Google Hire does what it does extremely well
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As a third party recruiting firm, we're using Google Hire as our core ATS. We needed a good solution to do a few basic things, but do them well:
<ul><li>Store all information about our candidates in a way that's easy to use, easily accessible, and nicely searchable </li><li>Take all our notes and track conversations with our candidates</li><li>Track all our open jobs and how candidates are moving through the process</li><li>Help us create a job board on our website and post our job out to other job boards</li></ul>
Pros
- Google does search well so when I search through our database for candidates, I'm confident that I'm pulling up all the right people from what we have.
- They have a modern and nice user interface - this is one of the biggest reasons to use it over other systems, as most ATS' are pretty ancient looking and not very pleasant to use.
- Their support is very good at answering and addressing questions.
- Their pricing is incredible. I'm sure at some point it will change, but for small companies paying 100+ per user for other ATS' - it's incredible to pay 100/month for the whole company.
Cons
- Despite many many months of requests, Google still hasn't implemented ANY custom fields. This makes it tough for an external recruiting firm to track what they want (most importantly: desired salary).
- The job board integration is not great for external recruiters, mostly at the fault of Indeed. Indeed flagged us as a recruiting firm and so none of our jobs actually go live. While I know this is an Indeed problem (we had the same problem when using Bullhorn), Breezy ATS never has that problem for us so I don't know what they're doing differently.
- Their development cycles are quite frankly very slow. I've requested some features, and while support is great about telling me it's coming or in the pipeline, I honestly don't really see a difference in the product since we started using it. It's still great to use, and we still love the software, but there haven't been too many visible improvements that make any difference to our work.
- Being Google, it can sometimes be frustrating that one arm doesn't talk to the other. For example, they announced a Gmail for Works App/Extension integration, but for some reason when they launched it, admins of a domain couldn't install it. Google Hire pointed to the Google for Works team, and it took literally months to fix. Not the end of the world, but just very silly considering they're the same company.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Hire is very good at doing the basics well. I believe for most internal HR departments at small companies, this is all you need. It also works well for small to medium-sized staffing companies that just want something reliable and easy to use.
What Google Hire doesn't do very well is be flexible. They don't have custom options, they don't have a ton of settings, and their development cycle is slow. As a result, it's pretty much what you see is what you get.
