Choosing recruitment software goes wrong in a predictable way: the shortlist is built from feature lists, the demos all look capable, and the decision ends up resting on which interface felt nicer on the day. There is a better test, and it takes ten minutes per vendor. Bring your own numbers, and ask each product to produce them. On the worked example of a small desk, those numbers are $2,800 cost per hire with 54% of it agency fees, 31 days to hire with 26 of them before an offer exists, 50 applicants per hire, and an agency fee break-even at 5.7 hires a year. Every one of those comes from four fields: a source and a date per applicant, a stage with a change date, an outcome per interview and offer, and the spend. A product that cannot produce them from a sample of your data is not a bad product, but it is not a system of record either, and knowing that before you sign is worth more than any comparison table. The free sheets on this site work all four figures with no account.
Build the shortlist from your constraint, not from features
If agency fees dominate your spend, the important product decision is about client and fee records. If days dominate, it is about scheduling. If applicants per hire dominates, it is about sourcing and advertising. One of those is usually clearly yours.
Run the same test on every vendor
Same sample of applicants, same four figures, same ten minutes. Vendors are used to demoing their strengths; asking all of them the same narrow question is what makes the demos comparable. Keep the sample small and identical: twenty applicants across two roles is enough to expose whether the fields you need are actually being kept.
Check the exit at the same time
Ask what an export contains and how long you keep access after cancelling. Your applicant history is the asset, and a product you cannot leave owns it. Ask specifically whether the export includes stage history and interview outcomes or only the current state of each applicant, because the history is what every trend figure is computed from and it is the part most often missing.
Questions people ask about best recruitment software
How many products should I shortlist?
Three is usually enough for a small desk. Beyond that the marginal difference is smaller than the cost of your own time, and the ten-minute test above will separate three products cleanly.
Does the biggest brand mean the best fit?
Not for a small desk. The larger products are built for requisition approval chains and multi-stage governance that a two-person hiring team does not have, and the cost of that capability is complexity you pay for daily.
What if none of them can produce my figures?
Then keep using the free sheets for the figures and buy the product for the record, which is a legitimate split. Just make the decision knowingly rather than discovering it in month three.