SmartRecruiters vs Workday Recruiting comparison

Why PeerSpot?

SmartRecruiters and Workday are both solutions in the Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software category. SmartRecruiters is ranked #2, while Workday is ranked #37 with an average rating of 8.0. Additionally, 93% of SmartRecruiters users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Workday users who would recommend it.

SmartRecruiters

Read 15 SmartRecruiters reviews

2,963 Views
1,511 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Workday Recruiting

Read 1 Workday Recruiting review

477 Views
224 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SmartRecruiters

Workday Recruiting

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SmartRecruiters and Workday Recruiting based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about iCIMS, SmartRecruiters, Zoho and others in Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software.

To learn more, read our detailed Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software Report (Updated: October 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software

October 2026

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Helped 920,769 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

SmartRecruiters

Ranking in Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software

2nd

Ranking in Talent Acquisition

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Workday Recruiting

Ranking in Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software

37th

Ranking in Talent Acquisition

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI-Recruiting (2nd)

Featured Reviews

SUMANTA GHOSH

Regional Recruitment Lead at IQ-EQ

A user-friendly tool that functions without any glitches

With SmartRecruiters, compatibility with other HRIS systems is an area with certain shortcomings that require improvement. SmartRecruiters is a tool that we use as an ATS platform in our company, but we manage the employee lifecycle with the help of SAP, and I don't see the integration of SmartRecruiters with SAP happening quite seamlessly, making it an area where improvements are required.

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ManishGupta9

Managing Director & CEO at Talenton Global

Unified hiring workflows have transformed recruiting into a data-driven talent strategy

While Workday Recruiting provides a strong enterprise recruiting platform, I would still see there are several areas where it could be improved to make recruitment a bit more faster, more intelligent decision-making, very candidate-centric and more effective for recruiters and hiring managers. Improvements have already been made on a few aspects like improving the AI powered candidate matching, but it could make AI matching more sophisticated by going beyond the resume keywords and just the job title. For example, potential improvements could include matching the candidates based on transferable skills, career trajectory, and potential, identifying hidden talent who do not have the exact job title but still possess the right capabilities and skills and experience, and explaining why a candidate is recommended with at least some summary providing confidence scores and eliminating the potential bias. There are a few other aspects to strengthen the passive candidate sourcing as well. This could be their biggest opportunity. Many of the best candidates, particularly senior executives and specialist talent, do not actively apply for jobs. Improvements could include external talent discovery, passive candidate identification, talent market mapping, competitor talent mapping as well, executive talent intelligence, and making the candidate experience more personalized where they can receive more personalized career recommendation, job suggestions, and real-time application updates. Recruiters still can benefit from more reduction of the recruiter administrative task because recruiters still spend a significant time on operational tasks in terms of screening, coordination for interviews, follow-ups, status updates and reminders, recruiting reports, and so recruiters should spend more time talking to candidates rather than managing the system alone. In terms of the analytics, better recruiting analysis and predictive intelligence, moving from just descriptive analytics to predictive recruiting intelligence, is where Workday could add a lot more value. Instead of just simply reporting time to fill is, let's say, 70 days, Workday could still say that position is likely to take maybe 80 days, 75 days to fill because the available talent pool is limited and consider expanding the geography or adjustment in the compensation or expand the search reach, whatever. Those kinds of analytics would be helpful. Improvements could go higher, but some improvement areas need Workday to make a few improvements to make skill-based recruiting even more powerful. It could develop a more dynamic enterprise skills graph as well. For example, current employee skills or adjacent skills, potential career paths, future roles, or reskilling opportunities could be included. This would connect the whole recruiting team with internal mobility, workforce planning, learning, reskilling, succession planning, and retention of the existing employees. Improving the diversity bias and monitoring is important. If Workday can do this, AI recruiting creates an additional responsibility around the fairness and companies and everybody have the responsibility to be fair. Workday could provide a stronger real-time monitoring of candidate sourcing diversity, funneling the conversion by demographic groups, potential algorithmic bias, interview score patterns, and selection rate differences. Those are a few things Workday can improve on and can achieve a higher score.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"What I really like about SmartRecruiters is communication and collaboration between candidates and internal clients or managers."

