Crelate ATS Review: Built for Staffing Agencies, Tolerates Everyone Else

Crelate is an applicant tracking system that was specifically built for staffing agencies and recruiting firms, which means it understands that your business model involves submitting the same candidate to 47 different clients and tracking which ones ghosted you.

Most ATS platforms are designed for corporate recruiting - one company, one career site, one hiring process. Crelate actually gets that agencies need to manage hundreds of clients, thousands of candidates, and complex placement workflows. Whether it does this well is what we're here to figure out.

What It's Supposed to Do

Crelate combines ATS, CRM, and recruiting automation specifically for the staffing agency model. You can track candidates, manage client relationships, submit candidates to multiple positions, monitor placement status, and handle the Byzantine billing that comes with agency recruiting.

According to G2 reviews, the platform handles both contingent and retained search workflows, which matters if your agency does both. You can manage job orders, track client interactions, automate candidate communications, and run reports on placements and revenue.

The Chrome extension for LinkedIn integration lets you add candidates directly from LinkedIn profiles, which is table-stakes functionality at this point but at least they have it.

The Actually Good Parts

For staffing agencies, Crelate's multi-client candidate submission tracking is genuinely useful. You can see which candidates are submitted to which clients, track status for each submission, and avoid the nightmare scenario of submitting the same person to the same company twice.

User reviews highlight the customization options - you can configure workflows, fields, and pipelines to match your specific agency processes instead of being forced into generic templates. For agencies with established processes, this flexibility matters.

The mobile app apparently works well, which is important when your recruiters are at client sites or coffee shops instead of desks. Being able to submit candidates and update records from phones is basic functionality that many enterprise ATS platforms still screw up.

The Parts That Don't Work Great

Here's the problem: Crelate tries to be everything for agencies - ATS, CRM, email automation, reporting, billing integration - and some features feel underbaked. Capterra reviews mention that the email integration is clunky compared to dedicated tools, and the reporting can be slow with large databases.

Reports from users indicate that the learning curve is steep. There are a lot of features, a lot of customization options, and a lot of ways to configure things wrong. Onboarding and training take time, which is challenging for small agencies that need to be productive immediately.

The search functionality reportedly struggles with complex Boolean queries, which is ironic for a tool designed for professional recruiters who live and breathe Boolean search. Finding candidates in your own database shouldn't be harder than sourcing new ones.

Pricing is per-user, and it adds up quickly for agencies with larger recruiting teams. You're looking at $60-100+ per user monthly depending on features, which is reasonable for enterprise but painful for solo recruiters or small shops.

The Verdict

Crelate is purpose-built for staffing agencies and recruiting firms, which is both its strength and limitation. If you're running an agency, especially one placing candidates across multiple industries and clients, Crelate's workflows make sense in a way that corporate ATS platforms never will.

If you're a corporate recruiter or a company doing internal hiring, you're probably better off with tools designed for that use case. Crelate will work, but you'll be paying for features you don't need.

Best for: Staffing agencies and recruiting firms Skip if: Corporate/internal recruiting teams Pricing: $60-100+ per user/month depending on features

Check reviews on G2 | More on Capterra