Top 10 Recruiting Software Vendors and Market Forecast 2023-2028

In 2023, the global Recruiting Software market surged to nearly $5 billion, growing by 10.4%. The top 10 vendors commanded a significant 52.4% market share, with Microsoft leading at 7.5%, followed by First Advantage, Sterling Talent Solutions, SAP, and Checkr.

Our APPS TOP 500 Market Report (Preview) covers hundreds of Recruiting software vendors, offering deep insights into market dynamics, vendor strengths, AI investments, customer momentum, and go-to-market strategies providing valuable perspectives on market trends and challenges.

Discover thousands of Recruiting software Customer Wins with the ARTW Technographics Platform, an essential resource for technology enthusiasts, sales business leaders, and data-driven marketing executives, offering curated insights into the evolving landscape of the software industry, including the latest developments in Recruiting software.

We ask the simple question: Who’s buying Recruiting applications from whom and why? And we provide the answers – supported by decades of research – to our clients around the world. (Sample from our Apps Database)

Through our forecast period, the Recruiting applications market size is expected to reach $6.4 billion by 2028, compared with $5 billion in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate of 5.1%.

Source: Apps Run The World, June 2024

Top 10 Recruiting Software Vendors

These top 10 software vendors are ranked by their latest annual product revenues attributable to Recruiting market segment. Check the methodology section below as well as our FAQ section on how we conduct research for these market reports.

Source: Apps Run The World, June 2024

Other vendors included in the report are: ADP, Agile-1, Accurate Background, Appcast, Inc, Asure Software, Avionte Staffing Software, BambooHR, Brazen Technologies, CareerArc, CareerBuilder, Cegid, Cisive, Community Brands, Cornerstone OnDemand, Dayforce, Ellucian, ELMO Talent Management Software, Epicor, Fountain HR Software, Frontier Software, Gloat, Gupy, Gloat, Greenhouse Software, HarQen, Haufe, HealthStream Inc., Harver, Hilan, HireVue, iCIMS, Infor, Jobvite, Kingdee, Muse, Modern Hire, Monjin Interviews Pvt. Ltd, mroads, NEOGOV, Oracle, P&I Personal & Informatik AG, Paychex, Paycom, Paycor, Paylocity, Phenom People, PSI Services LLC, Randstad Sourceright, Recruit Holdings, SHL, ServiceNow, SilkRoad, SmartRecruiters, Symphony Talent, Talentia Software, Textkernel, UKG, VidCruiter, Visma, Work4, Workable, Zoominfo, and many others.

Exhibit 4 shows our projections for the HCM enterprise applications market by HCM sub-segment, based on the buying preferences and the customer propensity to invest in new software within those industries as they continue to upgrade and replace many legacy industry-specific applications that have been identified and tracked in our Buyer Insight Database.

Core HR Market Definitions and Forecast Assumptions

Human capital management includes such functions as eRecruiting (applicant tracking), Onboarding (employee profile), Performance Management (assessment, goal management, succession planning), Core HR (personnel administration, benefits, compensation management, payroll), Workforce Management (absence management, activity tracking, scheduling, time and attendance), and eLearning (learning management system). For complete definition, please see below or visit our Taxonomy page.

Drivers behind the growth of Core HR applications market include

1. As sexual harassment becomes a focal point of social-media conversations, companies may have to step up their internal control measures by investing in new Big Data and social-media monitoring tools in order to respond to such complaints in real-time.
2. HR policies may have to be revamped in order to be better aligned with corporate social responsibilities, putting the interests of shareholders and public opinions ahead of any star performer.
3. eLearning could be given a boost in 2020 as part of US government tax reform, resulting in more companies like Apple, Disney and others to invest more in education programs for employees.
4. Succession planning becomes more important than ever to ensure smooth transitioning from one corporate reporting structure to the next.
5. Companies, especially those that operate in multiple countries, are searching for a system of record to minimize attrition, groom talented employees, while addressing complicated compliance requirements.
6. Digital transformation in response to new user demands, market forces.
7. Restructuring of HR processes to accelerate for next decade.
8. Heavily modified Core HR systems entail rising costs
9. Employers are reevaluating the performance management process by giving workers continuous feedback with consistent and transparent metrics

Inhibitors include the following trends that cut across multiple Core HR segments:

• The rise of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning pose challenges for HR executives as hiring and firing decisions may include unintended biases when screening and selecting job applicants or redundancies because of flawed metrics, algorithms and even job descriptions.
• Potential changes to Affordable Care Act and other key legislations could undermine HCM’s near-term growth. Shifting regulatory and compliance demands prompt stopgap measures.
• For eLearning vendors, expanding a content library is a challenge. The same applies to fending off the ubiquity of Youtube and Lynda from LinkedIn. The issue is whether users are better off with courseware or do-it-yourself microlearning development tools.
• Eroding trust in the workplace, lack of employee engagement; Bring Your Own Device trend engenders Core HR system distrust as well.
• The move toward continuous, ad-hoc and spontaneous feedback process will entail micro services that assimilate project management and team collaboration, requiring HR performance management apps vendors to combine personalized evaluation and unstructured communication. The challenge is to deliver tangible benefits for small work groups, while still using the same metrics to drive process improvement for the entire organization.
• The push to have continuous feedback and performance management could redefine corporate hierarchy as line managers and team members alike are calling for greater transparency, collaboration and better metrics to evaluate and improve one’s career path, while achieving work-life balance that adapts to the changing demographics.
• The bottom line is that individual performance will have to be measured as much as that of the team.  Similar to any successful software development, small teams are more effective than large and matrix-reporting hierarchies.

In other words, companies may be better off investing in tools that put more emphasis on team performance than what an individual can bring to the table. With the advent of telecommuting, much of the work is handled by small teams that spread around the world.

The stakes are much higher to sustain a team’s performance by leveraging tools that ensure smooth handoff of project milestones and deliverables from one person to another and even from one day to the next. Communication is the key, so is accountability and trust in the system. All these would require team members to share the workload as well as the reward, recognition and team-wide compensation.

Learning may well be the glue that binds together performance, compensation and competency management, delivering short tutorials and training videos on general topics and industry-specific subjects as in ViDesktop for legal and Arcoro for construction.

For many learning apps vendors, expanding a content library is a challenge. The same applies to fending off the ubiquity of Youtube and Lynda from LinkedIn.

All major HCM vendors including SAP, Infor and Workday have set their sight on Learning as one of their key areas of growth for 2020. The issue is whether users are better off with courseware, do-it-yourself microlearning development tools, or something perhaps more structured and extensible from HCM suite vendors. Another issue is whether the current crop of learning vendors are able to meet training requirements for new jobs like biofuels energy traders or drone operators that barely existed a few years ago.

Talent Acquisition Market Definitions and Forecast Assumptions

Human capital management includes such functions as eRecruiting (applicant tracking), Onboarding (employee profile), Performance Management (assessment, goal management, succession planning), Core HR (personnel administration, benefits, compensation management, payroll), Workforce Management (absence management, activity tracking, scheduling, time and attendance), and eLearning (learning management system). For a complete definition, please see below or visit our Taxonomy page.

Drivers behind the growth of Talent Acquisition applications market include

1. The onslaught of Google Hire for recruiting, Workplace by Facebook for org-charting and team collaboration, and the addition of LinkedIn to Microsoft’s evolving talent acquisition strategy is a mixed blessing for HCM vendors, resulting in heightened competition as well as partnerships(LinkedIn investing in Cornerstone On Demand). It raises the specter of whether the tech giants will redefine talent acquisition by leveraging their ability to influence billions of users thus expanding the market, or simply using their branding and pricing power to squeeze smaller players.
2. The prevalence of contingent labor management, which has extended from hourly, seasonal and low-skill contract workers to experienced contractors, could retreat as HR executives grapple with issues such as job insecurity, sluggish wage growth and globalization backlash.
3. By releasing more detailed reports on use of contingent labor management, companies could benefit from greater transparency.
4. Contingent labor management vendors will be well served to document successful transfers of statuses from contingent labor to full-time employment. Similarly, any increased demand in the use of contractors should be a harbinger of a more robust economy, resulting in a more balanced and productive workforce.
5. Aging population, coupled with increased emphasis on work-life balance, will continue to pose challenges for employers and recruiters.
6. Social recruiting, video interviews and innovative ways to brand a workplace have resonated with a new generation of employees as well as recruiters aiming to take their high-volume recruitment efforts to the mobile generation.
7. Digital transformation in response to new user demands, market forces.
8. Restructuring of HR processes to accelerate for next decade.
9. Heavily modified recruiting systems entail rising costs.

Inhibitors include the following trends that cut across multiple Talent Acquisition segments:

• The rise of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning pose challenges for HR executives as hiring and firing decisions may include unintended biases when screening and selecting job applicants or redundancies because of flawed metrics, algorithms and even job descriptions.
• Employer branding may fall short of expectations on the parts of recruiters and candidates.
• Scaling out marketing offerings to enable employers to communicate with salaried and hourly workers across multiple platforms – text, video, chat, email – will be key to long-term success.
• Expansion by Recruit Holdings and CareerBuilder, which own some of the biggest job boards, could render some Talent Acquisition vendors less relevant.
• Any change to LinkedIn by its new owner Microsoft to rope off more resume content could have considerable ramifications for the Talent Acquisition market.

