Fill one open role without paying recruiter fees

The problem

Hiring one person is a different problem from hiring twenty, and almost nothing in the market is priced for it. A recruitment agency typically wants a share of the first year salary, which for a small business is a number that competes with the hire itself. Recruiting software is sold as a monthly subscription that assumes you always have roles open.

So the first hire usually happens through an inbox. The advert goes on one board, applications arrive as email attachments, and within two weeks nobody can remember who has been replied to. Candidates get no answer, which costs you reputation in exactly the local market you will hire from again.

The failure is administrative rather than strategic. You do not lose the good candidate because you judged wrong. You lose them because you took eleven days to reply.

What AI can actually do here

Screening is where the model helps and where the care is needed. Ranking applications against the stated requirements gets a large pile into a sensible order, and it will be wrong about individuals in ways you should expect: it favours conventional phrasing and penalises unusual career paths, which are sometimes the candidates worth meeting.

Use it to triage, never to reject. Read the bottom of the ranked list as well as the top, at least for the first role, so you can see what the ranking is doing.

Everything else is workflow. One place where every application lands, a status against each person, templated replies so nobody waits in silence, and scheduling that does not take six messages. Job board distribution posts the advert to several places at once, which is a real time saving and no cleverness at all.

Be aware of the regulatory direction here. Under the EU AI Act, systems used for recruitment and candidate evaluation are treated as high risk, with obligations attached. That is a reason to keep a human making the decision and to be able to explain how you decided, not a reason to avoid the tools.

How the tools differ

The pricing gap is enormous, so start there.

Breezy HR has a Bootstrap tier that is free for 1 active position with unlimited users and access to candidates added in the last 30 days. For a single hire that is close to purpose-built. Paid tiers jump considerably: Startup at $157 per month billed annually with unlimited positions, Growth $273 adding referrals and interview standardisation, Business $439 adding offer management and HRIS integrations.

Workable has no free plan and starts at $299 per month, with Premier at $599 and Enterprise at $719, all with unlimited active jobs subject to fair use. It buys sourcing from a large candidate database, a careers page builder and an AI screening agent. That is a serious tool for continuous hiring and poor value for one role.

The 30-day candidate access limit on the free tier is the detail to watch. Export what you want to keep before it ages out.

When you don't need a tool

If you are hiring one person from applicants you already know, a shared document is enough. The value of software here is handling volume and preventing silence, and with eight known candidates you have neither problem.

If the role is niche enough that you will approach people directly rather than advertise, a tracking system adds nothing. That is outreach, not recruiting, and a contact list handles it.

If you hire regularly, the calculation changes and the subscription becomes reasonable. See hire without losing track of candidates for that case, and run HR admin without an HR department for what happens after someone says yes.