In a competitive job market, every candidate can use a boost. While there are several ways for someone to stand out during the application process, a great letter of recommendation is one of the best ways for them to have someone else highlight their skills and achievements.

Employers check an average of three references per candidate and often seek third-party verification before proceeding with an applicant. A strong letter of recommendation could make or break someone’s chances of landing the job. These letters can be career-defining for applicants, transforming potential hires into top contenders.

If you’ve ever wondered how to craft a standout recommendation letter that truly makes an impact, you’re in the right place. We’ve loaded this quick guide with expert tips and letter of recommendation samples to help you get started.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Recommendation letters often offer valuable insights into a candidate’s skills and personal qualities, verifying their potential and giving them an edge in the hiring process.
• While reference letters are particularly impactful for senior roles, they may be less crucial for entry-level positions where skills tests offer more insight into their abilities to perform well on the job.
• A solid recommendation letter should have a header, introduction, main body, conclusion, and signature, maintaining a professional yet warm tone to endorse the candidate effectively.
• When crafting your own reference letter, use the job description as a guide for what to include, covering skills, projects, qualifications, and personality traits.
• Every job candidate starts somewhere. High school and graduate school applicants also lean heavily on letters of recommendation to advance them to the next step in their education and prepare them for their future careers.
• Reference letters are most effective when integrated into a smooth hiring process, enhancing the employer’s brand. Toggl Hire’s ATS helps you track skills tests, interviews, and CVs seamlessly.

What’s the purpose of a recommendation letter?

To…recommend a candidate (or student). Oh, beyond that? Recommendation letters provide credible insights about a candidate’s skills, personality, and achievements. They help employers assess a candidate’s suitability for a job by highlighting their strengths, achievements, and potential contributions to the team.

Hiring managers usually ask for letters of recommendation after they’ve shortlisted job applicants and require verification of candidate credentials. They’re almost always private, allowing letter writers to offer a candid and subjective assessment.

Not all positions require a letter of recommendation. As a rule, they’re mostly needed for:

• Senior roles where experience and leadership skills are essential
• Roles where honesty and reliability are critical, such as those involving money or confidential documents

Letters of recommendation are rarely required for entry-level positions. However, a start-up looking to assess cultural fit and skills when building a new team, for example, could be an exception to the rule. Letters of recommendation are also useful for students hoping to secure college or grad school places as the next step on their chosen career path.

Letters of recommendation can be useful in different ways:

• For candidates, letters provide accurate representations of their abilities. A compelling recommendation letter could give them an edge when competition is fierce.

• Potential employers benefit from third-party opinions. This makes it easier to decide whether candidates meet role requirements.

• A previous employer asked to write a letter of recommendation can help maintain a good relationship with promising ex-employees. A good letter can also help build a positive brand.

How to format a letter of recommendation

Well, for starters, we don’t recommend using AI to compose and structure a recommendation letter, as they can vary greatly depending on which role the person is applying for and what skills are most important to success in that role.

They’re also highly personal, and it would look pretty darn suspicious if the letter sounded like it was written by Chat-GPT.

Despite these variations, the format remains fairly consistent.

The tone should always be professional and concise, avoiding slang or jokes. These letters validate candidates’ skills and achievements and often comment on their potential in a new role. While it’s okay to throw in an anecdote or two, now’s not the time to try and be funny.

Recommendation letters generally also follow a standard format. The following core elements are almost always present.

Header

The header is the first thing a reader sees, so it’s important to get this right.

Write the date of writing and the recipient’s address. Add your professional address to enable return mail if necessary (whether that’s a physical or email address). Double-check all of these details and present them professionally. Errors here ruin the tone of the letter before recipients read a word.

Greeting and introduction

Next comes the salutation or greeting. As this is a professional letter, a formal tone is required.

Greetings like “Hi there” aren’t appropriate. If you have the full contact information, use “Dear [recipient’s name].” If you’re unsure who you’re addressing, write “To Whom It May Concern” (and pay attention to capitalization.)

It’s generally better to personalize the greeting to create a human connection. Personalization matters in a process that can feel a bit robotic. Feel free to ask the candidate for more information about the recipient to ensure it’s addressed to the right person.

After the greeting, write a short introduction. Introduce yourself and your connection to the candidate. Re-stating the purpose of the letter is also a good idea. Something like “I can confidently recommend [X] for the role of [Y]” immediately creates a positive impression.

Body paragraph

The next section is critically important, as it forms the bulk of the letter and explains:

• The candidate’s qualifications (if relevant)
• Achievements in a professional setting
• Personal qualities that make the candidate a valuable asset

Every sentence should relate to the role in question. If the candidate is a former employee, describe how their experience fits the role. Use specific examples to illustrate the candidate’s skills and potential.

When a candidate moves from a junior to a senior position, it’s okay to be subjective. Think about how they’ve demonstrated leadership abilities. Running project sub-teams or stepping up to fill staff absences are both good examples.

Comparative assessment (optional)

This section is optional but can help when potential employers have plenty of choices. If the role is particularly competitive, explain how the candidate stands out from their peers.

For example, the candidate may have an outstanding work ethic or an exceptional thirst for knowledge. They may stand out for their concentration and focus under pressure. Or they may be a model colleague, defusing tensions and managing disagreements.

Closing statement

It’s challenging to know how to close a recommendation letter, but generally, you should end on a high note, with a positive but professionally-worded candidate endorsement.

The endorsement summarizes points made earlier about the candidate’s strengths and qualifications. Mention why the applicant fits the employer’s team. Stress your confidence that the candidate will perform well in the advertised role (not in the general workplace).

Invite the reader to contact you for further information. Employers may desire clarification before they make a final decision.

Signature

Finally, the letter should end with a formal closing and a signature. If you don’t know the recipient, “Yours” or “Best” are fine as a common letter of recommendation closing. However, “Sincerely” is generally acceptable. Definitely don’t go with “Peace out” (you’d be surprised…).

After that, sign and print the letter of recommendation. Typing your name is fine if you choose a digital format. Remember to include your professional title underneath the signature.

Tips for writing a strong recommendation letter

Mastering the structure above is fairly simple, but without care and attention, it’s easy to misjudge the tone or leave out important content. The following five tips show you how to write a recommendation letter so you use the perfect wording and structure every time.

Understand the purpose of the reference letter

Before writing anything, look at the job description and job title. Understand the required skills, tasks connected to the role, and cultural qualities suitable candidates need. This information influences your content and tone. Don’t start writing a candidate recommendation without thinking it through.

Think about the person asking for the recommendation

Keep the candidate in mind when writing a letter of recommendation. List achievements, focusing on what made your colleague a good team member. Pick out some unique qualities that set the candidate apart from run-of-the-mill applicants. For example, perhaps some interesting extracurricular activities or volunteer work they’re involved in.

Start with a reference letter template

Save time by using a pre-written letter of recommendation template. Below, you’ll find an expertly created template (along with some sample letters). Fill in the gaps with information based on your former employee and the role in question.

Edit to personalize and highlight the right skills

Before using a letter of recommendation template, check that it meets your requirements. For instance, you may want an extended section on different projects and relevant skills. Or you may need content on academic performance if you are a teacher or university professor.

Specific examples of recommendation letters

Letters of recommendation are not creative writing exercises. However, writing an effective letter requires care to ensure they fit their context. They must suit a particular role and never come across as generic.

If that sounds tricky, we’ve created five exemplary recommendation sample letters for different situations to use as guidance the next time a student or ex-employee asks for help.

1. A high school student requiring a recommendation to support their college application

Dear [Recommendation Recipient]

It is my pleasure to recommend [Student’s Name] for admission to [College/University name.] As their AP biology teacher and mentor in our Science Research Program, I have been consistently impressed by their intellectual curiosity, leadership, and determination.

In class, [Student’s Name] has excelled, frequently engaging with concepts that go far beyond the scope of the curriculum. Their research on the impact of microplastics on freshwater ecosystems earned first place at our regional science fair, showcasing their critical thinking.

Outside academics, they have led our Environmental Club to implement a campus-wide recycling initiative, reducing waste by 30% in one year. Their ability to inspire peers in their senior year and enact this meaningful change is just one example of their exemplary leadership and communication skills.

[Student’s Name] is an outstanding individual whose passion, integrity, and resilience will make them an asset to your institution. I wholeheartedly recommend them for admission.

Yours sincerely,

[Your Full Name]

2. A graduate school applicant writing a cover letter to faculty members

Dear [Recommendation Recipient]

I am honored to recommend [Applicant’s Name] for admission to [Graduate Program Name] at [University Name]. As a school counselor at [School Name], I have had the privilege of working closely with [Applicant’s Name] during their role as a peer mentor in our student support program. Their dedication to fostering academic and emotional growth among their peers has been truly exceptional.

[Applicant’s Name] has consistently demonstrated a deep understanding of interpersonal relationships and a natural ability to connect with students facing challenges. For example, during a peer mediation session, their empathy and problem-solving skills de-escalated a tense conflict. This experience reflects the qualities necessary for success in [Graduate Program Name] and as a future [profession, e.g., clinical psychologist, educator, etc.].

[Applicant’s Name] is thoughtful, diligent, and driven by a genuine passion for making a difference. I have no doubt they will excel in your program and beyond.