"The all-encompassing ability to manage the process cohesively out of the SmartRecruiter system was valuable."

"With this solution, I was able to add diversity to my recruiting. I was able to source from multiple locations, and I could show where applicants came from. The reporting tools that are on offer, allowed us to expand our reach. We were able to add meaningful diversity into recruiting."

"I used the free version, which I found valuable."

"What I really like about it is that it feels minimal, but is also dynamic. There aren't a lot of ways to get lost, which is good."

"It has a neat functionality built in where it rates candidates. So, before you even look at the resume, you see a rating, and it is based on keywords. For example, it will tell you that an applicant is a frontend engineer and has used React, Angular, etc. It gives you a heads up so that you don't have to go through a hundred resumes on Monday morning eliminating applicants. It will tell you that this applicant's skills match 87%, which is pretty neat. You can skip the ones that are rated 25% or something."

"It is a really user-friendly tool, and its implementation is quite wide. It is very easy to manage users and build your workflows. Overall, it works very well for the customization of the workflows for us. The recruitment team has generally found the whole platform useful. We were looking to kind of expand it by using the CRM functions that it has. However, with COVID and recruitment being on the freeze, we weren't really able to make the most of the tool. They are, however, finding it useful to actually build up their talent pools and client candidates to be able to contact them when we kind of have this freeze off."

"The candidate experience was better because the whole process was there."

More SmartRecruiters pros

"Workday definitely helps transform the whole recruiting from an administrative function into a lot more data driven talent management process with analytics."

Cons

"One of the areas that we would like them to improve is the self-scheduling feature. They have a self-scheduling feature that can be made a little bit more automated when it comes to scheduling. We are trying to use it, but it doesn't feel very user-friendly. This is something that could be improved. They have launched WhatsApp connections in the system, where instead of sending emails, you can WhatsApp candidates directly from the system, but currently, it mainly works in a few countries. Spain, where I'm based, is not one of them. If we use the system, the phone number for the candidates would be from the UK, and we don't think that would be the best. This feature is good for some countries, but not for all at the moment. It was first launched in the USA and then in a couple of countries in Europe. It is not yet launched fully in Europe. Reporting is always something that can be improved. Even though it is working well for us, its reporting can be better. Currently, it is a little bit complicated when it comes to reporting. It has a few pre-made reports that are easy to access, but if you want more details, you need to build your own reports. In order to do that, it is a bit tricky to learn and understand how it works. Even though you have help agents and support for help, it takes some time to learn, but it is not impossible. We have very recently made some integrations with Tableau. We are building dashboards in Tableau where we can get daily updated reports, and they are definitely helpful. That's something we would recommend. SmartRecruiters has recently implemented an inbox. You can have an inbox where you can see all your conversations, but currently, it is not filtering between the recruiters, so you see everyone's emails in there. They have already announced that they are working on the filtering feature for a specific inbox to make it more personalized per recruiter. This way the recruiters can have an overview of their own work."

"One thing that has been a bit of a struggle is getting tech support. It is a little more difficult to get support from SmartRecruiters. They want you to have your own in-house person to help you with any issues, whereas with both Lever and Greenhouse, you can just click a button at the bottom of the screen and chat with someone almost instantly."

"We ran into some serious issues related to language barriers."

"Reporting is always something that can be improved. Currently, it is a little bit complicated when it comes to reporting."

"SmartRecruiters' one-click application process could be better."

"The solution's reporting feature could be improved because it is not very strong."

"The major improvement area is how it integrates with other systems; that's where we've had some sort of pain points."

"Around 2015 and into '17, I worked at a federal contractor. I had to switch to a different applicant system as I didn't know if SmartRecruiters was OFCCP compliant, which is something that, as a US-based federal contractor, you have to ensure. They should work to appeal to the contractor industry and get the product OFCCP compliant."

