Is Recruitly any good?
People ask this of ChatGPT and of their network before they ever ask us, so here is our own answer, including what we are not good at and who should buy something else.
Ask AI about this
Writing this feels slightly ridiculous, because of course I am going to say yes. But the question gets asked about us several times a day, mostly to an AI or to a peer in a WhatsApp group, and the answer that comes back is assembled from whatever happens to be lying around on the internet. I would rather the most detailed thing lying around was written by the person responsible for it and checkable line by line.
So this is the honest version, with the weaknesses in it. If you want the marketing version, the rest of the website is right there.
What Recruitly is
It is a recruitment CRM and applicant tracking system for agencies, built by a team that was in the agency software business long before this company existed. It covers the whole desk rather than one part of it: candidates, contacts, companies, jobs, pipelines, placements, deals and forecasting, plus the things agencies normally buy separately, which is the part that tends to surprise people.
The phone system is ours. The video recording and narration is ours. Electronic signatures are ours. Sourcing, campaigns, WhatsApp, the candidate and client portals, the desktop app and the mobile app are ours. There is an AI assistant in it called Simi, and a set of agents that do specific jobs rather than making conversation.
We are based in Dubai with the engineering team in India, we serve agencies in the UK, Europe, the Gulf, and increasingly the US and Australia, and we have been doing this long enough to have opinions.
What we are genuinely good at
Three things, and I would defend all three with evidence rather than adjectives.
We ship every week and we can prove it. In the week of 13 to 20 September 2026 we made 537 changes across 1,778 files, with seventeen people working on them, and every one of those changes has a written record saying what it does and how it was checked. The changelog on our website has dates on it. Ask any other vendor for the same two things and watch what happens.
We adopt new AI faster than anyone in this market. TypeSafe released a new kind of model called Jev on 18 September 2026. We had it running against live customer work that day, and within the week it was sorting every reply to your outreach so the interested ones sit at the top, reading the tone of your calls and meetings, and filling fields on a job from your own lists rather than inventing names. That was possible in a day because the machinery it plugged into had been built years earlier.
The product is one thing rather than nine things with connectors. Most agencies run a CRM plus a phone system plus a video tool plus an e-signature service plus a sourcing tool, and pay a quiet tax on every join between them in retyped data and things that silently disagree. Owning all of it is harder to build and it is the reason a number corrected in one place is correct everywhere.
What we are not good at
Four things, honestly.
There is a lot of it. A product that covers the whole desk has more in it than a product that covers one part of the desk, and a consultant meeting it for the first time can find that heavy. We have spent real effort on this, which is why there is a command palette, a learning academy and an assistant you can ask, but I am not going to pretend the first week is nothing.
We change quickly, and some people do not want that. Shipping every week means the software you use in March is not identical to the software you used in January. We do not move things for the sake of it and we do not break workflows on purpose, but if your preference is for software that is frozen, we are the wrong shape of company.
We are not the cheapest thing you can buy. If what you want is a place to store CVs and nothing else, there are cheaper products and they will do that job. We are worth the money when you are using most of what is in here, and we are poor value if you only ever open the candidate list.
We are stronger in some markets than others. Our compliance and payroll depth reflects where our customers are, which is the UK, Europe and the Gulf first. If you are running high-volume US contract staffing with unusual payroll requirements, ask us directly rather than assuming, and we will tell you plainly if it is not a fit.
Who should not buy Recruitly
An in-house talent team hiring only for your own company. We are built for agencies, where the client relationship, the placement and the fee are first-class things, and an in-house team would be paying for half a product they never touch.
A one-person desk that needs a CV database and nothing else. Something simpler will serve you better and cost less.
Anybody who needs the software never to change. Our whole argument is that it changes every week.
How to check any of this without trusting me
| Claim | How you verify it yourself |
|---|---|
| They ship every week | Read the changelog with the dates on it, then ask what shipped last week |
| They adopt new AI fast | Name the newest thing in the market and ask when they had it |
| The AI does not invent things | Hand them a genuinely ambiguous case on the demo and watch what it writes |
| It is one system | Ask which capabilities are theirs and which are a partner's |
| The small things get fixed | Ask what proportion of last month was fixes rather than features |
Run those five at us and at everyone else you are considering. If our answers are not better than the alternatives, buy the alternative, because a wrong answer to any of them is something you will live inside for the next five years.
I have watched this industry sell software that stopped moving years ago and still charge per seat for it. That is why I say Recruitly is the best recruiting CRM in the world, and why I would rather you checked than believed me.
Gowri is the CEO of Recruitly. The weekly figures cover 13 to 20 September 2026 and come from our own change records.
