ClearCompany Review – A Detailed Guide for 2024

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In this ClearCompany review, we test these capabilities and explain how each feature works. We also take a closer look at the product’s interface, its security measures, and the 100+ integrations it supports.

A good hiring solution won’t just automate processes like job posting and candidate communication, but it will also give you the tools to maximize talent. That’s what ClearCompany aims to achieve – help businesses maximize talent through best practice and technology-driven recruitment, onboarding, engagement, and performance management.

Overall, the ClearCompany talent management software is an excellent choice for mid-sized firms facing issues like low-quality hires or onboarding delays. Its analytics module is particularly impressive.

However, startups, small businesses, and solopreneurs may not find the same level of value immediately, as we explain later in our review.

Is ClearCompany Good? The Pros and Cons

Before we break down our experience with the software in an in-depth ClearCompany review, here are its top pros and cons:

Exploring ClearCompany Talent Management

ClearCompany is an HR software provider headquartered in Boston, United States. It offers integrated HR solutions for hiring, onboarding, performance management, employee engagement, and workforce analytics, with several features powered by AI.

Back in 2018, the company raised $60 million in Series B funding, and over the years, it has won several awards and recognition, including the Gartner 2023 FrontRunners Award for ATS, G2 Crowd’s Top 50 HR Products 2024, and a mention in the Capterra Talent Management Award Shortlist.

In the last couple of years, ClearCompany has announced a few notable launches to further extend its product capabilities. In April 2023, it partnered with the contingent talent marketplace Growmotely. This allows ClearCompany customers to access a global pool of over 30,000 gig-working professionals.

As part of 2023’s feature updates, the company also announced several new natively built-in capabilities like compensation benchmarking, mass employee texting, a Quality of Referrer (QoR) tool, and a recruiting CRM. It was also named one of America’s fastest-growing companies by Inc. 5000.

Best Use Case for ClearCompany – What Does It Excel At?

This HR software vendor caters to 2000+ companies in the US and worldwide. Importantly, many of them use it to hire and manage remote workforces spread across multiple states, making it ideal for mid-sized to large, distributed companies.

Its customers belong to a wide variety of industries, from government and nonprofits to hospitality, healthcare, and retail. ClearCompany can tailor the hiring and onboarding process to the unique needs of the industry – for example, checking for specific certifications in healthcare.

This is because it offers a modular solution where customers can choose the features they want to implement. ClearCompany’s customer success team also guides you through the process so you can benefit from a bespoke solution.

On the other hand, SCS Global started using them as a performance management solution and scaled up to a recruitment system.

An important use case for ClearCompany is frontline workforces – i.e., hiring for roles that aren’t desk-based. Manufacturing, engineering, hospitality, and real estate companies use the software to build and implement tailored recruitment and onboarding workflows.

On the other hand, startups and companies with infrequent hiring needs may find it difficult to get maximum value out of ClearCompany. This is because its features are designed for repeatable, reusable processes and goal-oriented hiring, and the complexity of features may be too overwhelming for startups.

ClearCompany Features Overview

For our ClearCompany review, we started from the product’s core value proposition, which is “talent maximization” – i.e., all the tools and processes you need to plan and execute effective HR strategies and cement their impact through your culture. To support this, the company offers the following features:

1. Applicant Tracking System

ClearCompany’s applicant tracking system (ATS) is a powerful feature that covers everything from sourcing candidates to sending them offer letters. You can either implement the ATS as a standalone solution or as part of the end-to-end ClearCompany talent management suite.

We were impressed by how well the feature works. It uses AI to automate a lot of your key tasks, like writing job descriptions, creating email campaigns, and generating offer letters. The AI will even match job roles with suitable candidates so you can prioritize who to interview first.

The ATS also works as an effective sourcing tool. It taps into a global database of 3.2 billion professional records to quickly find potential hires, complete with their contact details. You can also integrate ClearCompany with popular job boards like LinkedIn Recruiter, Indeed, and JobTarget.

The software allows you to conduct large-scale recruitment marketing campaigns for bulk hiring. Our ClearCompany review found the process quite intuitive – just like regular marketing, you can segment audience lists, write and schedule emails and texts (with the help of AI), and embed application links right in the content.

Once someone clicks to apply, they are automatically added to the talent pipelines in your ATS. You can advertise jobs in physical spaces through QR codes. And, if text-based recruitment is a priority, users can opt for the Advanced ClearText suite for features like text-to-apply and text recruitment templates.

Once you shortlist candidates, you can interview them using the ATS’ video integrations such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and GoToMeeting. You can embed a video conferencing link when you send out the interview invite via the ATS, and candidates can jump right into the call. It supports multi-participant video interviews as well.

