Recruitment software that is not gated behind the top tier

Comparing entry prices across recruitment software is misleading unless you compare what the entry price buys. A staffing desk that buys an applicant tracking package and then discovers that client relationship records, activity history against accounts and the outbound layer sit a tier up has not bought a CRM; it has bought a requisition tracker and a second conversation with a sales team.

Surhires's Starter plan at $39 per user per month carries the candidate pipeline, job posting to LinkedIn and Indeed, one job board connector, candidate search and tagging, WhatsApp basics and the mobile app, capped at five hundred candidates. Professional at $49 adds AI matching with one hundred credits per user per month, resume parsing and bulk import, AutoShortlist, duplicate detection, the full WhatsApp Business API and placement invoicing.

These prices are provisional pending buyer validation, and we say so on the pricing page rather than in a footnote. Enterprise at $99 per user per month also carries a $2,000 per month platform fee, which is stated up front because finding it late is worse than reading it early.

Bullhorn implementation is quoted separately from licences and the reported range is wide, because the work is genuinely variable. A single-office perm agency and a multi-entity group running pay and bill through the same instance are not the same project, and a fixed number would be a fiction.

Surhires is self-serve to first value. You sign up, import a CSV, and the vertical template for your desk type configures stages, fields and dashboards. That covers a solo recruiter or a small agency without a call. It does not cover a migration off an established system with ten years of attachment history and custom fields, and we do not pretend otherwise: Bullhorn migration assistance is in build for the Wave 1 release and is run as a scoped concierge project rather than a generic importer.

Twelve named agents ship in Surhires, from job intake through resume screening, match scoring, outreach personalisation, reply handling, interview scheduling and placement risk. The Match Scorer shows which requirement drove each point rather than returning a bare number, because a score a recruiter cannot interrogate is a score a recruiter will not trust.

Two of the twelve are not built yet. The AI Notetaker and the AI Sourcing Agent are planned, and they are described in the future tense everywhere on this site. If automatic call notes are a hard requirement this quarter, that is a real reason to look elsewhere, and you should hear it from us rather than discover it in week three.

Where Bullhorn's AI search and match is a paid add-on, Surhires's matching is inside the Professional plan with a credit allowance stated on the pricing page. Neither approach is wrong. The difference matters when you are modelling cost per seat across thirty recruiters.

Candidates answer WhatsApp. In the UK, India, much of Europe, Latin America and the Gulf, a WhatsApp message gets a reply when an email does not, and recruiters have been running their desks from personal phones for years because the CRM never gave them anywhere else to do it. That is a compliance problem as much as a productivity one.

Surhires ships WhatsApp Business API messaging as a first-class channel: templates, opt-in capture, conversation history written to the candidate record, and message threads that survive a desk changing hands. Email cadences and general candidate communication are shipping and being extended. Nurture sequences are in build, and true multi-channel sequencing across email, WhatsApp and SMS in one flow is planned rather than live.

If you are a large enterprise staffing group running pay and bill through your recruitment platform, Bullhorn is the right answer and switching would be a mistake. The back-office depth, the VMS integrations, the timesheet and invoicing chain and the marketplace of partner products around it are the product, and no newcomer replicates that estate by writing a comparison page.

The same holds if your clients submit requisitions through a VMS you already have wired in, if your finance team reconciles contractor pay against the same system, or if your compliance function has already accepted an established vendor through a security review that took months. The cost of leaving is not the licence fee; it is the year of process rebuilding on the other side.

Surhires is a better fit for an agency of three to fifty recruiters that wants the candidate relationship layer, AI matching and outbound in one product at a published price, and that does not need pay and bill inside the same system.

Surhires is not an HRIS, a payroll system, a background-check provider or an assessment platform. It is recruitment software: candidate relationships, outbound sourcing, client submittals and the placement pipeline through to the first invoice. Background checks, assessments and e-signature run through integrations rather than being rebuilt inside the product.

There is no pay-and-bill module and none is planned for Wave 1. Timesheets, contractor payroll and margin reconciliation live in the systems you already use. Placement invoicing is shipping and being extended, and it produces the first invoice against a placement; it is not a billing engine for a thousand-contractor book.

SOC 2 is described as a readiness programme in progress, with a Type I report as the first deliverable. We do not claim a Type II report until one has been issued, and the trust page carries the current state rather than a badge.