Manatal Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

Manatal’s recruiting software has the following features:

• Career site
• Syndicated job posting
• Recruitment marketing
• Candidate profiles
• Applicant tracking system (ATS)
• Automatic resume parsing and candidate matching
• Candidate relationship management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Skills assessments
• Interview tools
• Internal scheduling tools
• Employee referrals
• Team collaboration features
• Staffing/recruiting agency access
• Templates
• Reporting and analytics
• Integrations

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Manatal allows you to curate a customized, branded career site to engage visitors with dynamic content, such as video. You can post one job to several job boards simultaneously, and Manatal captures and organizes candidate information in candidate profiles as applications start coming in.

Manatal’s ATS enables you to set up customizable, drag-and-drop pipelines to easily visualize where candidates are in the process. It also surfaces the best-fit candidates for your job postings automatically, which saves you time.

There are a range of features to support internal planning and collaboration as well, such as the Activities module and built-in chat to facilitate communication among team members.

We tested Manatal on a Windows laptop, using the Google Chrome browser. Approaching the software from a “Company” use case, rather than an “Agency,” we weren’t able to test out some additional features that agencies would use in the system.

When you log into Manatal the first time, you see a sleek, simple interface. The system suggests three tasks to get started: “Create a Candidate,” “Create a Department” and “Create a Job.” You have to choose the “Create a Department” first as you cannot create a new job without having created a department.

The main screen after logging into Manatal

Database and Data Management

Manatal stands out for its robust, searchable database. You can structure your data using customizable data fields and conduct Boolean searches to surface the job, candidate, client or company you’re looking for.

Manatal also securely stores multiple versions of candidate documents, such as resumes and cover letters to their candidate profile and alerts you to duplicate records that you can choose to merge or keep separate. While testing the platform, however, we found there is no central spot to find documents in Manatal. Rather, you have to access documents within a candidate profile.

The database also keeps track of any message or profile annotation history. For easier searching, you can apply customizable tags to candidate profiles.

Serves a Range of Use Cases

While many recruiting software providers focus on in-house hiring needs and maybe offer the ability to offer portal access to external recruiters, Manatal is flexible to serve a broader range of use cases: in-house hiring, a hybrid in-house/outsourced hiring scenario or entirely outsourced hiring.

Agency use cases get the same features out of Manatal that a company’s in-house recruiting would, such as the ATS, candidate profiles and onboarding. However, additional features for agency customers include a dedicated client view and client access control, resume watermarking and revenue tracking and forecasting across clients, jobs and specific team members.

Manatal’s core features include the career site, job post syndication, enriched candidate profiles and more.

Career Site

Manatal enables you to create a customizable career site that’s compatible with WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and other leading content management platforms. You can embed dynamic visual and video media and custom application forms with custom fields. Best of all, you don’t need any coding skills to curate an engaging job site that reflects your company’s brand.

Alternatively, you can integrate your existing career page via application programming interface (API) for streamlined integration with Manatal’s ATS.

You first have to enable the career page under “Administration.” After doing that, you’ll see “Career Page” in the main menu bar. You can select one of three basic layouts for your page, choose one main color, edit headers and more.

We were able to add a new form easily to our career page that comes with default required fields for a name, email address, phone number, cover letter and resume. These default form fields cannot be deleted or edited, but you can add new fields. All fields are general text boxes, so you can’t choose different field types.

You can insert custom fields into application forms that appear on your career site.

While the career page setup was simple, you’re limited in your layout, color and field formatting options.

Syndicated Job Posting

One of Manatal’s call-out features is its AI-powered Job Description Generator. You input the title and it generates a job description.

Enter a job title, and Manatal will automatically generate an editable job description for you.

However, in the process of testing, we learned that you have to go through quite a few steps to access this feature. You must first become a paying subscriber, essentially ending your free trial. Then, you have to enable Manatal AI under “Administration,” where you’ll be prompted to email the support team. Then, for security purposes, the security team will email you to verify your account. Overall, it took about two days to get access to Manatal AI.

When we created a job manually in Manatal, we could either fill out a form or use one of three sample templates. Creating a new job with a built-in template was quick and easy. We chose the “Sales Manager” template that already had the job description, responsibilities and qualifications populated, although we were able to edit the information.

We then tried creating a job through a form. We entered the title and department as a starting point. From there, you can paste the job description and do so much more, such as add a location, status, tags and activities. Any job description you create can be turned into a template to save time when you hire for that same type of role again in the future.