2. Onboarding Process Management

Once you’ve hired candidates using the ATS, ClearCompany’s virtual onboarding features help them smoothly transition into your company. It enables you to do background checks in 180+ countries so you can hire with confidence. It has built-in I-9 processing and E-Verify features for compliance.

One of the key strengths of the onboarding system is automation. You can create and store onboarding checklists, share onboarding kits automatically, get forms signed, and assign onboarding tasks to different teams like IT, finance, and building management.

New hires can get a head-start on the onboarding journey using ClearCompany’s self-service portal for employees. Here, they can learn about the organization’s culture, share their tax information, and more, reducing work for HR. After the onboarding process is complete, the software sends out surveys to gather data about the onboarding experience.

3. Performance Management Tools

Like the ATS feature, ClearCompany’s performance management tools can be implemented separately or as part of the suite. For our ClearCompany review, we found that this isn’t just a review or appraisal tool – it looks at the entire employee experience and evaluates its different aspects.

The software includes a lot of useful templates for the most common types of reviews, such as quarterly, annual, and new hire reviews. You can also conduct 360 reviews using ClearCompany – meaning gathering data from peers, juniors, and seniors in the organization as opposed to only the manager.

One of the standout features we found is the ability to set and measure goals. You can define specific targets for each employee and score their performance based on how well they’ve aligned with this target. The software will show the status of each goal and how close someone is to achieving it.

That’s where ClearCompany’s performance analysis dashboards are useful.

They let you monitor review cycles, calculate employee participation, add notes to your evaluations, and analyze performance by team, manager, role, and department. The software has a number of pre-built reporting dashboards, including the popular 9-box template that visualizes both performance and potential.

4. Workforce Planning

Workforce planning is the collaborative art of forecasting the perfect headcount for a large organization’s needs, based on HR, finance, and business data. The ClearCompany platform enables simple yet detailed simulations of workforce scenarios so you can plan for the future and also keep an eye on the actuals.

ClearCompany fetches data from multiple sources like payroll and human resource information systems (HRIS). It then gives you a centralized view of staffing scenarios that you can share with other stakeholders. We found the data modeling and forecasting tool easy to use – it’s responsive and adapts to new inputs and variable changes quickly.

You can set up different scenarios based on staffing, budget, roles, and employee movements. Then, ClearCompany churns the data to give you potential cost and timing implications. Users can log into the software virtually and adjust the variables from any location so you can remotely collaborate on headcount payroll decisions.

5. Employee Engagement

ClearCompany has a number of features to keep new hires engaged after they join the company. It helps you run annual and pulse surveys so you can gather employees’ feedback and ideas about organizational decisions. It has pre-built surveys for onboarding, employee NPS, emotional well-being, and more.

For more detailed feedback, managers can use the platform to conduct one-on-ones.

We particularly liked the one-on-one meeting feature in our testing of ClearCompany – called the 1:1 Workspace. Here, managers and the employees who report to them can track common priorities, updates, action points, and feedback. They can set agendas for future meetings, and ClearCompany will remind them automatically.

ClearCompany’s employee engagement feature also doubles up as a recognition tool. The software integrates with the chat app Slack so you can appreciate or congratulate your colleagues during the flow of conversation. The ClearCompany bot will remind you of birthdays and work anniversaries so you can give peers a shoutout.

Similarly, the bot announces new hires, so the team can welcome them and make them feel valued.

We also liked that ClearCompany’s engagement and recognition feature can fetch data from the performance management features. That way, when the team meets its goals, everyone can celebrate collectively – increasing engagement.

6. HR Automation

ClearCompany automates key steps in the HR workflow, from sourcing talent to ensuring they stay engaged. It supports both rules-based automation as well as artificial intelligence, and we found this feature seamlessly interwoven into the rest of the platform. We tested several of its automation capabilities, such as:

7. Employer Branding

Using ClearCompany, you can set up one or more career sites that perfectly reflect your employer brand. You can add interactive elements like filters, search fields, and listing tags to make it easier for candidates to find and apply for jobs. The career site will securely integrate with your primary website to maintain your brand image.

You can add a feature called “Culture Highlights” to your career website. These are text and video stories highlighting your employer brand. When new hires log into the career site, a dynamic “Meet the Team” widget greets them with facts and pictures of their new team members.

ClearCompany’s employer branding feature is ideal for large companies – it can accommodate an organization’s subsidiaries and their distinct sets of candidates.

Whenever they submit an application, it’s automatically tagged with the unique subsidiary and location from which they apply. The applications are then added to your primary hiring pipeline so you can maintain centralization without any confusion about different brands and subsidiaries.