Yours sincerely,

[Your Full Name]

3. An entry-level role for a previous intern or junior employee

Dear [Recommendation Recipient]

I am writing about Ms. [x] regarding the Web Development Officer position. I employed Ms. [x] for three years, first as an intern and then as a junior technician. During that time, she contributed to a website redesign and became a valued member of our IT support team.

Ms. [x] regularly demonstrated the ability to contribute and develop her skills. She volunteered for coding and web design courses and used those skills in subsequent projects to maintain the company website. Her initiative and desire to succeed exceeded our expectations and requirements for someone in her position.

I confidently recommend Ms. [x] for a permanent technical role. She possesses exceptional potential and a willingness to learn. She is honest and friendly and works hard to meet project goals. I have no doubt that she will become a valuable asset to any business workforce.

Yours sincerely,

[Your Full Name]

4. A senior-level position

Dear [Recommendation Recipient]

I am writing about Mr. [x] concerning the position of Digital Marketing Manager. I employed Mr. [x] for five years at Cybersales Enterprises and confidently recommend him for the position.

While at Cybersales, Mr. [x] rose to the position of Regional Sales Executive. He showed exceptional business and organizational capabilities, running a 30-person team responsible for North American operations.

During his time with us, Mr. [x] oversaw the creation of an immersive sales app that used 3D technology to introduce new products. He also managed several product launches, ensuring seamless rollout and strong sales figures.

Mr. [x] also contributed to our learning culture by developing his skills and mentoring junior staff. He showed a flair for relationship management, enabling colleagues to realize their potential. His character makes him a strong candidate for management roles.

At all times, Mr. [x] demonstrated a strong work ethic and proved an honest, enthusiastic team member. I am confident his skills and qualities make him an ideal addition to your team. He will confidently assume additional responsibilities without any problems.

Yours sincerely.

[Your Full Name]

5. A character-specific letter focused on soft skills, not technical qualifications or skills

Dear [Recommendation Recipient]

I am writing about Mr. [x] for the Corporate Social Responsibility Manager position. I employed Mr. [x] for seven years at Ecowash Industries as our Environment and Ethical Officer. I have no hesitation in recommending him for a senior CSR position.

As an employee, Mr. [x] showed a passionate belief in environmental protection and social causes while aligning CSR initiatives with our business strategy. He communicated clearly with senior colleagues, explaining corporate policy changes and updating production managers about performance targets.

Mr. [x] also demonstrated an exceptional ability to resolve disputes and motivate colleagues. He used game-playing techniques to embed energy conservation practices. He also bridged the gap between executives and factory staff, easing the transition to different packaging and production techniques.

I am confident Mr. [x] will perform well as a CSR manager. He has outstanding commitment, negotiation skills, and positivity. As an employer, he is also a pleasure to work with.

Yours sincerely,

[Your Full Name]

How to hire employees you want to recommend

So, now you know how to recommend someone for a job, and that letters of recommendation are an important part of the process. They add a human touch to recruitment, communicating admiration, respect, and even affection. Reference letters also reassure employers in a world where 64.2% of candidates write misleading resumes.

But that’s not all they do. Recommendation letters can also be critical reference points in hiring decisions. At Toggl Hire, we often think, ‘Will we be proud to recommend this candidate?’ If we aren’t sure, it’s time to take a second look.

The challenge is finding candidates you want to recommend. If that’s what you’re after, consider implementing skills testing and other candidate assessment checks during your hiring process. This step ensures you’re hiring all-around great employees you’ll be happy to recommend once they eventually move on to a different role (hopefully far into the future!).

Skills test scores, for example, can identify individuals with skills and personalities that suit your organization. Find out more with a free Toggl Hire account. Sign up today to make your hiring more efficient and plan for a more productive workforce.

Recruitment strategies are evolving faster than ever, leaving behind the days when social media felt revolutionary (oh my, how time flies).

Today, social recruiting is just one piece of the puzzle in a much larger, more dynamic toolkit. To stay ahead, businesses need to think beyond the familiar and tap into innovative approaches to attract and secure top talent.

This article takes a forward-looking approach, guiding you through what makes a recruitment strategy impactful, showcasing standout examples, and revealing 13 cutting-edge strategies designed to help your business thrive in 2025.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• A recruitment strategy is a plan of action outlining how the company will acquire talent, including what methods and tools you can use to achieve a pre-determined goal.
• A fully-formed recruitment strategy is based on a specific goal. For example, if your goal is to improve diversity and inclusion, you’ll detail which recruitment methods and tools meet this goal, such as skills-based hiring.
• There are many recruitment strategies out there, but some of the most effective examples include building a strong employer brand and talent pool, optimizing your sourcing strategies and social recruiting, and putting diversity first.
• With Toggl Hire’s expertise in employee skills testing, you can optimize your recruitment efforts and unlock the full potential of these innovative recruitment strategies.

What is a recruitment strategy?

A recruitment strategy is a well-defined hiring plan that outlines the approach an organization chooses to attract, evaluate, and hire people to fill their open positions. Your strategy will include actions you’ll take at any step of the hiring process. For example, you could develop a recruiting strategy to boost candidate applications or create one to improve employee retention.

To choose the best recruiting strategy, a company should first identify its strengths and weaknesses — aka the parts of the recruitment funnel that are working well vs. those requiring improvement — and understand how the hiring process fits into these big-picture goals.

A good example of a recruitment strategy

An effective recruitment strategy should include all the tools, tactics, and goals required to bring in the best talent to drive business growth.

Let’s look at a practical example, like campus hiring. An organization with a clear growth plan and a specific profile of an employee for hard-to-fill roles might choose to create a recruiting strategy based on acquiring talent early in their career. Why? Well, it’s a relatively easy market to target!

Alternatively, a leading tech company looking to nurture diversity and foster greater innovation could adopt a “Hackathon Hiring” approach. By hosting coding competitions open to a global audience, the company could identify exceptional talent from various backgrounds while showcasing the company’s commitment to diversity and innovation.

Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was — and still is — the most important thing we do.

Marc Benioff, Chairman, Founder and CEO of Salesforce

3 things to consider before developing a hiring strategy

To reiterate, a good recruiting strategy includes all the necessary details on how you plan to achieve a set goal. So, before you can start developing any kind of strategy, it’s important to keep these three things in mind.

#1. Recruitment goals

This can be a short-term objective, like onboarding 10 new hires before the end of the year, or a longer-term goal, like improving your employer branding across the US market.

Just remember that goals should be specific, measurable, and aligned with the company’s long-term vision. And with the goals set, you’ll want to agree on the right recruitment metrics to monitor the progress.

#2. Recruiting process

When considering the specific steps you’ll take in your recruiting process, from job posting to onboarding, it’s essential to keep your recruitment goals in mind.

For example, if the goal is to onboard quickly, you’ll need a recruitment process that’s fast and efficient. Or, if the goal is to increase diversity, you’ll need to focus on inclusive best practices to achieve this goal, right down to the language used in your job ads.

For instance, at Toggl, we aim to find the best candidates while maintaining a great candidate experience. This is what our recruitment process for most of our products or roles looks like:

1. A 15-minute skills test to evaluate candidates‘ core skills quickly
2. When we hire for customer-facing roles, we use video intros for additional screening
3. A short homework assignment to identify the most qualified candidates
4. An interview with the hiring manager to confirm cultural alignment
5. A paid test week to get proof of competence and conduct peer interviews

We track metrics like best candidate sources, percentage of candidates over the test threshold, applicant satisfaction scores, drop-off rates, and speed to hire to identify areas of improvement in our recruiting process.

#3. Recruitment tools

Recruitment tools like Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), skills assessments, and automation software have become an essential part of the recruiting process because they help to:

• Streamline the hiring process
• Save hiring teams significant time and money
• Improve the candidate experience
• Reduce the risk of mis-hires

But to know which tool is right for you, you’ll need to refer back to your chosen recruitment goals and interview process to help you decide. For example, skills testing is an excellent tool to speed up candidate screening but would need to be combined with an efficient selection process if the goal is to hire more efficiently.

13 best recruitment strategies to find qualified candidates

Now we understand what recruiting strategies are and the main things to consider when developing one, let’s dive into our pick of the best recruiting strategies and tactics, and why they work in 2025.

1. Work on your employer brand

Employer branding plays a major role in attracting, hiring, and retaining great talent. In fact, 81% of organizations have taken action to improve their employer brand in the last 12 months, signaling its impact on hiring success and employee satisfaction.

Your employer brand is what makes people want to work with you and for you. Think about companies like Apple, Patagonia, Nike, and Netflix. Each has a clear mission, identity, and tone of voice that helps them stand out as industry leaders — as well as a compelling employee value proposition.

Granted, they’ve been around for a while now. But even newer companies stand to gain from strategic employer branding.

Take Revolut, for example. The global finance app went from series A funding to raising a whopping $800M in series E in the space of just five years. To reflect their incredible journey and mission, they created a unique campaign under “never settle” to attract potential candidates to their brand.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

Start by identifying which areas of your employer brand need work. Everything from your job ads to writing creative job descriptions to the perceived company culture falls under your employer brand — so you’ll need to investigate thoroughly to decide what needs work.

You’ll also need to engage with other departments, such as marketing and communications, to build a brand candidates want to work for.

