Candidate screening software: recruitment screening software, applicant screening software and HR screening tools that rank on proven fit

The phrase covers three product categories that solve different problems. Buying the wrong category is the most common expensive mistake in this market, because every vendor in all three describes itself as candidate screening software.

Assessment platforms put a test in front of the candidate. Skills tests, work samples, cognitive and personality assessments, or a recorded async video answer. TestGorilla, Vervoe, Criteria, Willo, HireVue and CodeSignal live here. They are strong when your applicants look identical on paper and you need a signal a resume cannot give you, and they are the right answer for high-volume entry-level hiring where the resume is close to worthless. The cost is candidate drop-off: every extra step before a human conversation loses people, and the good candidates with options are the ones who leave first.

Applicant tracking systems with screening built in filter and organize people who already applied. Workable, Breezy HR, JazzHR, Manatal, Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters sit here. The screening is usually knockout questions, resume parsing, keyword matching and structured scorecards that your own team fills in. This is the right purchase if your problem is that applications are scattered across inboxes and nobody knows who has been reviewed. It is the wrong purchase if the problem is that nobody has time to review them, because an ATS organizes work rather than doing it.

AI screening agents read every applicant against criteria you set once, score them, rank them and show why. That is the category HireAgent is in. The distinction that matters against the other two: an agent does the reading, so the constraint stops being recruiter hours. The distinction that matters against the hype: it produces a ranked shortlist with evidence, not a hiring decision, and a person still runs the interview.

A useful test before you shop. Look at your last filled role and find the stage where days were lost. If people were lost between applying and anyone reading them, you need an agent or an ATS. If you read everyone and still could not tell who was good, you need an assessment. If you never had enough applicants at all, none of this helps and you need candidate sourcing instead.

Prices below were read from each vendor’s own public pricing page in August 2026. Quote only means the vendor publishes no figure at all, not that we could not find one.

Checked August 2026. Vervoe and Recruitee both removed previously published self-serve prices, so figures for them in older comparisons are out of date. Confirm any quote-based number with the vendor before budgeting. Roughly half this market, including Greenhouse, Criteria, Vervoe and HireVue, publishes nothing at all, which is why a shortlist built from published prices alone is skewed toward the smaller vendors.

HireAgent sources, screens, ranks, writes outreach and books interviews from one role brief. Published flat pricing: $299 a month for three roles, $799 for ten with ATS integration, $1,999 at scale. Best for teams whose real constraint is recruiter hours rather than applicant volume. Not an ATS, and it does not conduct interviews.

Workable is the most complete self-serve ATS with screening attached, and it publishes rates: Standard $299 a month, Premier $599, Enterprise $719. Read the footnote carefully, because those are the figures for the 1 to 20 employee band and they scale with headcount, which is why quoted Workable prices vary so much between articles. AI features run on a credit system, 3,000 free then $0.12 a credit.

Breezy HR is the friendliest entry point, with a genuinely free Bootstrap tier and Startup at $157 a month billed annually, $189 monthly. Growth is $273 and Business $439 on annual billing. Good pipeline visuals and enough screening automation for a small team hiring steadily.

JazzHR publishes annual pricing that stays flat as you grow: Hero $1,000 a year, Plus $3,480, Pro $5,508. The cheapest credible ATS for a US small business that wants structured screening without a per-seat model.

Manatal is the cheapest published per-seat price in the category at $15 per user per month on annual billing, rising to $35 and $55 for the enterprise tiers. Strong AI resume matching for the money and popular with agencies.

Greenhouse is the reference implementation of structured hiring: scorecards, interview kits and consistent evaluation across interviewers. Pricing is customized with no public figures. Worth the process discipline if you have the recruiting team to run it, overkill if you do not.

SmartRecruiters is the one enterprise ATS that puts a number on its entry tier, Essential starting at $14,995. Everything above that is request-pricing. Aimed at companies hiring at real scale across many locations.

TestGorilla is the default skills-testing platform, with a free tier at 10 credits a month, Core at $142 a month and Plus from $400. A large test library and the easiest way to add a work-sample signal to a noisy applicant pool.

Willo does async video screening, and its pricing model is unusual in a helpful way: Lite is $49 per live role and includes 150 assessed candidates for that role, capped at five live roles, while Enterprise is $3,799 a year falling to $3,229 on a three-year term. Paying per role rather than per seat suits teams that hire in bursts.

Criteria sells validated pre-employment assessments with real psychometric backing, which matters if you ever have to defend a selection decision. It no longer shows any dollar figures and prices around headcount.

Vervoe scores candidates on simulated job tasks rather than multiple choice. Note for anyone comparing older articles: Vervoe used to publish self-serve tiers and now shows only an Enterprise plan with a contact CTA, so any price you read for it elsewhere is probably stale.