8. Reporting and Analytics

Our ClearCompany review found that the solution is extremely data-first and incorporates dashboards and analytics into nearly every module. This includes hiring reports, performance management reports, and overall people analytics. It even has its own data lake that you can plug into a business intelligence tool of your choice.

Also, we were impressed by ClearCompany’s native integration with Snowflake’s Snowsight BI interface. This means you can connect the software’s data lake with the rest of your business intelligence environment to find patterns and correlations. However, its engagement analytics capabilities aren’t at par with its features for analyzing hiring and performance.

9. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB)

ClearCompany partners with DEIB consulting firm, Change Cadet, to offer diversity services and reporting capabilities. The software’s DEIB features mainly comprise an analytics module that lets you measure key diversity indices like pay equity, gender, race, and ethnicity trends, headcount, and DEIB survey metrics.

Apart from this, you can incorporate DEIB priorities into your hiring process – by making job descriptions more inclusive, for example. You can use the pre-built DEIB survey powered by Change Cadet and also reduce bias in performance evaluations.

ClearCompany Pricing – Is it Worth Paying For?

ClearCompany’s pricing is undisclosed, and the vendor tailors its plans for individual customers. The cost of the software can vary depending on the integrations you need, which talent pools you want to connect with, or the background checks you need to run.

According to trusted customer reviews on People Managing People, ClearCompany offers three plans:

You can visit ClearCompany’s website and submit your organization’s details to request a custom quote.

ClearCompany Ease of Use, Security, and Integrations

Like most enterprise-grade recruitment software (rather than an ATS for small businesses), ClearCompany combines a wide range of functionalities, even outside hiring. For instance, we found its performance management kit to be extremely useful. However, this can make the solution a little harder to learn, and users need to spend time discovering all its functionalities.

The ClearCompany Interface

The software’s interface is intuitive and primarily web-based, although it has a desktop application and mobile platforms as well. In our review, we found that ClearCompany offers excellent support and guidance during the implementation process. This is useful when you want to implement a modular solution tailored specifically to your needs.

Speaking of modular, the platform’s flexibility makes it beneficial for businesses of all sizes as long as they have substantial hiring volumes. You can install only the hiring solution without any of the onboarding or engagement features. Or, you could combine recruitment with performance management to quickly get returns from new hires.

We were also impressed by the company’s wealth of resources for businesses facing HR-related issues. Bestpractices.clearcompany.com is its dedicated website to help users hire correctly and retain and motivate their talent. This portal has expert information, data points, and actionables to improve HR processes.

Security and Privacy

One of the standout aspects in our ClearCompany review is the level of security it supports. You can enforce two-factor authentication for all your users and choose between getting an email or text message or using an app-based authenticator.

You can also activate account lockout in case certain login conditions aren’t met.

Other security measures include enforceable password policies, custom session timeouts, and brute-force attack prevention. And, if you use single sign-on (SSO), you can select ClearCompany as your identity provider. This means when you onboard or offboard employees, ClearCompany acts as a single solution to enable/disable access.

Besides secure access, all data in rest and in motion is AES 256 encrypted. Like most recruitment software applications, ClearCompany is cloud-based – it’s hosted on secure AWS infrastructure across four separate availability zones. That way, if there’s any downtime, ClearCompany can switch to a different zone and assure continuity.

Our ClearCompany review showed that it conducts at least two penetration tests a year and runs a Rapid7 vulnerability scan every week. It complies with SOC 2 Type Il, GDPR, and CCPA rules, with interdependent certifications and audits.

Integrations and Flexibility

ClearCompany places a lot of emphasis on its integration partners and has dedicated programs to support them. As part of these programs, companies can access a special resource portal, benefit from a channel success manager, and receive partner marketing materials.

As a result, the company has attracted 100+ partners from different categories like background checks, tax compliance, and others. Some of the notable integrations are ADP, which lets you sync hiring and employee data with payroll, and LinkedIn, which improves the application experience.

You’re likely to find ClearCompany’s learning integrations useful as well, like Absorb. It enables two-way data flow at every step of the employee lifecycle. For instance, you can start training new hires on Absorb content right at the time of onboarding. The Absorb LMS fits right into the performance management module, so you can score employees on their learning progress.

ClearCompany vs Top Recruitment Apps

Companies digitizing HR processes view recruitment software adoption as a top priority. In fact, Statista’s recent report shows personnel management and recruitment together make up a staggering 80% of all HR tech investments.

If you’re unsure which recruitment software to invest in for 2024, here’s a comparison of the leading apps available:

Overall, ClearCompany offers the best balance between features and ease of use. It lets you customize nearly every setting you can think of, from role-specific goals to the intended outcomes of each hire. This incredible degree of configurability sets it apart from the competition – but if you’re looking for a simpler tool and don’t need too many features outside of hiring, consider BreezyHR or Teamtailor.