Key employer branding elements to focus on include:

• EVP: The promise you make to potential candidates in return for their commitment to your company. Promises like “Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere” from AirBnB help to crystalize your brand’s value proposition.
• Careers page: A major opportunity to showcase your employer brand with videos, testimonials, and information on the hiring process.
• Recruitment marketing materials: Refers to all the touchpoints and ways in which you market your company to candidates long before they’re even ready to fill out an application.
• Employee ambassadorship: Another powerful tool when marketing your company brand, as brand ambassadors are perceived as more credible than corporate marketing messages.
• Job postings/ads: Actually your last chance to convince prospective candidates to apply.

Create a desirable employer brand, and we promise you that attracting great candidates becomes a whole lot easier!

2. Polish your ideal candidate profiles

Creating an ideal candidate profile for every role is far from a waste of time. Just as marketers develop customer personas to target their efforts, a candidate profile can become an invaluable hiring tool used to:

• Create better job descriptions
• Improve sourcing strategies
• Lead to a better quality of hire

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

Don’t let your ICPs gather dust! For them to work, you need to continually review and refresh them for every new role by following these seven steps.

3. Optimize your candidate sourcing process

Sourcing is the first stage of your talent acquisition process and refers to all your combined efforts to find and attract potential applicants to your company and/or a specific role. That includes how you target both active and passive applicants.

Given that 85% of the workforce doesn’t even scan job boards, optimizing this stage of the recruitment process can bring big rewards.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

Start by conducting a review of your sourcing methods and cross-check your current strategy with other creative candidate sourcing ideas. For example:

• Use external recruiters or headhunters
• Try new channels for job postings and advertising
• Open up your vacancy to remote hires
• Subcontract employees for a temporary project or position, like a maternity cover
• Incentivize more employee referrals
• Tap into your database of past applications

4. Attract passive candidates

According to research, only 35% of employees are not interested in looking for a new job next year. 41% are actively seeking new employment, and 24% were “unsure,” indicating they’re in the passive market and could be swayed by the right opportunity if it came along.

Given that passive candidates aren’t actively looking for new roles, it’s important to realize you aren’t going to engage with them on job boards. Instead, you need to adopt a long-term talent acquisition philosophy to ensure you get seen by passive talent long before they’re looking for a new role. This way, when they are eventually on the market, they’ll think of you!

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

There are many ways to get the attention of passive candidates, for example:

• Create a strong employer brand: As we saw before, employer branding is one of the most powerful ways to get the attention of passive candidates.
• Gamify your application process with skills tests: We’ve seen first-hand how effective skills testing can be in capturing the attention of passive talent.
• Be seen on social media: Whatever space you’re in, your company’s social media profiles can be used as tools to convert your passive followers into active candidates.

5. Put diversity first

Finally, what we’ve all known has been proven. Diversity and inclusion in the workplace not only helps to level the playing field for minority groups, but it also carries many real business benefits.

• Companies in the top quartile for diversity representation have a 39% greater likelihood of financial outperformance than companies in the bottom percentile.
• Diverse teams are 87% better at making decisions
• Companies that welcome diversity are 1.7x more innovative

Given those stats, and in this day and age, you really shouldn’t need any more convincing about putting diversity first.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

Global pharmaceutical company and top-ranking employer Novartis is a leading example of putting diversity first. Of course, being a large company with big responsibilities, its diversity initiatives have grown to the point of needing a Chief Diversity & Culture Officer.

But even long before your company’s culture gets to that level, there are still many things you can do:

• Pay close attention to job postings and descriptions to check for inclusive language
• Try blind hiring and anonymous applications
• Remove bias with skills tests and unconscious bias awareness initiatives
• Switch up the job boards you use and try including niche job boards that specialize in a particular sector, field, or skill set

6. Create a talent pool

One of the biggest challenges in recruitment is often sourcing suitable candidates with the skills and experience you need. One way to tackle this problem is to build a high-quality talent pool and keep a list of vetted candidates on standby.

However, a great talent pool isn’t just a list of names and phone numbers. A properly curated talent pool provides rich information on each potential candidate, including their: 

• Experience
• Hard & soft skills
• Attributes
• Career goals
• Cultural fit to your organization
• Suitable roles

If you’re going to implement any long-term recruitment strategies, building a talent pool is one we’d definitely recommend. Not only will it boost your speed to hire, but it will also reduce costs and keep the best candidates engaged with your business.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

The first step is to acknowledge all the different methods that can contribute to your talent pool.

For example:

• Candidate sourcing campaigns
• Leads from career events
• Software like Toggl Hire keeps track of all applicants (including unsuccessful applicants that may be suited to a different or future role)
• Community
• Passive candidates
• Candidate profiles on platforms like LinkedIn, Github, and UpWork

The second step is to start exploring different strategies and best practices for creating and maintaining a robust talent pool.

For example:

• Sorting and segmentation: To extract the most value from your existing talent pool and remain organized when growing it, you’ll need to segment by attributes like job function, skills, experience level, location, and interests.
• Nurturing and engagement: It’s not enough to simply collect and sort candidate details; you need to stay connected with candidates in your talent pool through things like social media, events, and outreach.
• Personalization: Your segmentation will prove invaluable when recruiting from your talent pool, but it’s also essential to personalize your communications to build and maintain that relationship.

7. Develop an employee referral program

Employee referral programs aren’t new, but getting them right is still tricky. Asking your current employees to refer great people from their network is an effective way to connect with outstanding talent. And what makes this recruitment strategy so sought-after is that it’s free.

Employee referrals are one of the best recruitment strategies because:

• Referred candidates have lower turnover rates
• They’re better quality hires
• They help reduce your time to hire
• They’re cost-effective for sourcing

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

The trick with employee referral programs is to strike a balance between incentivization and quality. You want your staff to actively refer people from their network but not their low-quality connections.

But the good news is that building employee referral programs is quick, low-cost, and delivers qualified candidates fast! No wonder it’s one of the favorite recruitment strategies among technical recruiters.

8. Nail your social media recruiting efforts

The rise of digital technology and social media has fundamentally changed the way candidates and recruiters interact. Digital hiring strategies and social media help recruiters find, engage with, and acquire the best talent on the market.

Here are some stats to back this up:

• 79% of job seekers have used social media in their job search in the last year.
• ‍On LinkedIn alone, 9,000 candidates apply, and 7 candidates are hired every minute.
• Candidate application rates increase 34% when the job postings include a video. LinkedIn also reveals that video views are up 36% year on year.

The fully remote workflow automation company Zapier is a great example of social recruiting in practice. The company uses innovative ways to engage and connect with its target audiences and prospective job candidates.

For example, during the summer, the company posted the results from its first “no-meeting week,” during which 80% of the team achieved their goals and gave others a meaningful look into the company culture.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

To get started with social recruiting, consider the following:

1. Choose the social media platforms most relevant to your audience and recruitment goals
2. Post frequently sharing news and insights into job openings, job fairs, networking events, company milestones, product updates, contests, what it’s like to work at your company, etc
3. Engage with followers and potential candidates by responding to their questions and comments
4. Encourage employee referrals and engagement by current employees
5. Measure and track how your social recruiting efforts perform in order to adjust and optimize your social recruiting strategy

9. Connect with graduates

Graduates are the future, literally. For many roles, graduates are just a graduation away from clicking apply. In fact, many graduates are encouraged to secure their places up to a year before they even finish their courses, and this represents a candidate pool that shouldn’t be ignored.

Here are just some of the reasons why you should consider creating a recruiting strategy targeting graduates:

• They cost less as graduates start their careers
• They’re motivated to keep learning, with 94% of graduates surveyed citing work as an avenue for building their skills
• They have excellent knowledge of the latest digital tech and software to help your business thrive
• They bring fresh perspectives from their learning experience

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

4 ways you can connect with graduates include:

• Social media: Using creative, bespoke recruiting campaigns to target university students, like this creative ad campaign from Amey below.
• Job fairs and careers days: Attending multiple events for employers hosted at universities
• Your benefits package: Another way to hook graduates is by making a better offer than your competitors and including perks like gym memberships or flexible hours that make all the difference
• Candidate experience: Recruiting in this space is highly competitive, and another way to differentiate your brand is through the candidate experience.

10. Attend or host industry events

In an increasingly remote world, there is a lot of value in attending in-person events. Company and industry events can raise your profile within your industry, bring value to your network, and position your business as an exciting and innovative place to work.

From a recruitment perspective, events are a great way to synergize with several other recruitment strategies. They raise your employer brand, plant the seed with passive candidates, and are an opportunity to build a talent pool.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy? 

Start with Hootsuite’s awesome guide on how to host your own virtual events. These ideas offer a quick, easy, and low-cost way to start boosting your business profile and meet future candidates.

If you’re in tech, this could be a hackathon. For the arts industry, try hosting an exhibition. Or, if you’re in marketing, go to a conference.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t hold remote events. Something as simple as hosting a webinar on an industry hot topic or a virtual job fair is still a powerful way to bring people together.

11. Create an internship program

Last but not least, one of the most effective recruitment strategies that has never fallen out of fashion in the world of talent acquisition is the implementation of internship programs. Statistics show that candidates who complete internships are 85% more likely to secure a full-time job after graduation.

These programs offer hiring managers a unique opportunity to identify and nurture promising talent within their organizations by allowing both employers and candidates to assess their compatibility before making long-term commitments.

This strategy works exceptionally well because it provides an extended evaluation period and serves as an effective talent pipeline.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy?

