Using HubSpot as an applicant tracking system (ATS) is ideal for thousands of companies worldwide – from small businesses looking to save time to large enterprises seeking to organize their multilayered recruitment processes.
In this blog, we'll take a deep dive to understand what makes a good ATS and equip you with the tools to decide the best option for your company: HubSpot Pro as an ATS or HubSpot Enterprise as an ATS.
As we stated in our blog on what makes a good ATS, there are many benefits of an ATS. This platform is "a computer program that helps manage the whole hiring process. It collects and sorts through potentially thousands of resumes" – something hiring managers used to need to do by hand. These software store data such as applicant resumes, contact information, and demographics, assisting hirers in streamlining their candidate-sifting processes. The digitization of this process saves hirers (such as yourself) an incredible amount of time and money.
An ATS serves to help you manage your candidates, improve your team's collaboration, eliminate data silos and integration issues, and maintain strong relationships with your clients. However, when it comes to effectively managing your recruitment process, it is not just any ATS that will do it. Having the proper applicant tracking system (ATS) makes all the difference in successfully improving your hiring process optimization, so it's wise to do your research and choose carefully.
Enter: HubSpot's various ATS options, available as add-ons to two marketing service tiers.
HubSpot's versatility as an ATS stems from its ability to adapt core functions – like contact management, automation, and pipeline tracking – to fulfill all recruitment needs. With nearly a quarter-million annual users, from individual proprietors and contractors to large corporations, plenty of organizations already use HubSpot for marketing, sales, service, or operations. This gives HubSpot as an ATS a considerable leg-up.
Current HubSpot users are already using this platform would naturally find that extending their use of this software to handle their hiring and recruitment processes makes perfect sense for their organization, especially since it eliminates the need for yet another standalone tool. If you're curious about the specific mechanics of using HubSpot as your ATS, our blog breaks down the implementation considerations step by step.
We'll discuss the crucial decision organizations often face when considering HubSpot for recruitment: choosing between Professional (Pro) and Enterprise level ATS Hubs. This choice isn't merely about your budget – it's about matching your recruitment needs with the correct feature set.
Remember that either tier will require you to combine your existing HubSpot Marketing Hub membership with their Service Hub or Sales Hub to create your ideal, all-in-one ATS solution.
While Enterprise includes all Pro features, it also offers advanced capabilities that might be essential for larger organizations or those with complex recruitment workflows.
This article will investigate the differences between using HubSpot Pro and Enterprise as your ATS. We'll explore each tier's specific features for recruitment, examine real-world use cases, and break down the cost implications to help you make an informed decision for your organization.
Whether you're a small business looking to streamline hiring or a large enterprise managing multiple recruitment teams, understanding these distinctions will be crucial for your success.
When leveraging HubSpot Pro as an applicant tracking system, you're tapping into a powerful combination of marketing, sales, and service features that work together seamlessly. Overall, HubSpot Pro has distinct features that are capable of transforming your recruitment process from a fragmented series of tasks into a streamlined, easy-to-use operation.
There are three different hubs: marketing hub pro, service hub pro, and sales hub pro.
Each Hub serves a specific purpose in the recruitment process:
It's critical to understand that while each Hub has distinct features, they all work together seamlessly to help automate your entire recruitment process.
For example, a candidate might:
You don't necessarily need all three Hubs, and HubSpot doesn't require you to have all 3 to use their features. In fact, many businesses successfully use just Marketing + Service Hub Pro or Marketing + Sales Hub Pro, depending on their specific recruitment needs and processes. Your particular combination of services should be based on your business needs and discretion.
Remember that all Hubs share certain core features like contact management and basic automation, but each adds specialized tools for its primary function in the recruitment process.
Marketing Hub Pro serves as your candidate-attraction powerhouse. It boasts sophisticated email marketing tools that will let you nurture your talent pools with targeted content on various platforms, such as social, ads, or your own website or landing pages. Meanwhile, its automation features can handle routine communications such as application confirmations and interview reminders.
Content capabilities enable you to create professional job postings that integrate directly with your careers site, and social media tools help distribute these opportunities across multiple platforms. The built-in analytics provide clear insights into which recruitment channels deliver your best candidates.
Marketing Hub Pro: Think of a "candidate attraction engine" that handles automated job posting and recruitment content distribution and creates and manages your careers-focused landing pages.
Service Hub Pro transforms candidate management from a fragmented, manual process into a structured, fluid system. The candidate ticketing system adapts beautifully to track your candidates' applications through their various stages, from initial screening to final offers.