Once your job description is ready to go, you can post to more than 2,500 free and premium job boards at once, such as Indeed, LinkedIn and Monster. You can also post your job openings to social media networks using a shareable link to expand your post’s reach even more.

Candidate Profiles

Another standout feature of Manatal’s platform is its ability to enrich candidate profiles by automatically parsing and importing data from external sites, such as a candidate’s LinkedIn profile. That way, you don’t need to copy and paste information from one browser window to another. Using Manatal’s Chrome extension, People-Match, pulls candidate data from more than 20 social media and public platforms into Manatal.

Import candidate data from their LinkedIn profile into their candidate profile in Manatal

We tried the Chrome extension on LinkedIn and were able to add the person as a contact or candidate for a specific job. When adding a candidate through the extension, you can click on the link to navigate back to the candidate profile in Manatal. We were only able to see one of two candidates in the main candidates section but could see both in the respective jobs they were attached to.

We also were only able to find our newly added contact via the search bar and were not sure where the list of contacts is housed within the system. After consulting Manatal’s online documentation resources, we learned that you have to enable the “Contact and Guest Menu” under the “Administration” tab.

Applicant Tracking System

Manatal helps you maintain oversight of your hiring pipeline by enabling you to create a customizable pipeline, drag and drop candidates as they progress and view them on a Kanban board or list.

Kanban view of the candidate pipeline

List view of the candidate pipeline

When you post a role, the system scans it to learn the core skills and requirements And then cross-references that data with candidates in your talent pool to identify the best-fit talent. The ATS bulk parses resumes and detects, extracts, classifies and scores candidates’ information automatically in batches for a particular role.

In the testing environment, we noticed a percentage next to each candidate to gauge their fit for a role but it would be better to have more context to this percentage and dig into the details of where the candidate fits well for the role and how they fall short.

Manatal’s ATS supports multiple languages, even right-to-left languages, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and those with special characters, such as Chinese and Thai, making Manatal a great option for companies that operate and hire in a variety of countries.

Candidate Relationship Management

Manatal allows you to communicate with candidates via email or SMS. To save time, utilize the email templates to bulk send to candidates. Manatal syncs with Outlook/Office365 or Gmail and keeps a history of interaction between recruiters and candidates.

It was easy to contact a candidate via email directly from within Manatal without having to navigate to the email inbox in a separate window.

You can send an email to candidates directly from within Manatal

At first, we couldn’t find the email template function but learned in Manatal’s online documentation that you can set up email templates by either navigating to “Settings” or by clicking on your profile icon in the upper righthand corner and clicking “Settings.”

There, we were pleased to see several built-in templates, saving us time from building our own from scratch. Out-of-box email templates include:

• Application acknowledgment
• Candidate rejection
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data consent
• Invitation to phone or in-person/virtual interview
• Application status update
• Referral outreach

Interviewing Tools

Interviews with candidates sync between Manatal’s Activities calendar and your Outlook/Office 365 or Google calendar. With Manatal, you can also create your own interview scorecards to ensure each candidate is evaluated fairly.

The interview scorecard function is tucked away in the “Administration” tab where you first have to enable the interview scorecard feature. It was easy to create a new scorecard by adding a field name and type, such as open-ended text, a number, a rating, a checkbox and other formats.

Scheduling Tools

Manatal’s scheduling tools are geared towards internal planning and organization and doesn’t offer a self-scheduling tool for candidates who are invited to interview.

In Manatal, you can create activities, tasks and events to your activity calendar in Manatal that syncs with your Outlook/Office 365/ Teams or Google Calendar or email inbox. You’ll receive automatic reminders of upcoming activities and they’re displayed on your main dashboard, so you’ll never lose track of what you need to do and when.

It’s very easy to create an activity and there are various ways you can do so, such as by navigating to activities in the main navigation bar or a candidate’s profile or by clicking on the big plus sign at the top right.

Create activities in Manatal for phone calls, interviews and more

When hiring collaboratively, you’ll want to use Manatal’s Activities feature to assign tasks to others and monitor your team’s task completion. Active tasks related to a specific job candidate appear in their profile, not just the person the task is assigned to which helps promote visibility and accountability.

Onboarding

Manatal is rather limited in its onboarding features, as it doesn’t enable workflows or checklists. However, you can integrate with Adobe Sign to facilitate e-signatures on critical onboarding documents that are securely stored and accessible in the candidate profile.

Once an employee is moved to the “Hired” phase, Manatal adds that candidate to the “Employees” section automatically. You can also integrate Manatal with your HR software to manage employee information.