For a successful internship program, start by doing research to:

• Identify which departments or teams should have an internship program
• Define the objectives and goals of the program for the team, individuals, and wider organization, as well as the terms and compensation they will receive to attract interns to your program
• Promote your internships through various channels, such as career fairs and universities, as well as your careers page and social media.
• Refine your program by gathering and incorporating feedback
• Measure and assess the success of your program by tracking key metrics such as intern satisfaction, the number of interns who were offered full-time roles, and subsequent retention rates

12. Provide a safe workspace free of political discussions

Global political events such as the US election and war in the Middle East appear to be spilling over into the workplace, causing discomfort for employees. A recent Politics at Work report finds that:

• 75% of employees are considering leaving their jobs due to political discussions at work
• 60% believe political discussions should be banned at work altogether
• 66% have lied about their political views to fit in with their colleagues
• 94% of entry-level colleagues are more likely to lie about their political beliefs, compared to 44% of senior managers

Potential applicants, especially those seeking junior roles or even those who have experienced the fallout of political discussions in their previous workplace, need reassurance you’re offering a safe space free from potential conflict.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy?

Admittedly, it’s easier to publicize your anti-politics stance to an audience of existing employees rather than potential applicants. But there are steps you can take to reassure candidates of your company values, such as:

• Using your social platforms to highlight your company culture and the benefits of not discussing presidential candidates at work
• Using interviews to communicate how your commitment to a politics-free environment contributes to a harmonious workplace culture
• Highlighting your commitment to a respectful environment on your careers page, job descriptions, and recruitment marketing materials

13. Appeal to the hidden workforce

As much as 14 to 17% of the US workforce comprises hidden talent, packed with skills, but whose resumes are often overlooked in favor of more traditional candidates. These hidden workers may include:

• Neurodiverse employees
• Workers forced into retirement who would relish the opportunity to return to work
• Caregivers who have left the workforce to support their dependents
• Ex-inmates struggling to find an employer willing to give them a second chance
• Veterans who haven’t yet found a civilian role
• Menopausal employees who have been forced out of work due to their age or symptoms
• People with long-term physical or mental health problems

These candidates may never have been employed or may have been forced out of the workplace due to their situation. Whatever their individual circumstances, they have limitless skills to offer an employer.

How can you implement this recruitment strategy?

To tap into this hidden talent pool, consider implementing these steps:

• Partner with organizations that specialize in helping individuals from these groups to find employment
• Review your recruitment processes and job descriptions for language or requirements that may deter these candidates from applying
• Offer flexible working arrangements, such as part-time or remote work options
• Implement a returnship program for caregivers or retirees looking to re-enter the workforce to demonstrate your commitment to supporting employees at all stages of their careers
• Follow up with candidates who have requested recruitment accommodations to understand how you can support them throughout the hiring process
• Assert your commitment toward skills-based hiring, and how you plan to use skills assessments to find the best person for the job.

Where does Toggl Hire come in?

If you want to fill more positions, attract better-quality candidates, and decrease your time to hire, these 13 effective recruitment strategies offer some easy-to-implement ideas.

Combine every strategy we’ve covered with skills testing to give your hiring metrics an extra boost! This is great for candidates, too, as it provides a more exciting way to showcase their talents and gives them instant feedback.

Incorporating hiring tests into your recruitment strategy has many benefits

• Gamify the application experience to attract top talent and passive applicants
• Improve the quality of hire & speed to hire, as it’s easier to recognize top talent
• Reduce unconscious bias for more diverse talent
• Higher quality candidates at every stage of the pipeline
• Create a talent pool in Toggl Hire with extensive information on candidates’ skills & past applications

Remember, the ultimate key to a successful recruiting strategy is creating a slick and efficient hiring process. Try Toggl Hire’s skills testing for free today.

As 2024 comes to a close, we’re thrilled to share our latest updates designed to make your time tracking experience smoother, more secure, and more insightful.

Here’s what’s new in Q4:

• New automation options for time tracking in the Chrome Extension, auto-tracking calendar events, and creating autotracker rules in the Windows Desktop App.
• Improved approvals: Assign multiple timesheet approvers, approve or reject in bulk, and spot overlapping time entries.
• Passkeys — a more secure and seamless way to log in.
• Expanded Audit Log capabilities to see changes to Clients, Tags, Workspace settings, and billable and labor rates.

More Ways to Automate Your Time Tracking

No clicks, no reminders, no extra burden — this is how we want to reinvent time tracking. Here’s what we launched in Q4 to enable more auto-tracking options.

Enable “Always Track This Page” in Your Extension

We spend much of our workday in our browsers. Now, you can set specific pages (like Notion, Jira, HubSpot, or other frequently used websites) to automatically enable time tracking. You decide how long you need to be on a page before tracking starts — and it stops automatically when you close the tab.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Go to your browser extension settings.
2. Under Integrations, select “Auto track” for the pages you want.
3. Specify when auto-tracking should start.

Auto-Track Calendar Events

Calendar integrations have already helped teams save up to 80 hours per month on time tracking. Now, we’ve made it even better. With auto-track for calendar events, your events will convert into time entries automatically within 15 minutes of starting.

To enable:

1. In the Calendar view, click on the Calendar Settings dropdown.
2. Switch on “Auto-track calendar events.”

Create Auto-Tracking Rules in Windows App

Drag your cursor over any open window, and — voilà! — you’ve created an auto-tracking rule. You’ll be prompted to set details like description, project, and tags. Once set, a time entry starts automatically whenever that window is opened.

Here’s how it works:

1. Drag your cursor over an open window to create a rule.
2. Set details such as project, description, or tags.
3. Specify how much time should pass before tracking begins.

Improved Approvals

Improvements include assigning multiple timesheet approvers and approve timesheets in bulk.

We’ve made timesheet approvals more efficient:

• New flexibility: Assign multiple users or user groups as timesheet approvers to streamline the approval process for larger teams. Learn more here.
• Save time: Approve or reject multiple timesheets in a single action — no more one-by-one reviews.
• Better accuracy: Easily identify overlapping time entries for cleaner, more reliable timesheets.

👉 Read more on reviewing Team Timesheets.

Approvals are available in our Premium and Enterprise plans.

Hello, Passkeys!

We’re stepping up account security with Passkeys, a faster and more secure login option. No more password fatigue, and no more phishing worries.

🔑 To enable Passkeys:

1. Go to Account Settings.
2. Click “Enable” under “Passkey” in Additional Login Options.

👉 Learn more about Passkeys here

Expanded Audit Log Capabilites

For better transparency into Workspace changes

We’ve expanded the Audit Log to provide even more visibility into workspace changes. In addition to Projects and Time Entries, the Audit Log now tracks:

• Clients
• Tags
• Workspace settings
• Billable and labor rate changes

These updates help admins maintain transparency and build trust with their teams.

👉 Learn more about Audit Log

Audit Log is available with Premium and Enterprise plans.

Catch Up on Key 2024 Launches

Missed some updates earlier this year? Here’s a quick recap:

• Q3 2024: Toggl Track Goals, Historical Labor Costs, the Audit Log and more. Check them out.
• Q2 2024: More Invoice Flexibility, task-specific billable rates, and shared time entries for team collaboration. Learn more.
• Q1 2024: QuickBooks integration, duration-only time tracking, and more. See the details.

The labor market never sits still, so every year, we’re challenged with new recruitment trends. While it might feel exhausting trying to keep up, understanding what’s happening on the market (and why) is the only way to improve your hiring strategy. 

From gaping skills gaps to shifting employee preferences regarding remote and hybrid work, let’s first recap the impact of top hiring trends of the past few years on today’s market — then analyze what’s on the agenda for 2025.

Key shifts in the recruitment market in 2024

2024 was a year of recalibration in the labor market.

Amid economic uncertainty, layoffs in the tech sector persisted, with companies restructuring to focus on profitability. Companies like Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, TikTok, Snap, and Google all made cuts, with the industry losing around 130,000 people across 457 companies.

A similar story exists in the financial services sector, where the top 12 investment banks slashed 100 front-line dealmakers in Q1 of 2024 alone.

You’d imagine, then, that the talent market would be filled with highly skilled people, ready to slide into place at other organizations. In the case of bankers, this appears to be the case. Eric Li, research director at Coalition Greenwich, explains:

Investment banks remain laser-focused on costs. What we’ve seen is that while the big banks are cutting, smaller boutiques and other investment banks are picking them up. Around 60 of those who lost their jobs have found new roles elsewhere. It’s a great chance for them to pick up talent that would otherwise be too expensive to hire.

However, many other industries report that skill shortages have made it challenging to find the caliber of candidate they need to fill their open vacancies. SHRM’s Talent Trends report reveals that over three in four organizations have had difficulty recruiting for full-time regular positions. Highly skilled medical positions and skilled trades have been the most difficult-to-fill positions in 2024.

One in four organizations indicate full-time regular positions filled in the past 12 months demanded new skills. Organizational growth (55%) and evolving technology (51%) are the primary drivers of these new skill requirements. However, three out of four organizations report facing moderate to significant challenges in finding candidates with the necessary skills.

Talking of skills challenges, SHRM also finds that 37% of candidates don’t have the required technical skills, 30% lack adequate soft skills, and 18% don’t even have the basic skills needed to join their organization.

At the same time, some traditional hiring incentives are being scaled back. For example, the percentage of organizations offering flexible work arrangements has reduced by 16% in 2024 compared to 2022. Improvements to compensation packets, including salary and employee benefits, also fell by 16%. These declines highlight a move away from some of the more generous pandemic-era recruitment strategies, even as the need for top talent remains.

