3 of 5 recruiting tools we once named now belong to bigger groups; 3 hide the price

01Three of the five sit inside bigger groups

The biggest change is ownership. SAP completed its purchase of SmartRecruiters on 11 September 2025 and said it would fold the product into SAP SuccessFactors while keeping it available on its own.³ Lever’s pages now carry the “Lever by Employ” mark and an Employ Inc. copyright.¹ Breezy HR describes itself as “Part of Learning Technologies Group plc”.² Workable and Keka are still sold under their own names with no parent shown on their pricing pages.⁴⁵

Ownership is not a verdict. SAP buying SmartRecruiters is good news for a company already on SuccessFactors, because the hiring record and the employee record will converge. It is less good for a company on another HR system, which now buys its recruiting tool from a rival suite’s owner. For Lever and Breezy HR, the question to put in writing is the same: where does the product sit on the parent’s roadmap, and what notice will customers get of a price or platform change?

02Half the field will not tell you the price

Of the five tools from 2023, two print a price: Workable and Breezy HR. Lever says pricing is “available upon request”; SmartRecruiters’ pricing page lists packages and a “Talk to an expert” button; Keka’s page shows its Hiring plans, Pro and Advanced, with a free-trial button and no figure.¹⁵⁷ Zoho Recruit, which we added because it is the one most Indian teams also see, prints rupee and dollar prices per recruiter.⁶

The pricing models differ as much as the prices. Workable prices by company size, so a growing firm moves up a tier whether or not it hires more recruiters.⁴ Zoho Recruit prices by recruiter seat, so a 400-person company with two recruiters pays for two.⁶ Breezy HR prices by plan, with a free Bootstrap tier.² Keka sells hiring separately from its HRMS and payroll plans, so a Keka payroll customer should not assume recruiting is included.⁵

Quote-only is not a reason to rule a tool out; enterprise recruiting software is usually priced by negotiation. It is a reason to structure the request. Ask every quoted vendor for the same four things: the unit the price is built on (employee, recruiter seat or open role), the annual figure in rupees for your current headcount, the figure at one and a half times that headcount, and the cap on the renewal uplift. Put the printed prices above through the same four questions and the comparison becomes possible. Without them a buyer ends up comparing a per-recruiter seat with a per-employee tier and calling it a price comparison.

The 2023 post quoted an Aberdeen Group finding that recruiting software cuts time-to-hire by 50% and cost-per-hire by 40%. I could not trace it to a dated study, so it is gone. The honest replacement is your own baseline: export the last two quarters of hires from whatever you use now, spreadsheet included, and measure days from requisition to accepted offer before any pilot starts. A vendor that will not run a pilot against that number is selling the brochure.

03A CV database is personal data, and the rules have dates

Every recruiting tool is, underneath, a store of personal data about people who are not yet employees: names, phone numbers, salary histories, sometimes identity documents. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 covers all of it.⁸ The Act lets an employer process data without consent “for the purposes of employment” (section 7(i)), but whether that reaches an applicant who is never hired is not settled by the text. The safer reading is to treat candidates as consent-based: tell them what you collect and why, and keep it only while the hiring purpose lasts (section 8(7)).

For a recruiter, the “specified purpose” is the problem. A CV received for one opening in 2024 and still searched for a different role in 2026 has drifted from the purpose the candidate was told about. The fix is cheap and procedural: ask at application whether the candidate wants to join a talent pool for a stated period, store the answer as a field in the ATS, and let the retention rule act on it.

The DPDP Rules were notified on 13 November 2025. The duties a recruiting team will feel, reasonable security safeguards, breach intimation and retention, come into force on 13 May 2027.⁹ Rule 7 asks for intimation to the Board without delay and a detailed report within 72 hours.¹⁰ That makes the retention setting in the ATS a compliance control, not a preference. Most tools let an administrator purge candidates after a set period; few ship with it switched on.