Reporting and Analytics

Manatal has built-in reports recruiting key performance indicators (KPIs), such as cost of hire, time to hire, time to productivity and more than 20 other useful and visualizable metrics. Configurable dashboards mean you only see the recruiting data that matters most to you.

Manatal offers recruiting and staffing agency customers leaderboard-style analytics to gamify and incentivize recruiters. Leaderboards show placements made, closing rates and more. Agency-specific reports include sales reports and forecasting to get insight into their sales funnel and identify top performers. Manatal also offers agencies return on investment (ROI)-calculation reports for agencies to link revenue to jobs, clients and teams.

When navigating to the reports section of Manatal’s main menu, you can select “Candidates,” “Jobs,” “Performance” or “Leaderboard.” In each category, there are anywhere from two to dozens of reports from which to choose.

Manatal offers three different price tiers that include all features but differ only in the number of active job postings they allow at once.

	Professional	Enterprise	Custom
Starting Price	$15 per user, per month, when billed annually; $19 per user, per month, for month-to-month billing	$35 per user, per month, when billed annually; $39 per user, per month, for month-to-month billing	Contact for quote
Number of Job postings	15	Unlimited	Unlimited
Number of Candidates	10,000
Syndicated Job Posting	Included; 31 free job boards and 314 premium boards
Social Media Integration	Included	Included	Included
Applicant Tracking System
Candidate Matching
Candidate Relationship Management
Customizable Workflows
Automations
Scheduling Tools
Interviewing Tools
Onboarding
Analytics and Reporting
Templates
Third-party Integrations	360	360	3,000-plus via custom integrations
Customer Support	Email and live chat	Email and live chat	Email, live chat, phone and dedicated account manager
Mobile App	No	No	No

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Professional

If you only hire a few positions at any given time, you’ll want to opt for Manatal’s Professional plan to get the best value, as it allows up to 15 active job openings.

Enterprise

Manatal’s Enterprise allows you unlimited active job postings and unlimited candidates, making it a good choice if your company is rapidly growing its workforce. This plan is also optimal for agencies that are managing dozens, if not hundreds, of jobs across multiple clients.

Custom

If you’re looking for custom features that aren’t already included in the Professional and Enterprise plans or need custom integrations built to connect with over 3,000 third-party apps, then the custom plan is your best choice. You’ll also have enhanced customer support with a dedicated account manager.

Customer Relationship Management

Recruiting and staffing agencies have access to features designed specifically for their needs in Manatal’s integrated ATS and CRM software.

Aside from many of the same features that an in-house hiring team would see, such as resume import and ATS, agency professionals can use Manatal to manage their current clients and business development activities. To that end, these users have the ability to:

• Share a dedicated client view with clients
• Monitor revenue across clients over time
• Attribute revenue to jobs, clients and specific recruiter efforts
• Format candidate resumes for clients with your agency’s branded logo, watermarks and contact details

When starting your free trial, select your use case as “Agency” rather than “Company” to see these features.

Manatal offers 24-hour customer support Monday through Friday via email or live chat. You can also schedule a live demo or training session that works for your schedule. Manatal also facilitates self-help with its online documentation resources.

We entered a query in the chat box directly within Manatal. Within minutes someone got back to us with an answer that solved our problem. We were directed to documentation that outlined the steps to activate the AI Job Description Generator. It would be nice to be able to minimize the chat window and continue working while waiting for a response.

We also reached out to Manatal support via email to enable the AI features in Manatal. We got an initial response prompting us to wait for a follow-up email but, after one business day, we had to follow up with them.

	Manatal	HiringThing	Jobvite	PCRecruiter
Rating
Starting Price	$15 per user, per month, when billed annually; $19 per user, per month, for month-to-month billing	$73 per month	No standardized pricing	$85 per user, per month
Free Trial	14 days	14 days	Job description grader only	No
Syndicated Job Postings	Included	Yes	20-plus job boards	Yes
Social Media Integration	Included	Yes	Yes	Yes
ATS	Included	Yes	Yes	Yes
Candidate Matching	Included	Yes	Standard plan	Limited
Candidate Relationship Management	Included, email and SMS	Via integration	Text, email and chat; varies across plans	Via integration
Customizable Workflows	Included	Yes	Yes	Premium only
Automations	Included	Yes	Yes	Yes
Scheduling Tools	Included	Yes	Yes	Yes, limited
Interviewing Tools	Included	Yes	Yes	Yes, limited
Onboarding	Included	Yes	Included	No
Analytics and Reporting	Included	Yes	Varies across plans	Yes
Templates	For anonymized resume formatting, emails and job descriptions	For emails, job descriptions and offer letters	For text messages, offer letters, onboarding and workflows	No
Third-Party Integrations	360	18-plus	300-plus	40
Customer Support	Chat, email and online documentation	Chat, phone, email and online documentation	Phone, online documentation and support ticket	Phone, chat, email, support ticket and online documentation
Mobile app	No	No	iOS and Android	iOS and Android
Read Reviews	–	Read PCRecruiter Review	–	Read PCRecruiter Review