So, what do companies have up their sleeve to deal with these gaps in their organizational lineup?

Top recruitment trends to expect in 2025

Effectively, last year’s recruiting trends serve as a springboard for the new developments in the market. So, here’s what we expect to see through 2025.

1. The evolution of AI adoption

Hirers and job seekers have moved beyond the excitement of artificial intelligence’s arrival and are now experiencing it as a mainstay of the recruitment process. Some 57% of applicants relied on OpenAI during the application process in 2024 (which is hardly surprising) either to speed up or refine their applications.

Professional resume writers, job coaches, and other online tools have been around for decades. AI is just another version of the same. So, well-trained HR managers are well aware that the resumes they’re reviewing may not have been written by the candidates (and that’s one reason why Toggl eliminated resume screening long ago). 

The lesson here? To hire top talent in the age of AI, you need to adapt your recruiting process. 

Instead of giving candidates problems ChatGPT can solve, try testing their skills with open-ended homework assignments or soft skills assessments. Modern assessment tools like Toggl Hire include anti-cheating and anti-AI protection, which also prevents candidates from using apps during tests. 

In a world where everybody is using AI to boost productivity and improve efficiency, it might seem “wrong” to prevent candidates from using AI to help them apply for your job listings. However, doing so allows you to assess the candidates’ actual skills and personality traits rather than evaluate how well they can use ChatGPT to look up the right answers. 

It’s not all about preventing AI usage, though. Hiring teams are also exploring ways to use AI for good in the hiring process. For example, T-Mobile relies on an AI-powered tool to remove biased, non-inclusive language from job descriptions.

New HR technology, powered by advanced algorithms, can help hiring teams:

• Streamline repetitive, manual tasks such as interview coordination and scheduling, ad publishing to multiple job boards, satisfaction survey management, new hire onboarding, employee payroll management, and more.  
• Create automated communication channels to both strengthen employer branding and improve candidate experience. Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), chatbots can easily provide candidates with updates on their application status, answer questions about company culture, and handle a ton of other recruitment marketing activities.  
• Automate document processing.  Artificial intelligence can document cross-checks and information lookups at cruising speed with high accuracy. Streamline candidate identification and document checks with new KYC tools. Save time with AI-generated summaries of new regulatory or compliance documents.
• Get more data for decision-making. Whether you’re doing workforce planning for the new year or trying to evaluate your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) metrics, AI can crunch the numbers. Thanks to predictive analytics, you can also look into the future and model the volume of future applicants or estimate talent attrition using historical data.
• Build bigger talent pools. Leverage AI to cross-check past candidates’ or current employees’ skills and match them with new job opportunities. Personalize outreach to potential prospects on social media and across job boards to get more people into your recruitment funnel. 

AI already has ample practical use cases in recruiting, and we expect more talent leaders to embrace it by 2025.

Practical tips for making better use of AI in recruitment

• Learn about the different types of AI. Machine learning, predictive analytics, generative AI, and robotic process automation (RPA) — each of these technologies is better suited for specific tasks in a recruiting process. For example, Generative AI excels in content generation, while predictive analytics helps with advanced forecasting and modeling.
• Brainstorm use cases. Identify the most time-consuming, error-prone, and manual elements of your talent acquisition process. Brainstorm with hiring managers how different AI products can address the inefficiencies. 
• Start with pilot projects. Select several test use cases. For example, test different AI apps for recruitment marketing tasks or employer branding activities (e.g., job ad copy generation or personalized nurturing sequences for candidates in your pipeline). Set clear success criteria for each and measure the impact to estimate ROI. 

2. Increased commitment to skills-based hiring

As the cost and time-to-hire increase, every new employee becomes a critical hire. The increased emphasis on talent quality will require companies to tighten the recruitment process. Hiring managers will be eager to vet job seekers more rigorously and at a wider scale with the help of skills-based hiring. 

For 78% of HR professionals, SHRM reports that pre-employment assessments, which test skills, knowledge, and abilities, have improved the quality of their organization’s hires. 80% of recruiting pros claim to be committed to creating a more diverse workforce, and a skills focus is central to this initiative. Note: A skills focus increases talent pools by 10x, according to LinkedIn.

That’s because skills-based recruiting moves away from basing hiring decisions on gut feelings toward actual data on candidates’ competency. You can practice collaborative hiring by giving each manager the power to select people with the skills they need. 

Practical tips for implementing skills-based hiring in 2025

• Conduct a job task analysis to better understand the role’s competencies. Shift the focus from degree or work experience requirements to the skills, qualifications, and aptitudes of an ideal hire.
• Determine the optimal use cases for pre-employment tests. Use basic skill tests to quickly check if applicants have the skills needed. Then, apply a combination of different interviewing methods and take-home assignments (case studies, coding challenges, language tests, time-boxed competency assessments) to find the perfect skill matches.
• Drop questions about the candidate’s background to eliminate interviewer bias. Instead, ask more behavioral and problem-solving questions to understand how a candidate thinks and acts rather than what shaped them personally and professionally. By combining structured interviews with pre-employment tests, you can get a more comprehensive picture of a candidate’s skill set and team fit. 

3. Strong labor market optimism

Prepare for the labor market to open back up again in 2025. Although the current unemployment rate in the US is expected to remain around 4%, and a stable 6% in the EU, more opportunities will exist.

Over 80% of employers across tech, financial services, and healthcare plan to expand hiring in 2025, signaling renewed labor market optimism after two years of declines. Easing inflation and stabilizing interest rates are fueling employer confidence. 64% say macroeconomic conditions will support hiring in 2025.

Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s Chief Economist

At the same time, EY reports 38% of employees are likely to quit in the next year due to poor pay and work-life balance.

For recruiting professionals, the above trends translate to a bigger talent pool…and bigger workloads, too. With an increased supply of candidates and an increase in open roles, there will be a heck of a lot of movement. Recruiters can expect to spend more time wading through hundreds of applications, pre-screening for hard skills, and scheduling rounds of interviews. 

And without a strong talent acquisition strategy, you risk getting some bad hires on board. 

Skills assessments can help hiring teams quickly find the most suitable candidates. Sadly, many job seekers lack essential hard and soft skills for the jobs they are after. That’s where proof of competence will become synonymous with recruiting top-level talent. 

Skills assessments can help hiring teams quickly whittle down the initial flood of applicants and highlight the most suitable candidates. AI for process automation, in turn, can help with secondary hiring processes (background checks, job offer management, onboarding, etc.), helping you reduce time-to-hire and boost productivity.

Practical tips for managing your candidate pipeline in 2025

• Refresh job descriptions with new skills to better reflect the kind of talent you’re seeking for vacant positions. 
• Be upfront about non-negotiable criteria. State if the role doesn’t support remote working or is strictly limited to candidates from a specific location. 
• Combine different pre-screening methods like resume checks, competency assessments, cognitive abilities, and aptitude tests (among others) to get more qualified candidates to the next stages. 
• Use cultural fit interviews and job simulations to secure both proof of competence and a strong team fit. 

4. Increased focus on closing skills gaps

Although the overall candidate supply is higher this year, skill shortages aren’t going away. Digital transformations, an aging workforce, a decreasing number of STEM graduates, and lower participation among women negatively affect today’s labor market.

Since 2015, the skill sets for jobs have changed by 25%, and that number is expected to be 65% by 2030. Yet, both existing employees and active job seekers are behind in developing new competencies. 

Modern-day jobs also require softer skills. As AI advances, businesses need to balance robotic output with human instincts, making interpersonal skills highly sought-after.

The most in-demand skills? Here they come:

1. Communication
2. Customer service
3. Leadership
4. Project management
5. Management
6. Analytics
7. Teamwork
8. Sales
9. Problem-solving
10. Research

Talent upskilling and reskilling will be a major recruiting trend in 2025.

To address the problem, HR leaders will need to first gain visibility into existing organizational skill gaps and evaluate the effects of tech disruption on the existing roles. 

Practical tips for addressing skills gaps in 2025

• Schedule a talent gap analysis to deconstruct the work your people already do and the skills they have (and lack) to perform their jobs better. Identifies areas for strategic recruitment, training, and development.   
• Introduce career coaching sessions. Improve employee engagement and talent retention by introducing new professional development plans for employees and walking them through different training programs available. 
• Offer a training budget. Instead of superimposing training from above, let employees choose any professional training, workshop, or conference they fancy. At Toggl, we give each employee €4K annually as part of our benefits program, and this helps us maintain a highly skilled workforce. 
• Launch an apprenticeship program. Expand your campus recruiting program with a digital apprenticeship — a fixed-duration program aimed at teaching fresh grads suitable hard skills.

5. Using contractors to plug operational gaps

Since 2020, business leaders have been increasingly turning to contingent, seasonal, or consultant employees to address skills gaps, better respond to changing market conditions, and maintain a competitive edge. 

In fact, Robert Half’s State of US Hiring report finds that 63% of companies plan to add contract professionals in the first half of 2025.

Contingent labor is expected to comprise 35% to 40% of the global workforce by 2025.

Gartner

This trend translates to extra workloads and complexities in compliance management for recruiting teams. Faster hiring cycles, proper worker classification, rapid onboarding (and offboarding) — a lot of grunt work is required to maintain a contingent workforce. 

To streamline external workforce management, create a set of processes, projects, or roles you want to fill in with contractors and map these to anticipate engagement duration. Determine: 

• Which roles have temporary or fluctuating demand?
• Which roles are need-driven? 
• Which roles require long-term support? 

