent by differentiating themselves through their employer brand. For growing companies that want to attract top talent but lack the budget for a custom-built careers website, Recruitee's builder provides a professional solution at no additional cost.

Job Distribution and Sourcing

Recruitee offers multi-channel job distribution with access to over 1,450 job boards worldwide. Positions created in the platform can be posted to multiple job boards simultaneously with a single click, dramatically reducing the time and effort required to advertise openings. The platform supports both free and premium job boards, with integration partners covering global sites like LinkedIn and Indeed as well as regional and industry-specific platforms across Europe.

Beyond job board distribution, Recruitee provides candidate sourcing tools including a Chrome extension that allows recruiters to capture candidate profiles from LinkedIn, GitHub, and other professional platforms directly into the ATS. Social media sharing features make it easy to promote open positions through company social channels, and employee referral tracking helps formalize and incentivize internal referral programs. The recently introduced AgencyHub add-on consolidates communication and performance tracking for external recruitment agencies, providing a centralized interface for managing agency relationships, submissions, and fees.

Interview Scheduling and Communication

Interview scheduling is often one of the most time-consuming aspects of recruitment, and Recruitee addresses this with automated scheduling tools that integrate with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. The platform can suggest available time slots based on interviewer availability, send automated invitations to candidates, and handle rescheduling without manual intervention. For panel interviews involving multiple team members, the scheduling tool finds time slots that work for all participants, eliminating the back-and-forth email chains that typically plague the scheduling process.

Communication with candidates is managed through integrated email functionality that keeps all correspondence within the platform. Email templates can be created for common communications like application acknowledgments, interview invitations, and rejection letters, ensuring consistent and professional messaging. The recently launched WhatsApp Hiring add-on enables candidate engagement through WhatsApp, acknowledging the growing preference for messaging-based communication in many European markets. All candidate communications are logged in the candidate profile, creating a complete record of every interaction.

Analytics and Reporting

Recruitee provides recruitment analytics through a dashboard that tracks key metrics including time-to-hire, source effectiveness, pipeline conversion rates, and team activity. These reports help recruitment teams identify bottlenecks in their processes, determine which sourcing channels deliver the best candidates, and measure the overall efficiency of their hiring efforts. The data can be filtered by department, time period, and other dimensions to provide both high-level overviews and detailed insights.

For companies that need to report on diversity metrics or comply with equal opportunity hiring regulations, Recruitee's analytics provide the data foundation needed for these assessments. The platform also tracks individual recruiter and team performance, which is useful for resource allocation and identifying training opportunities. While the analytics are not as advanced as those offered by enterprise-grade ATS platforms, they cover the essential metrics that growing companies need to optimize their recruitment processes.

GDPR Compliance and Data Protection

As a Dutch company, Recruitee was built with GDPR compliance embedded in its architecture from the outset. The platform includes automatic consent collection during the application process, configurable data retention periods that automatically anonymize or delete candidate data after a specified time, easy processing of data access and deletion requests, and comprehensive audit logs. These features are not afterthoughts bolted onto an existing system but fundamental components of the platform's design. For European companies that handle sensitive personal data from job applicants across multiple jurisdictions, this compliance-first approach significantly reduces the administrative burden of recruitment-related data protection.

Pricing and Plans

Recruitee offers multiple pricing tiers designed for different company sizes and needs. The Launch plan starts at approximately 199 euros per month and covers the essential ATS features for small teams. The Scale plan provides advanced features including automation, custom pipelines, and enhanced analytics for growing companies. Enterprise plans with custom pricing are available for large organizations with complex requirements. All plans include unlimited user seats, which is a significant differentiator from competitors like Greenhouse and Lever that charge per recruiter seat.

An 18-day free trial is available without requiring a credit card, giving companies enough time to set up the platform, import existing candidates, and test the full workflow before committing. While the starting price of 199 euros per month puts Recruitee at the higher end of the market for very small businesses, the unlimited seats model makes it cost-effective for companies with larger hiring teams. The value proposition improves as more team members participate in the hiring process, since there is no per-user cost increase.

Integrations and Ecosystem

Recruitee integrates with a wide range of HR tools, communication platforms, and business applications. Native integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, LinkedIn, and various HRIS and payroll systems. The Recruitee API and webhook support enable custom integrations for specific workflows. Through Zapier, the platform connects to thousands of additional applications, extending its reach into virtually any business tool ecosystem. The Offer Letters feature, introduced recently, allows recruiters to create and send offer letters directly within the platform, reducing the need for external document management tools.

Limitations and Considerations

Recruitee is focused specifically on recruitment and hiring, not full HR management. It does not include payroll, time tracking, performance management, or employee onboarding features. For these functions, companies typically pair Recruitee with a complementary HR system like Personio or Factorial. Some advanced features including skill assessments, video interviewing, and e-signatures require third-party integrations rather than being available natively. The platform is best suited for companies that hire regularly; for businesses that only recruit occasionally, the monthly subscription cost may be difficult to justify compared to simpler or free solutions.

Who Should Use Recruitee

Recruitee is ideal for growing European companies that want a modern, collaborative approach to recruitment with strong GDPR compliance built in. It works best for organizations with 50 to 5,000 employees that hire regularly and want to involve multiple team members in the evaluation process. HR teams looking for an intuitive ATS that requires minimal training, companies focused on employer branding and candidate experience, and organizations that value collaborative decision-making in hiring will all find Recruitee to be an excellent fit. The platform's European headquarters, unlimited seats, and GDPR-first design make it particularly compelling for businesses that prioritize data protection and want to keep their recruitment technology within the European ecosystem.