Hire by Google (discontinued) vs. Lever

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.

Incentivized

Managing pipeline and candidate communication is easy through lever. Keeping it all in one place allows the hiring teams to be in the loop real-time. The reporting is clunky and basic, however, and without a 3rd party tool, sourcing from the lever database is difficult. Also, it is very easy to have duplicate candidates since the alerts Lever gives are often incorrect

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Great integration: Keeps a list of Outlook email communication along with LinkedIn and other data sources
• Is fairly lively, not too much lag between screens even though it is looking through a lot of data.
• Has excellent reporting on how well each email message is working.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if we were provided a more detailed summary of why our referrals were not selected for a position.
• The feedback feature that interviewers can give on candidates is great, but it is sometimes hard to find again after completion.
• If there is a mobile version, better marketing/awareness on this would be helpful.

Incentivized

It isn't difficult to use for the applicant processing, but [I feel] if you want to pull reports or use their tools, good luck!

What support? - Add a ticket and get links to [I believe] their unhelpful user guide. Add a charge if you want better support - afterward just got those links faster...

I picked Google Hire after spending about 3 months on Bullhorn. I found Bullhorn to be terrible. It's WAY more customizable and theoretically powerful, but it's also a pain to set up and maintain. Even just getting your job page set up on your own site required tech support. Getting it eventually to what you want could be a great benefit, but Google Hire does great right out of the box and is a lot cheaper. Breezy HR is a great system. It's a bit more expensive than Google Hire for multiple job postings, but their system is equally easy to use and straight forward. However, we are all in on Google Products, so it was just a no brainer to go with Hire for a better price and most likely a better search function.

Incentivized

I think Lever stacks up fairly well and is right above the midpoint. iCIMS and Greenhouse provide a larger, more Enterprise style product for huge scale, so I'd put the two of them above Lever at this time, but we chose Lever over Greenhouse for a reason. I just don't know if we'd be able to scale to the size we'd want to long-term with their product suite. Compared to the others listed here, and many others, I would take Lever every time.

Incentivized

• Google Hire makes, unfortunately, a very little impact on our ROI, but I think in the ATS world that's a good thing. It simply acts as a record that we can put everything in and easily reference, and the fact that it works overall makes it a positive software product in the long run.
• While the search works great, I don't know that I've ever specifically found a candidate and placed them due to it. That could be a result of our job reqs though.
• The biggest most obvious impact is really just the price. We needed a tool that does what Google Hire does, reliably. Most other companies charge at least 150 or so for 2 people, whereas Google Hire is 100/month for many users. It gives us flexibility for the future and helps minimize what could be a big expense. That definitely helps our bottom line.

Incentivized

• We have an ATS now and did not have one before
• LinkedIn integration is better than others I've seen
• Spend too much time researching unhelpful user guides since their support is terrible
• Lots of frustration with post implementation support
• Integrations break, tools don't work and settings fail which could lead to other issues