Instead of standard job descriptions, highlight specific job tasks that contractors will need to complete (e.g., produce three blog posts per month) or processes you’d want them to handle (e.g., payroll management). 

Finally, don’t forget about compliance. Be upfront about any specific requirements you have — mandatory liability insurance, a valid professional license, the ability to perform on-site work, and so on. 

You will need to change your hiring strategy to recruit and onboard contractors. But the payoff of doing so is greater operational agility, faster hiring cycles, and easier access to in-demand skills. 

Practical tips for hiring contractors in 2025

• Understand the different service models. Some contractors do mostly deliverable-based, fixed-price gigs. Others prefer retainers, charge hourly for fractional engagements, or take a day rate for consulting work. Check if your current accounting setup can accommodate their proposed payment cycle and payment terms.
• Rely on social media recruiting. Contractors and freelancers don’t frequent popular career sites. Instead, they hang out in online communities and on social media. Prioritize LinkedIn and Twitter to build relationships with independent workers. 
• Offer fair compensation. Contractors save companies a lot of payroll costs since most taxes are passed on to them. This means few can (or will) afford to charge the same hourly rates as regular employees. Don’t lowball the proposed rates, and try to negotiate the scope of work instead if you have budgetary constraints.  

6. Employee engagement is in crisis mode

Over the past years, we’ve seen the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, Quiet Firing, and Rage Applying. That’s hardly surprising, given that employee engagement has been sinking year-over-year.  

Evaluating employee engagement is a top priority for HR professionals in 2025.

Rising cost of living, salary freezes, forced returns to the offices — a lot of factors have made the global workforce less optimistic about the future. 

The latest recruiting trends, including increased reliance on contingent talent, accelerated adoption of AI, and the return of a recruiter’s market, are making people even more anxious about their job security. 

To patch things up in 2025, HR professionals will need to first evaluate the job satisfaction scores and then drill down to the causes of poor engagement. 

Collect feedback on all levels:

• Survey managers about their levels of happiness, motivation, and recognition, plus their perception of the team’s morale and satisfaction. 
• Ask lower-level employees to anonymously share feedback about their managers. Do they get enough recognition, timely feedback, and the ability to bring up new ideas? 

Compare the sentiments to better understand the gaps and overlaps in perception and determine the best course of action. 

Practical tips for improving employee engagement in 2025

• Coach your managers to lead better. Middle managers are responsible for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Identify leaders with strong people skills (and likely higher team engagement scores!) that you already have and look to hire more people with similar skill sets for open roles. Invest in extra training for current staff to help them develop better soft skills, curb micro-management tendencies, and learn some new ways to empower and recognize their employees.  
• Advocate for employees’ ideas. Don’t just ask for feedback; act on it. Create a transparent system for accepting, evaluating, and executing employee ideas. Show that your company listens, cares, and implements suggestions from people at every level. 
• Double down on your remote and hybrid policies. 34% of businesses plan to extend their return to office policies to five days a week in 2025. But this doesn’t mesh well with employees who value a more flexible working model. 60% of employees would stay in a job they hate if it offered flexible hours, and 22% would quit their employer if it enforced an RTO mandate. If remote-first isn’t the right fit for your organization, consider the more flexible hybrid approach, which could be a gamechanger for your employee engagement levels.

7. Internal mobility is on the rise 

The recruiting landscape will remain dynamic, with people moving internally and even cross-border to keep progressing. And by offering this, employers can hang onto their top talent and avoid the expense of recruitment. KornFerry finds that 67% of internal employees would remain with their employer if they received adequate opportunities for upskilling and advancement.

As costs continue to soar into 2025, sourcing talent from within an organization can be a first step in saving expenses during the recruitment process. Hiring talent internally and promoting talent mobility schemes not only helps save on recruitment expenses like interviewing candidates and working through agencies but it also helps convey business confidence in existing employees’ skills while also providing current staff career growth and development opportunities.

Julia Braun, Chief HR Officer for software provider, SoftwareOne

A tough job market, combined with sinking employee engagement rates, means that businesses will likely be forced to keep flexibility on the agenda. However, these recruitment trends allow for hiring more diverse candidates, optimizing operating costs, and increasing corporate resilience.

When done right, a strong internal mobility strategy helps close the knowledge and skills gaps, improve employee engagement rates, and minimize the impact of local labor shortages on business operations.

Create a strong internal mobility strategy to boost employee engagement rates.

Practical tips for improving your talent mobility strategy in 2025

• Brainstorm new talent mobility opportunities. Instead of only moving talent geographically or vertically up the career ladder, consider alternative schemes: lateral moves to other teams or projects, job shadowing or mentorship to support cross-function mobility, and virtual “experience exchange” assignments. The current state of technology allows you to effectively combine in-person and virtual collaboration across functions. 
• Create a dedicated internal hiring process. Don’t force existing employees to go through the same process as any other job seeker. Streamline and simplify the application process by using competency assessments rather than resume pre-screening and peer interviews instead of culture pre-screeners with HR. 
• Mind compliance. Work-from-anywhere arrangements come with a new pane of tax, immigration, and employment law risks. New remote work-related tax rules may also emerge. Ensure that your policies remain in close sync with the current compliance regulations to avoid unnecessary risk exposure. 

8. Talent retention remains a top priority 

Telenet retention is an important part of workforce planning, and even more so in 2025 as the wave of resignations continues. 90% of organizations are concerned about retention, according to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report. They consider “offering learning opportunities” as the top retention strategy.

According to employee recognition platform Nectar, 29% of employees have quit a job within the first 90 days of starting. Clearly, HR teams need to focus more on improving the candidate experience and employee experience. 

To do better in 2025, focus on addressing the necessities. Poor compensation is the top reason for candidates seeking a role elsewhere, which makes sense given the economic climate.

But if cash bonuses and pay bumps will strain corporate cash flow, prioritize alternative options. To improve talent retention and engagement, career progression and work flexibility could also persuade your employees to stay, according to the Achievers Engagement and Retention report.

Practical tips for retaining top talent in 2025

• Refresh your succession plans. Look into creating new vertical and horizontal growth opportunities for experienced employees. Standardize performance reviews and industry benchmarks to make compensation offers more competitive. Use data-backed KPIs to clearly set performance expectations and recognize the best candidates for promotion. 
• Introduce better perks. 87% of employees would consider leaving a company that does not focus on their wellbeing, and perks are an important part of supporting them. With inflation rising, fewer people appreciate fancy gym memberships or having access to an in-office meditation room. Among the most in-demand employee retention perks for 2024 were lifestyle spending accounts that allow workers to spend a fixed monthly allowance on benefits meaningful to them. For example, health and well-being support, family care (sponsored daycare, elderly care), adoption assistance, catered food, and better work-from-home support.
• Improve the workplace ambiance. Mass layoffs, budget cuts, workplace automation — a lot of the latest recruitment trends make employees wary about their job security. Combined with a tougher leadership style, these factors dramatically reduce the employees’ comfort with taking risks and making mistakes without fear of negative consequences. Only 58% of workers feel psychologically safe at work and, by proxy, less engaged and productive. Measure how your company performs in the area of psychological safety and implement better practices like a “no-blame culture” and “fail fast-learn fast.”

Stay ahead of recruitment trends in 2025

From the growing importance of employee engagement to skills-based hiring, the latest recruiting trends for 2025 feel more like an evolution of effective HR practices than a revolution in hiring. And that’s a relief, right? Sure, but it’s definitely not a sign to kick back and relax because the job market will be anything but steady this year. 

Sync with new candidates and current employees’ expectations to avoid higher talent attrition. Empower your hiring team with AI tools that simplify and automate the recruitment process. Evaluate how contingency workforce and new talent mobility models can help you address skills gaps. 

If improving the quality and speed of hires is your priority for 2025, check out our skills-based hiring pipeline that helps screen, shortlist, and hire the most qualified people for the job. Get started for free!

As a recruiter, few things feel better than sourcing a high-quality candidate for your hiring manager. However, it’s difficult (to say the least) to accurately predict which applicants have the abilities to do the job well, will fit into the company culture, and ultimately be able to make an impact on the team.

Unless…you’ve already integrated pre-employment tests into your hiring process or are currently figuring out how to do so. Oh, what is pre-employment skills testing? You’re about to find out!

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Pre-employment testing offers a standardized, data-backed way to evaluate job applicants’ core competencies, role-specific skills, personality traits, and general cognitive abilities. 

• Unlike traditional screening methods, standardized tests are scientifically more likely to predict job performance and employee engagement. Skills tests also allow companies to attract applicants from a broader talent pool and prioritize people with the right skills rather than credentials.  

• Pre-employment tests help recruiters filter candidates who lack the right skills for the role and shortlist the best candidates faster. Other advantages include deeper talent insights, better candidate experience, faster new employee onboarding, and operational cost savings. 

• Popular types of pre-employment skills tests include technical skills tests, soft skills assessments, cognitive ability tests, competency assessments, emotional intelligence tests, language proficiency tests, and risk tests. 

• Different types of skills tests serve different purposes in your recruitment cycle. Basic tests help pre-screen candidates, while advanced role-based assignments and personality tests can help with candidate shortlisting and selection. 

What is pre-employment testing?