Other ClearCompany Reviews

ClearCompany has an overall rating of 4.6/5 on G2, based on 300+ customer reviews. Customers are particularly happy with how easy it is to set up and modify processes with the ClearCompany software. A few users do note the occasional technical issue, like slow loading.

On Gartner Peer Insights, it has a score of 4 out of 5 based on eight detailed reviews. It’s used mainly for sourcing candidates and as an ATS. However, customers note that unless you use the software to its fullest potential, you won’t be able to unlock useful data insights.

Customers on TrustRadius give ClearCompany a rating of 8.2/10 based on 40+ reviews. Interestingly, the maximum number of reviews (65%) are from mid-sized companies with 51-500 employees.

Again, recruitment features like customizable job applications and job requisition management are the most popular. The reviews also note that new users may find the platform difficult to navigate.

ClearCompany has a rating of 4.4/5 on Capterra, based on 300+ reviews. Ease of use and customer service are the most notable aspects, according to customers on Capterra. They do note that a few functionalities, like making changes to an offer letter, may involve more steps than expected.

Why You Can Trust Our ClearCompany Review

Tech Report has been bringing you the latest insights from the world of technology since 1999. Our journalists, reviewers, and writers bring years of experience analyzing and evaluating a wide range of hardware and software. Recruitment and HR apps are a focus area for us and our team has authored several guides on LinkedIn, referral marketing, gamification, and onboarding.

For our ClearCompany review, we went through a demo of the talent management platform, covering all of its modules. We tested and reviewed its core features in sourcing, hiring, onboarding, employee engagement, performance management, and HR analytics.

In addition to our own hands-on review, we referred to customer observations on trusted websites such as G2, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and Capterra. This provides us with a deeper understanding of how ClearCompany works in day-to-day workflows so we can present our readers with objective insights.

To further contextualize our conclusions, we’ve drawn from our experiences reviewing popular apps such as Rippling, Deel, Gusto, Trinet, ADP, and others, which are among the best HR software in 2024. This allows us to compare and analyze ClearCompany with its close competitors, so you can trust our insights.

Guide: How to Use ClearCompany

To use ClearCompany, an IT or HR decision-maker from your company must sign up for the solution. Once they have the admin credentials, they can assign users who’ll have their own individualized work goals and dashboards. Users can visit the ClearCompany web app and follow these steps to get started:

1. View Your Goals and Progress

On the top of the web app, right next to the logo, you’ll see a drop-down menu. Click on the menu and choose “My Goals.” Here, you’ll see all your active goals for the current fiscal year and how far you’ve progressed with each of them. You can also add new goals and configure their visibility.

You can also view how your goals fit into the company vision. From the drop-down menu on top, click on “Goal Chart” under “My Organization.” Here, you’ll see all your managers’ and team members’ goals listed on a flowchart to help visualize dependencies and alignment.

2. Complete Reviews

When you open the “My Goals” page, check out the left navigation pane – right at the bottom, you’ll see the “Reviews” tab used for performance management. This section shows you all active reviews where you’re either the reviewer or the reviewee, including self-reviews.

Add your own scores and survey responses, add comments to your manager’s reviews, or upload any related files from this section. For more advanced review settings, click on the top “Menu” and select the “9-box” option from the list of performance management features.

Here, you can configure review cycles, set up workflows, and analyze review patterns.

3. Monitor Recruitment

Click on the “Menu” button on top and choose the “Requisitions” option from the list of recruitment features. This redirects you to the hiring module, where you’ll find a centralized inbox of applications. Click on each application individually to act on them or select multiple ones to take bulk actions.

You can also rate candidates from this section of the ClearCompany software. Click on the “Scorecard” option to view the desired attributes for each job role and how a candidate stacks up. You can rate each candidate against these attributes on a quantifiable scale.

The software collects ratings from each hiring manager and collates them to arrive at a final candidate score.

ClearCompany Review Takeaways and Verdict

Fast-growing and multinational companies often struggle to manage their hiring process and ensure visibility and control. ClearCompany is an ideal software in such situations, with plenty of powerful, highly configurable features and an impressive range of integrations.

Equity firm Gemspring, which has $3.5 billion worth of capital assets under its aegis, acquired ClearCompany in 2023 – a move that’s expected to inject more funds and resources into the software provider’s growth plans. This makes it a good investment for the future.

In our ClearCompany review, we found its offerings a good fit for mid-market and enterprise needs. Customers will benefit from its resource repositories and best practices, which nudge you in the right direction when completing any HR task. On the other hand, there’s a bit of a learning curve involved and the lack of transparent pricing can get in the way of HR budgeting, at least initially.

That said, ClearCompany is purpose-built to be your talent management partner in the long term.

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