Workforce Management Market Definitions and Forecast Assumptions

Human capital management includes such functions as eRecruiting (applicant tracking), Onboarding (employee profile), Performance Management (assessment, goal management, succession planning), Core HR (personnel administration, benefits, compensation management, payroll), Workforce Management (absence management, activity tracking, scheduling, time and attendance), and eLearning (learning management system). For complete definition, please see below or visit our Taxonomy page.

Drivers behind the growth of Workforce Management applications market include

1. Artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve scheduling forecasting and workforce analytics
2. Digital transformation in response to new user demands, market forces
3. Restructuring of HR processes to accelerate for next decade
4. Anticipate, execute WFM measures to address human capital risks
5. Heavily modified WFM systems entail rising costs.
6. Unbundling of work, requiring better measurement of tasks, risks as well as scheduling and time and attendance.

Inhibitors include the following trends that cut across multiple Workforce Management segments:

• Online retailing is having considerable impact on brick and mortar operations, which have been one of the biggest spenders of workforce management applications.
• Growing influence of Amazon and its Cloud infrastructure division AWS is driving a wedge between users that run AWS and those that do not, a move that could benefit AWS competitors.
• The structural changes to the retail marketplace is likely to redefine task management and other WFM functions as some firms are becoming fulfillment houses, rather than full-service retailers.
• Time clock hardware not in sync with software release cycles
• Easy to use reporting tools remain elusive to line of business and HR managers
• Shifting regulatory and compliance demands prompt stopgap measures
• Eroding trust in the workplace, lack of employee engagement; Bring Your Own Device trend engenders WFM system distrust as well

HCM Win/Loss Analysis As Part Of Enterprise Applications Buyer Insight Customer Database

On the buyer side, customers are investing in HCM applications based on new features and capabilities that are expected to replace their existing legacy systems. In many cases, competitive upgrades and replacements that could have a profound impact on future market-share changes will become more widespread.

Since 2010, our global team of researchers have been studying the patterns of the latest HCM software purchases by customers around the world, aggregating massive amounts of data points that form the basis of our forecast assumptions and perhaps the rise and fall of certain vendors and their products on a quarterly basis.

What follows is a sample of our latest findings, which are being updated continuously. Each year our research team identifies tens of thousands of these HCM customer wins and losses from public and proprietary sources.

The research results are being incorporated into regular updates in our Enterprise Applications Buyer Insight Customer Database. You can access the Quarterly Win/Loss Analysis Scoreboard and our Enterprise Applications Buyer Insight Customer Database by becoming a subscriber.

Source: Apps Run The World, June 2024

Methodology

Similar to any of the hundreds of reports that we have published since 2010, HCM Top 500 is a labor of love. Since 2013, our team of researchers have been conducting rigorous research on thousands of HCM vendors, surveying them quarterly, reviewing their products at even shorter intervals because of the compressed Cloud release cycle, and discussing HR vision with their customers to better understand user needs as well as different paths to upgrade and replace their existing systems.

Each year we also attend many industry-wide and vendor-specific user conferences – HR Tech, Dreamforce, SAPPHIRENOW, Oracle Open World, just to name a few, to gauge what customers are looking for.

Throughout this process comes a rich database of more than 2,000 HCM vendors as well as over 50,000 HCM customers that have been touched one form or another through regular surveys, phone and in-person interviews, email exchanges, and social media interactions, etc.

On a proactively basis, we contact the vendors directly to tabulate their latest quarterly and annual revenues by HCM segment, vertical market, revenue type, region, country and customer size.

We supplement their written responses with our own primary research to determine quarterly and yearly growth rates in each of the 22 segments and 21 verticals, in addition to customer wins to ascertain whether these are net new purchases or expansions of existing implementations.

Another dimension of our quantitative research process is through continuous improvement of our customer database, which stores more than one million records on the enterprise software landscape of over 100,000 organizations around the world.

The database provides customer insight and contextual information on what types of HCM, enterprise software systems and other relevant technologies are they running and their propensity to invest further with their current or new suppliers as part of their overall HCM and IT transformation projects to stay competitive, fend off threats from disruptive forces, or comply with internal mandates to improve overall enterprise efficiency.

The result is a combination of supply-side data and demand-generation customer insight that allows our clients to better position themselves in anticipation of the next wave that will reshape the HCM marketplace for years to come.

HCM Market Taxonomy

Definition of Human Capital Management (HCM) Applications

Core HR and Performance Management

Talent Acquisition 

Workforce Management

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