HireVue is the enterprise standard for video interviewing plus assessment, and the vendor most often quoted with invented numbers. Its own pricing page names an Essential and a Premium package with no figures whatsoever. The five and six figure ranges you see quoted for it are third-party guesses that contradict each other.

Candidate screening software evaluates applicants against criteria and puts them in an order, so a person reads the strongest first instead of reading everything. That is the whole job. Everything else on a vendor feature list is a variation on it.

In practice a screening run has four steps. Criteria capture turns the role into structured requirements: must-haves, nice-to-haves and disqualifiers, each one something you could show evidence for. Evidence extraction reads each application, resume or profile and pulls out what is relevant to those criteria rather than summarizing the document. Scoring compares the evidence to the criteria and produces a rating, usually on a scale rather than a pass or fail. Ranking with rationale orders the pool and, on any tool worth buying, shows why each candidate scored where they did.

The fourth step is the one to interrogate on a demo. A score without a rationale is unusable in two situations that both come up: when a hiring manager disagrees with the ranking, and when a candidate or a regulator asks how the decision was made. Ask the vendor to show you a low-scoring candidate and explain the score. If the answer is a number and a progress bar, the tool will not survive contact with a real hiring debate.

Screening quality is set almost entirely at criteria design, before any software runs, and most disappointing results trace back to this step rather than to the model. Three rules do most of the work.

Write criteria you could show evidence for. Shipped a production service handling real traffic is checkable. Strong ownership mentality is not, and any tool asked to score it will invent a proxy, usually seniority of employer, which is exactly the kind of proxy that creates adverse impact.

Separate must-haves from preferences honestly. Teams routinely mark six things as required and then hire someone missing two of them, which means the criteria were wrong, not the candidate. A tool applying your stated must-haves strictly will filter out the person you would actually have hired.

Name the disqualifiers explicitly, including the boring ones like work authorization or an on-site requirement. Getting these into the structured criteria is what stops a recruiter re-reading fifty profiles to answer the same question. And keep them job related: a disqualifier that is not tied to the work is the fastest route to a discrimination problem.

Once the criteria are written, run them against fifteen candidates you have already decided about and see whether the ranking matches your own judgment. If it does not, the criteria are incomplete, and it is much cheaper to learn that on fifteen than on five hundred.

Yes, and it is regulated. Automated screening is lawful across the US provided the tool is job related, does not produce unlawful adverse impact, and meets the notice, consent and audit duties that apply where you hire. Those duties are set at city and state level, so the obligations depend on where the candidate sits, not where your company is. The table below summarizes what applies as of August 2026.

Two federal points sit underneath all of it. Title VII applies to any selection procedure whether or not software is involved, and the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures expect a procedure producing adverse impact to be validated as job related and consistent with business necessity. The four-fifths rule, where a selection rate for any group below 80 percent of the highest group flags potential adverse impact, remains the usual first test. Run it on your own screening outcomes quarterly; it takes an afternoon and it is the number an agency will ask for.

The practical compliance requirement, whatever jurisdiction you are in, is an audit trail: what criteria were applied, what evidence produced each score, and who made the final decision. That is why every HireAgent match score links to the criteria and the evidence behind it, and why a live worklog records each action the agent took. This page is a summary for buyers and not legal advice; confirm your specific obligations with counsel before you deploy automated screening.

Candidate screening software costs roughly $15 per user per month at the cheap end and $15,000 a year at the enterprise entry point, with most US small and mid-sized teams landing between $1,000 and $8,000 a year. Manatal is published at $15 per user a month, JazzHR from $1,000 a year, Workable from $299 a month and SmartRecruiters Essential from $14,995. HireAgent publishes flat pricing at $299, $799 and $1,999 a month, billed on open role count rather than seats or headcount.

The spread is wide because the category contains three different products. Assessment platforms charge for tests. Applicant tracking systems charge for the system of record and include screening features. Agents charge for the screening work itself. A full vendor-by-vendor breakdown with prices read from each pricing page is in the priced comparison further down this page, which splits twelve tools by what they actually screen.

Screening software reasons about evidence in a candidate history. It cannot tell you anything that history does not contain, and the gap catches teams out in two specific places.

The first is demonstrable skill. Whether someone writes clean SQL, defuses an angry customer or produces good work under a deadline is not inferable from a resume, no matter how carefully it is read. That is an assessment problem, and TestGorilla, Vervoe and Criteria exist because it is a real one. Screening narrows the pool; a work sample proves the thing you actually care about.

The second is motivation. Screening cannot tell you whether a strong candidate wants this job, and a shortlist of people who will not move is worse than a shorter one of people who will. That is what the outreach step is for, and why HireAgent drafts personalized messages and books the interviews rather than stopping at a ranked list.

One more limit worth stating plainly: HireAgent does fit screening, not background screening. It does not run criminal records, employment verification or credit checks, which are a separate regulated category under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. If that is what you came here for, you need a consumer reporting agency, not this.