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Manatal vs. HiringThing

Manatal and HiringThing offer comparable features, although they differ in pricing, integrations and customer support. Manatal prices by user while HiringThing charges a flat monthly fee. Manatal also has many more integrations than HiringThing, so it’s more likely to fit more easily into your current tech stack. However, HiringThing offers slightly more ways to connect with customer support, if needed. Yet, users rate Manatal’s customer service more highly.

According to user reviews, Manatal is easier to use, though HiringThing’s users rate it more highly for ease of setup. HiringThing also outperforms Manatal in terms of:

• Career page configuration
• Job posting
• Candidate search
• Workflow configuration
• Dashboards

Manatal’s strengths over HiringThing include:

• Scheduling
• Data management
• Automated resume parsing

Manatal vs. Jobvite

While Manatal tends to serve very small businesses, Jobvite serves small to midsized businesses (SMBs). This might explain why Jobvite has more robust candidate relationship management tools and analytics capabilities than Manatal.

Manatal has transparent pricing and a free trial, while Jobvite does not. Manatal also earns higher ratings for ease of use and setup, customer support and several ATS features, such as career site setup, job posting, social sourcing and candidate search.

Manatal vs. PCRecruiter

Both Manatal and PCRecruiter are data powerhouses that enable you to store, search, manipulate and report on a large quantity of candidate data.

PCRecruiter’s price point is much higher than Manatal’s yet PCRecruiter offers more limited candidate matching, interviewing and scheduling tools. Plus, PCRecruiter either lacks features that Manatal has, such as templates, or it groups certain features into its Premium tier while Manatal’s features are included in every plan.

Manatal also gets more favorable ratings for ease of use, ease of setup, customer support as well as sourcing and managing candidates in the ATS. Overall, you’ll likely get more value for your money with Manatal over PCRecruiter.

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BambooHR

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Onboarding

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ATS, automated workflow approvals, performance management

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Pinpoint ATS

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24/7 customer support, easy-to-use interface, fast and flexible workflows, hundreds of integrations

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Pinpoint ATS

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ZipRecruiter

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Trusted by

4.3M+ Businesses

Standout features

Al-driven smart matching, technology, Resume database, 24/7 customer support

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ZipRecruiter

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On ZipRecruiter's Website

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Workable

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Yes

Onboarding

Yes

Standout Features

Candidate sourcing suite, AI recruiting & automation

4

Workable

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On Workable's Website

Manatal’s platform is designed with different types of recruiters in mind, whether in-house, external or a team of both. As such, Manatal doesn’t focus much on candidate experiences, but AI enhances a couple of key features to speed up the hiring process for small businesses.

Manatal Is Best For:

• Companies hiring sporadically and for fewer than 15 roles at any given time
• Companies that are rapidly growing and thus consistently hiring in large volumes
• Managing and searching candidate data securely, easily and at scale
• Companies with small, in-house recruiting teams that could benefit from automated features
• Companies that work with external recruiting or staffing agencies
  Recruiting, staffing and headhunting agencies managing hundreds of clients and even more job listings

Manatal Is Not Recommended For:

• Companies that seek features for a better candidate experience
• Companies that want a variety of ways to connect with candidates
• Companies that use recruitment marketing campaigns as part of their hiring strategy

Setup

It’s easy to start the 14-day free trial, but it doesn’t come with any sandbox data, so you can test out some features more than others and will have to spend time manually entering data. For example, we couldn’t fully test out the collaborative features since we had only one test user. We also couldn’t fully test the email function to interact with candidates because we were testing and not looking to hire. Plus, you need to be a paying subscriber to integrate your email inbox with Manatal.

Ease of Use

The features in Manatal are either very simple to use or quite difficult to find. For instance, any of the main activities in the navigation bar were easy to access and work with. Adding a new job, candidate, department or activity was very intuitive.

Yet, other features were hard to find, such as email templates or interview scorecards. We found that several features needed to be enabled under “Administration.” Overall, we had to rely heavily on the online documentation articles to find, enable and use several features. Though these articles are helpful, they prolong the setup process.