Pre-employment testing (sometimes referred to as a pre-hire assessment) is a standardized measure for evaluating a candidate’s abilities. Pre-employment tests help assess skills, competencies, personality, and other aptitudes to determine their fit for the role. 

Unlike resumes and pre-screen interviews, pre-employment assessments offer more objectivity (thanks to comparable scores or consistent rating systems) and promote informed hiring decisions.

In other words: You get to compare people on what they know, rather than how well they market their abilities.

Why pre-employment testing works better than traditional screening methods 

Skills-based hiring may sound like a new concept born out of necessity due to the competitive, digital age we live in, but back in the 1980s, researchers were already arguing that “professionally developed cognitive ability tests are valid predictors of performance on the job and in training for all jobs,” based on a backlog analysis of over 50 years worth of employment testing data and several workforce management theories. 

Their key finding? Hiring for skills was 5x more predictive of job performance than hiring for education and more than 2x more predictive than hiring for work experience. 

Fast forward to now, and skills-based hiring is among the top recruitment trends. A recent SHRM survey found that 56% of employers use pre-employment tests to evaluate candidates, and one in four plan to use skills assessments more often in the next five years. 

What gives? Why such a big shift towards pre-employment testing?

There are several reasons, but as the workforce composition changes and more people choose alternative career paths of freelancing and gig work, portfolio careers, or apprenticeship-based programs over traditional education, standard assessment criteria may no longer provide good benchmarks for decision-making during the hiring process.

After all, when you can learn to code via an eLearning platform or master video content creation by being active on TikTok, criteria like “years of experience” or having a “relevant degree” lose their efficacy for pre-screening. 

It’s part of the reason why seven in ten US workers believe that employers should hire based on skills, rather than experience — and many companies are following the lead.

The state of Maryland, for example, eliminated degree requirements for almost 50% of positions in healthcare, skilled trades, and engineering to attract more applicants. Walmart plans to remove college degree requirements for a fraction of its corporate jobs, too. 

Moreover, skill sets evolve faster than traditional educational programs. Since 2015, the skill sets for jobs have changed by 25%, and that number is expected to double by 2027. Few curriculums also include tutoring on specific project management software or influencer marketing best practices — these are skills people learn on the job. 

The bottom line? Pre-employment tests help effectively identify people with the right skill sets, competencies, and character traits rather than impressive educational credentials, inflated accomplishments, or fake job experience on a resume. 

How we use pre-employment skills assessments to hire top talent

We don’t believe in pre-employment skills tests because they’re the “cool” thing in hiring. We believe in them because they work.

At Toggl, our parent company that includes Toggl Track, Toggl Plan, Toggl Work, and, of course, Toggl Hire (hey, that’s us!), we rely on a combination of short multi-question skills assessment tests and open-ended homework assignments to pre-screen and shortlist job candidates. 

Across all Toggl products and teams, our standard hiring process goes like this: 

1. Screening job knowledge test: Using pre-made questions from our test library, our hiring managers can create competency-based tests in 15 minutes or less to quickly pre-assess any number of applicants.

2. Cultural interview: Everyone who scored above the testing threshold gets invited to a culture-fit interview. Since we’re a mission-driven remote company, we want to hire people with similar values, working styles, and collaboration preferences. 

3. Homework assignment: Once the technical and cultural fit is confirmed, the shortlisted candidates will move on to a longer homework assignment. Modeling a real-life job task, such standardized assessments help us evaluate the candidates’ practical knowledge and predict job performance. 

Depending on the role, we may also opt to do asynchronous video interviews to screen for soft skills, such as critical thinking and communication, early on. Most of our roles also include a paid test day (or even a whole week), offering a realistic job preview where candidates interact with the team and show their chops in the field. 

By structuring our recruitment process around pre-employment assessments, our hiring managers spend 22 hours less on sourcing, screening, and shortlisting job applicants. We’ve hired over 150 new employees with a skills-based approach and now help others do the same. By implementing similar practices, other companies screen candidates 80% faster and reduce time-to-hire for new tech roles by 85%. 

What are the advantages of pre-employment testing?

Pre-employment tests are a low-effort, high-impact action that boosts recruiting metrics like the number of applicants, qualified candidate rate, time-to-hire, plus candidate experience scores. Other benefits include the following.

Data-driven hiring decisions 

With pre-employment skills testing, it’s much easier to gather objective data on candidates’ skill sets, personality traits, and cognitive abilities. With the right tool, you can automatically filter out the applicants who lack technical knowledge and move the best candidates faster through your hiring process. Pre-employment testing also helps reduce hiring bias and promotes fair hiring practices.

Extra talent insights 

Skills tests help you see more sides of the candidate, a bit like a 2D image vs. a 3D model. You get a better idea of how the candidate’s experience and skills match up to the job description and whether their personal characteristics fit with your company. Internally, they can also help you measure emerging skills gaps and the general talent market dynamics.

Better candidate interviews 

Use data from a pre-employment assessment to guide your selection of job interview questions. For example, you can focus more on evaluating the applicants’ critical thinking abilities and situational behaviors rather than probing their job knowledge to learn more about their behavioral traits, management styles, and interpersonal skills.

Cost savings 

Reduce the cost of bad hires and high turnover costs by increasing the likelihood of both a good fit and stronger job performance with job knowledge tests. You can also save time (and money) for the entire hiring team by reducing the time spent on resume reviews and endless job interviews. 

Better employee onboarding 

Use data from pre-employment tests to create an onboarding plan or career development plan for new hires. Help new hires be more productive faster by helping them develop the right skills needed to succeed in their role. For example, instead of shoehorning all new IT hires to complete cybersecurity training, allow candidates with strong skills to skip it to learn more about your CI/CD pipeline design.

What about the disadvantages of pre-employment testing?

Few things in life don’t have a flip side (except for chocolate chip cookies, maybe, because the flip side of cookies is still delicious). So, although applicant testing provides hiring teams with ample data for decision-making, it can also have some downsides. 

Risk of a higher candidate drop-off 

Some candidates may find standard pre-employment tests off-putting (especially if they’ve applied for similar roles and have had poor experiences with clunky tests). 

To encourage more job applications, start with a shorter pre-employment screening assessment. Time it to 15 to 30 minutes and state the duration upfront. Test primarily for hard skills and leave other types of assessments (e.g., an integrity test or personality test) for a later stage.

The cost of administering pre-employment tests 

Pre-employment tests may seem like yet another overhead cost, sure. But the real question is…can your team afford to keep wading through endless resume piles, dealing with interview scheduling conflicts, and ultimately — the cost of a bad hire? 

When we spoke to Dunja Lazic, VP of Marketing at Sked Social, she recounted when her team had to review 200 resumes and schedule over 15 screening interviews. They felt absolutely burned out by the final interview round. With Toggl Hire’s pre-employment tests, they can now screen 800 applicants in one hour, identify the best hires, and hire for new roles twice as fast!  

Candidate cheating on skills assessment tests

“But aren’t people going to ask someone else to complete pre-hire assessments or use ChatGPT?” Well, some will try. However, modern skill assessment platforms are ahead of the game and can quickly flag their behavior, saving you from a potential mis-hire. 

Toggl Hire, for example, offers various anti-cheating measures to help ensure reliable assessment results. Flag candidates for suspicious behavior that includes:

• Completing several tests from the same browse

• Copying and pasting the test questions

• Detecting how likely it is that a test answer was generated using AI

The likelihood of cheating depends on the test you offer candidates, too. For example, popular personality questionnaires have dubitable accuracy since candidates can easily choose more favorable character traits. Soft skills assessments or situational judgment tests, on the other hand, can help evaluate how a person thinks, acts, and behaves in different situations. 

7 common types of pre-employment tests 

Ready to incorporate more data into your hiring decisions? Here are the seven common pre-employment test types we recommend using: 

✅ Technical skills tests

✅ Soft skills assessments 

✅ Cognitive ability tests

✅ Language proficiency tests 

✅ Competency assessments 

✅ Emotional intelligence tests

✅ Risk tests

Here’s how each one can improve your hiring process.

1. Technical skills tests

Most employers use pre-employment testing to screen for technical skills. After all, you want people who can perform their job in real life, not just on their resume. 

Technical skills assessments evaluate the candidate’s knowledge and expertise in their domain. For example, you may test a software engineer’s knowledge of Java, Python, Ruby, or another programming language. Or, you might evaluate a broader technical skill set, like those required for an SEO manager or Growth Marketer role.

2. Soft skills assessments

Soft skills (or power skills, as we call them) are as important as strong technical skills. Teaching a person a new technical method or project management workflow is way easier than fixing their (lack of) personal accountability or a natural tendency for non-constructive criticism.  

Soft skills assessments (sometimes called personality tests in the hiring world, although personality tests are technically a subcategory) help determine whether the candidate’s personality or behavioral tendencies fit well with a particular role and the company culture. 

By asking situational, behavioral, and role-play-styled questions in an online test, you can quantitatively evaluate applicants’ communication, problem-solving, time management, and remote work skills, among other things. Combine test data with real-world feedback from culture-fit interviews to get the most suitable candidates on board! 

3. Cognitive ability and aptitude tests

Cognitive ability tests (also called simply aptitude or IQ tests) measure a person’s ability to think, learn, reason, and apply information. These tests can measure specific abilities like:

• Critical thinking

• Numerical reasoning

• Verbal reasoning

• Logical reasoning

• Mechanical reasoning

Aptitude tests help recruiters learn more about a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. They are often used in screening for mid- to senior-level roles. These tests could be particularly helpful for technical roles like engineers or in roles where high-level problem-solving is needed, like project managers.