In Service Hub, you can build custom pipelines to mirror your organization's recruitment workflow. Service hub's knowledge base is a feature that creates a centralized repository for recruitment documentation, interview guides, and onboarding materials. Team collaboration tools ensure everyone involved in hiring decisions stays aligned and informed.
Service Hub Pro: Think about this hub as the complete candidate experience manager, where you can track all of your applicants and control the process.
Sales Hub Pro enhances your ability to tie actions and campaigns back to revenue when what you're doing affects company revenue. For example if you operate a staffing or recruitment agency where placing candidates or contractors within a company impacts the revenue you make. Pipeline tracking let's you see where candidates are getting stuck in your sales process while also helping you forecast revenue. Meeting scheduling tools eliminate the back-and-forth typically involved when coordinating interviews.
Sales Hub's pipeline management features are particularly valuable for recruitment agencies who face the burden of managing multiple client requirements simultaneously and in an organized fashion. Custom properties let you track candidate qualifications, experience levels, and other critical data points that inform hiring decisions.
Sales Hub Pro: This hub is your revenue visualizer. It assists you in maintaining proper context when looking at candidates across companies/contracts for staffing and recruiting companies.
When leveraging HubSpot Pro as an applicant tracking system, you're accessing an integrated suite of tools that streamlines every aspect of recruitment. Let's break down how each of the three Hubs offered in HubSpot's Pro plan will contribute to your hiring process:
HubSpot Pro Hubs are especially suited for small to medium-sized businesses that need a scalable recruitment solution that will grow with them – without enterprise-level complexity.
If your organization typically manages dozens (rather than hundreds) of open positions simultaneously, Pro could provide your business with the perfect balance of functionality and usability. It's particularly effective for companies that prioritize quality of hire over volume and need strong candidate relationship management tools.
What makes HubSpot Pro particularly attractive is its scalability. Especially attractive to startups and other companies in any growth stage, Huspot Pro can adapt to your needs over time. It grows with you.
You can start with the features you find most essential and successful, and then, in time, you can gradually implement more sophisticated workflows and automation as your processes mature. This flexibility ensures you're never paying for more functionality than you need while maintaining the option to expand when the time is right.
The key is recognizing that HubSpot Pro provides all the core ATS functionality most organizations need without the overwhelming complexity that can come with enterprise-level systems. It offers a strategic combination of powerful features, user-friendly interfaces, and reasonable pricing, making it an excellent choice for businesses that build efficient, effective recruitment processes.
When it comes to candidate management, HubSpot Pro offers everything most growing organizations require to track their applicants. You can create detailed candidate profiles with custom properties, track your applicants through customizable recruitment stages, and automate follow-up communications in one place. The platform also excels at centralizing resume storage and maintaining consistent candidate scoring systems across your team.
Client/contract management becomes significantly more streamlined with HubSpot Pro's ability to create separate pipelines for different departments or clients/contracts. Whether working with multiple hiring managers or many external clients, you can track specific preferences and requirements, maintain detailed communication histories, and generate custom reports on recruitment progress, all in one centralized location. The automation capabilities ensure stakeholders stay informed without the need for manual updates.
Team collaboration is where HubSpot Pro also tends to shine bright. On this platform, your recruitment team can share candidate feedback through a centralized system, assign and track tasks, and maintain consistent evaluation criteria across all positions. HubSpot Pro's accessibility ensures team members can access recruitment data from anywhere, while its scheduling features eliminate the usual back-and-forth of interview coordination.
In short, HubSpot Pro is the ideal choice for:
Moving up a level in sophistication from HubSpot Pro, HubSpot Enterprise builds upon the robust foundation of Pro's ATS capabilities, offering every feature available in the Pro tier while also bringing powerful tools designed for complex recruitment operations into the mix.
When you combine HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise with either Service Hub Enterprise or Sales Hub Enterprise (or both), you unlock advanced features that transform how large organizations manage their recruitment processes. Marketing Hub Enterprise enhances your candidate attraction efforts with sophisticated custom event triggers and predictive scoring to identify the most promising applicants.
Service Hub Enterprise introduces hierarchical team structures and comprehensive playbooks that standardize recruitment processes across various departments.
Sales Hub Enterprise adds a crucial layer of functionality through its capabilities of custom objects for complex data relationships, advanced permissions for large teams, and enterprise-grade security features like single sign-on (SSO).
This comprehensive suite of tools makes Enterprise particularly valuable for organizations managing high-volume recruitment, multiple hiring teams, in need of or complex client relationships.
For large HR departments and recruitment agencies managing complex hiring processes, HubSpot Enterprise elevates the ATS experience with advanced features designed for sophisticated operations.
Building on the robust foundation of Pro features, Enterprise offers additional tools that transform recruitment processes for organizations operating at scale.