More SmartRecruiters cons

"Workday Recruiting's pricing experience is reasonable for a large enterprise company, but a bit more complex and potentially expensive for SMEs and smaller organizations because it is an enterprise-level recruiting platform."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SmartRecruiters is much better than its competitors. Considering the type of features and services it provides, it is probably one of the best solutions in the market. Others may offer a similar price, but their services won't be that good or the user-friendliness won't be that great. The licensing works based on how many users are there in a company. If you are using other functionalities, like CRM and HRS, the price increases."

"SmartRecruiters is an expensive solution."

"I haven't been so involved with pricing, so I don't have all details, but I know that we are paying per head when it comes to different countries. There is an additional fee for new features that they release. If it is something that we would like to use, we need to pay some extra for it."

"They are pretty competitive. As the product matures, it has much more functionality and different pricing models. It can relatively cost a lot more if you want to use additional features, but, in general, it is competitive in the industry. We work on a yearly license agreement based on the company size. There are the support costs, which are a part of the additional cost based on the percentage of the licensing fee. So, it has a license plus support cost. Then, of course, there are other add-on options that we can purchase and procure whenever we want to based on certain negotiated arrangements."

"I wasn't involved in its acquisition, but I would assume that SmartRecruiters is pretty pricey."

"There were implementation costs in the first year to get everything set up and running, and then they have various modules on top, which are optional and available at an extra charge."

"Back in 2018, when I engaged with their sales, they wanted to charge around $10,000 for an annual subscription. Depending on your organization, that either could or couldn't be expensive. I personally think it's a fair price. However, I engaged them and negotiated a lower price with them. I think I got closer to $6,000. It came with a commitment of three years."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Healthcare Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	8

No data available

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Workday Recruiting?

Workday Recruiting's pricing experience is reasonable for a large enterprise company, but a bit more complex and potentially expensive for SMEs and smaller organizations because it is an enterprise...

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What needs improvement with Workday Recruiting?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Workday Recruiting?

I have several main use cases for Workday Recruiting: workforce planning and requisitions, candidate sourcing applications, recruiter and hiring manager workflow, selection, offer management, candi...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SmartRecruiters

October 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Talent Acquisition

October 2026

Download Workday Recruiting product report

Overview

SmartRecruiters offers user-friendly recruitment solutions, excelling in diverse candidate sourcing, cost-efficiency, and seamless integration. It simplifies candidate tracking, job publication, and communication while providing valuable data analysis and customizable workflows.

SmartRecruiters is a comprehensive talent acquisition and applicant tracking system that streamlines recruitment from job postings to offer letters. Healthcare organizations utilize SmartRecruiters for its seamless HRS integration and candidate tracking, valuing its capability to source diverse candidates. It facilitates efficient job publication, resume analysis, interview scheduling, and communication, enhancing recruitment through automated notifications and feedback features. However, challenges like regulatory compliance, customization options, and integration with other systems persist. Users cite issues such as complex application processes, language barriers, and inefficiencies in workflow customization.

What are the most important features of SmartRecruiters?

User-Friendliness: Easy to navigate and use, facilitating feedback sharing.
Candidate Tracking: Effective management of the candidate lifecycle.
Job Publication: Efficient posting and advertising of job positions.
Data Analysis: Provides valuable insights through reporting tools.
Customizable Workflows: Tailors processes to meet specific needs.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces expenses in the recruiting process.
Diverse Candidate Sourcing: Supports inclusivity and broadens talent pool.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly integrates with HRS for streamlined operations.
Feedback Mechanisms: Enhances communication with candidates.
Communication Efficiency: Allows for effective candidate interaction.

SmartRecruiters is widely adopted in industries focused on talent acquisition, such as healthcare, emphasizing its user-friendly design and adaptability to low-bandwidth environments. It supports end-to-end recruitment processes, enabling improvements in job requisition creation, career page updates, data management, and offer letter generation, promoting consistency and efficiency.

SmartRecruiters

Workday Talent Acquisition unifies and transforms hiring at scale with an AI-powered, end-to-end solution. Organizations can rethink sourcing and enhance experiences for job seekers by automating programs to find top talent and provide personalized, streamlined experiences that expedite hiring.

Workday

Sample Customers

Atlassian, Aol, IBM, Napa, Skechers

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software

October 2026

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