Marketing Hub Enterprise enhances your recruitment marketing capabilities through sophisticated automation and analytics. Custom event triggers allow you to create highly personalized candidate journeys based on specific actions or qualifications. For instance, when a senior developer applies, they can automatically receive different communication sequences than entry-level candidates.
The predictive lead scoring functionality, when adapted for recruitment, becomes a powerful candidate scoring tool. It analyzes historical hiring data to identify the characteristics of successful placements, helping prioritize candidates most likely to be a good fit. Combined with advanced reporting capabilities, you gain deeper insights into your recruitment funnel and can make data-driven decisions about your talent acquisition strategy.
Service Hub Enterprise introduces features crucial for large recruitment teams and complex organizational structures. The hierarchical team's feature allows you to organize recruiters by department, region, or specialty while maintaining clear lines of communication and accountability.
This feature becomes particularly valuable when managing multiple recruitment teams across different locations or industries, such as in international or multi-regional organizations.
Enterprise-level playbooks provide standardized processes for different types of roles or recruitment scenarios, ensuring consistency across large teams. Goal-setting capabilities allow recruitment managers to track team performance against key metrics like time-to-hire or quality-of-hire, with sophisticated tracking and reporting tools to measure progress.
Sales Hub Enterprise brings powerful tools for managing complex recruitment relationships and data structures. Custom objects allow you to create sophisticated data models beyond standard candidate and job records – perfect for managing complex relationships between candidates, positions, hiring managers, and client companies.
Advanced permissions ensure sensitive candidate information remains secure while allowing appropriate access levels for different team members.
Single sign-on (SSO) capabilities streamline access management across large organizations while maintaining security standards. These features are particularly valuable for recruitment agencies managing multiple client relationships or enterprise organizations with complex approval hierarchies.
Enterprise-level features across all three Hubs work together to create a comprehensive recruitment ecosystem capable of handling:
The Enterprise tier transforms HubSpot from a capable ATS into a complete talent acquisition platform suitable for organizations with complex recruitment needs and large-scale hiring operations.
Sometimes, using HubSpot Enterprise as an ATS just makes sense. Enterprise organizations and large staffing agencies face unique recruitment challenges that demand more sophisticated, multilayered, and complex solutions. HubSpot Enterprise becomes particularly valuable when your recruitment operations reach certain levels of complexity and scale. Here are some signs to gauge where your company falls.
Custom Objects, a sophisticated feature in HubSpot Enterprise, is essential when your organization needs to track intricate relationships between different recruitment entities.
For example:
The predictive scoring capabilities in Enterprise transform how larger organizations evaluate talent. This feature can be particularly valuable to hirers when:
Your recruitment team can leverage historical hiring data to identify the most promising candidates earlier, significantly reducing time-to-hire for critical positions.
Enterprise-level reporting capabilities become crucial as recruitment operations scale. Organizations benefit from:
These insights help organizations make data-driven recruitment strategies and resource allocation decisions.
For organizations managing sensitive recruitment data across multiple teams or clients, Enterprise-level security features provide:
You ought to consider HubSpot Enterprise for your business or HR department when your organization has outgrown pro features due to:
HubSpot Enterprise as an ATS makes sense for organizations that must maintain efficiency and compliance at scale while providing a superior experience for candidates and recruitment teams. The additional investment in Enterprise features pays off through improved recruitment outcomes, better data management, and reduced administrative overhead.
Remember that you must base your transition from Pro to Enterprise on genuine operational needs rather than just your organization's size. In other words, not all large international companies need to transition from Pro to Enterprise. Be sure to consider all factors first.
Some larger organizations might be well-served by Pro features, while smaller organizations with complex recruitment processes might benefit from Enterprise capabilities.
Understanding the investment required for each HubSpot configuration helps organizations make informed decisions about their ATS solution. Let's break down the costs for both Pro and Enterprise combinations.
It may be helpful to consider different Hub combinations when implementing HubSpot Pro as your ATS. Marketing Pro includes a minimum of three users:
**Enterprise pricing reflects the advanced features and increased user count (Marketing Enterprise includes a minimum of five users):
Choosing between HubSpot Pro and Enterprise for your ATS needs requires careful consideration of your organization's current situation and future goals. Let's explore the key factors that should influence your decision.
The right choice depends on finding the sweet spot between functionality and investment. While Pro offers robust features for growing organizations, Enterprise provides the advanced tools necessary for large-scale complex recruitment operations.
Ready to determine which HubSpot ATS solution best fits your organization's needs? Our team at Eternal Works specializes in implementing and optimizing HubSpot as an ATS.
Contact us for a free consultation to explore how we can help streamline your recruitment processes with HubSpot.