4. Language proficiency tests

As work goes global, you may be hiring remote team members internationally or looking for multi-language candidates to support your expansion to a new market. If you’re hiring for roles that require native-level fluency in one language, plus good English language skills, use a simple, standardized language test. 

Language assessments evaluate a candidate’s spoken and written proficiency in a second (or third, or fourth!) language. If you require flawless communication language skills for roles like tutors, pre-screen candidates using internationally recognized certificates like CELTA, TEFL, or TESOL for English language or DALF for French. 

5. Competency assessments 

Competency assessments measure a person’s skills, experience, and specific competencies against job requirements. They are role-specific, which is why you might see them called job knowledge tests, and help benchmark the candidate’s potential against the set hiring criteria.

For example, if you’re hiring an Account Executive, a competency skills assessment would include questions about their knowledge of the sales cycle, customer relationship management skills, and experience with specific markets and/or nurturing techniques. 

Examples of competency assessments include: 

• Role-based tests: Based on the job analysis, determine the key functional competencies for the role. Use Toggl Hire’s test database to build customized competency tests for different roles. Our questions draw on expert knowledge and cover a wide range of roles — from accounting to sales and support. 

• Interview-based assessment: Competency-based interviews include standardized questions for each applicant, designed to assess their core competencies, like critical thinking or analytical skills, and specific hard skills, like data analytics skills. A hiring manager then receives a scorecard and a candidate evaluation form with fleshed-out assessment criteria and ratings. 

• Homework tasks: To assess the candidate’s skills in context, you can give out longer take-home assignments — a coding challenge, a client case study, a presentation demo, or any other well-scoped task. Toggl Hire provides over 500 ready-made homework templates with in-built assessment criteria to test a wide range of competencies. 

6. Emotional intelligence tests

An emotional intelligence test is a good complement to a general soft skills assessment if you are hiring for managerial, executive, or senior customer-facing roles. 

Emotional Intelligence is commonly defined by four attributes: Self-management, self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship management. 

Marc Brackett, Ph.D., founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Test takers with a high EQ may have the same skills and job knowledge, but they’re also more likely to navigate the social complexities of the workplace better, show strong leadership qualities, and communicate effectively with diverse groups.

7. Risk tests

Some employers use pre-employment tests to weed out candidates who may not meet workplace safety criteria. These risk assessments help reduce the likelihood of poor workplace behavior that could endanger other employees’ safety and corporate operations. 

There are a few types of risk tests:

• Integrity tests evaluate a candidate’s likelihood of following the company’s rules and root out counterproductive tendencies, such as absenteeism or safety violations. Integrity tests are often used for entry-level positions to ensure potential employees will take responsibility for completing their tasks efficiently.

• Safety assessments look at how likely a candidate will behave in a way that creates or heightens the risk for themselves or their coworkers. While this isn’t a personality test, the test results of a safety assessment are crucial to the hiring decision for high-risk workplaces.

• Physical ability tests determine if a person meets the physical requirements of a job. While not always relevant, especially as more companies go remote, physical ability tests are relevant for very physical work like jobs in construction or firefighting.

How to decide which type of pre-employment assessments to use

Pre-employment assessment tests work best when you use a combination of them. Combine role-based aptitude tests with more specific questions about the candidate’s numerical reasoning, problem-solving, or good critical-thinking skills, for example. 

Ultimately, your choice of tests will depend on the ideal candidate profile you’ve created for the job description and role you’re hiring for. General cognitive ability may be key for an entry-level role, while specific skills in marketing, sales, or engineering are essential for others. 

Example of implementing pre-hire assessments

Let’s say you’re just starting the hiring process for a junior UI developer and a senior full-stack developer.

For the junior role, a good mix of tests could include a programming skills test (adjusted to the candidate’s level of knowledge) with some probing questions about their general mental ability. This would give candidates with good potential a fair shot. 

Starting with a basic, short technical skills assessment can help you whittle down the applicant pool quickly. Then, invite the best candidates to do a structured interview (to check their communication and problem-solving skills) and consider doing extra interviews if you still have doubts. 

For the senior role, you’ll want to drill down further into the candidate’s skills from the start. Combine a basic pre-employment test with an open-ended coding assignment to evaluate a broader scope of skills. 

Next, you could add an asynchronous video interview — a pre-recorded video Q&A that candidates create, sharing more info about their skills, experiences, and knowledge. Video interviews are a great way to screen candidates for initial culture fit and emotional intelligence.

If the senior role assumes managerial duties, add a behavioral interview to evaluate the candidates’ situational judgment, communication skills, and overall people management skills. 

Where do pre-employment assessments fit in the recruitment process?

As you’ve learned by now, skills assessments have many use cases. But too much choice often breeds confusion. To avoid alienating candidates with multiple tests (and making your job harder than it should be), here’s how to slot pre-employment tests into your hiring process.

Candidate screening

Identify qualified candidates faster at the beginning of the hiring process through short, standardized tests designed to evaluate the applicants’ core competencies and aptitude for the role. 

Examples of candidate screening tests: Cognitive ability tests, role-based job knowledge tests, language proficiency pre-employment assessments, and technical skill assessments

Candidate shortlisting 

Use a combination of open-ended assignments and structured interviews to get extra data for decision-making. Reduce bias by focusing on candidates’ abilities and character values, which predict future job performance. 

Examples of shortlisting tests: Soft skills and personality assessments, homework assignments, and async video interviews.

Candidate selection 

Get the final proof of “fit” and competency by evaluating the candidates’ skills in action with job simulations that represent real-world tasks and challenges in their new role.  

Examples of candidate selection methods: Culture fit interview, live exercise, role-play, and paid test days.

Try a pre-employment assessment with Toggl Hire

Pre-employment testing is a much more modern, fair, efficient, and engaging way to screen candidates for qualifications. These kinds of modern-day skills tests improve the recruitment process and enable data-driven hiring and smarter HR decisions.

With Toggl Hire, you’ve got hundreds of pre-employment tests available to help you evaluate candidates’ cognitive abilities, core competencies, job knowledge, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, language proficiency, and many other skills at every stage of your recruitment process.

Don’t just take our word for it, though. See why we love pre-employing skills testing and create a sample assessment using questions from our skills test library! It’s free…so you have no reason not to. 👀

If you set out to bake a cake, you first step is to check you have all the right ingredients at home. A similar principle works for hiring and upskilling employees — you need to know what’s available internally before making any changes.

To do this, you can use a skills matrix, a valuable tool for creating an overview of your organization’s current skills.

In this context, you can think of a skills matrix as the ingredient list for hiring managers looking to bake a recipe for business success. Not a fan of analogies? Don’t worry. We’ll walk you through what a skills matrix is, why you need one, and a step-by-step guide to create one.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• A skills matrix is a hiring and talent management tool for assessing employees’ skill levels and interests in those skills.

• A skills matrix uses a list of skills to identify skills gaps, enhance decision-making, manage resources more effectively, track employee development, and support workforce and succession planning to make better hires.

• Skills matrix and competency matrix are two terms used interchangeably, but the latter is broader in terms of skills covered (skills are also slightly different from competencies).

• To create a skills matrix, you only need to follow five steps: identifying missing skills, creating a scoring system, evaluating individual skills, evaluating interest levels, and creating a visual representation of your data.

• Don’t have time to create a skills matrix from scratch We’ve included a handy skills matrix template below to get started!

What is a skills matrix?

A skills matrix is a tool hiring and talent management teams can use to assess their teams’ skills and competencies. It’s a visualization of the skills your team has, and their level of proficiency and interest in each skill.

Skills matrices do more than just help assess each employee’s skill levels, though. They also:

✅ Identify and close skills gaps causing low productivity and engagement levels

✅ Use a rating system to rank the proficiency in each skill across teams and employees to assign each team member to the correct department or job

✅ Improve succession planning, project management, resource allocation, training and development, and much more

Plus, they’re relatively easy to create and can be a powerful tool to guide your talent management and acquisition efforts — especially if you’re engaging in skills-based hiring.

7 benefits of using skills matrices

Whether you’re looking to upskill your existing team or engage in an aggressive talent acquisition campaign that requires you to hire employees with the most in-demand skills, skills matrices can be a useful tool for determining relevant skills for those roles.

Here are seven ways to use them to benefit your internal talent management or hiring efforts.

1. Identify skill gaps

A skills matrix determines which skills your existing team is missing by offering a data-driven approach to skills mapping. By laying out all the technical skills in a matrix, you can determine if your team has what it takes to meet and exceed their goals or if there is a skills shortage.

If your skills aren’t falling short now, they likely will be soon. Kornferry’s latest skills data highlights an $8.5 trillion talent shortage — more than 85 million jobs are expected to be unfilled by 2030 if employers don’t get ahead of the game by focusing on skills. Consider this your nudge.

But what does this look like in action? Imagine your development team needs to implement five new features in the next quarter. With a skills matrix, you’ll determine you’re missing a particular skill — customer feedback collection. With that knowledge, you can fill that gap by hiring a customer-focused product manager.

2. Effective resource management

After creating your matrix, you may realize your organization has all the skills needed to succeed, but they’re not distributed where you need them. If that’s the case, you have a skills mismatch in your team, and a skills matrix will give you the relevant data to prove it.

For example, you have a rockstar customer success manager who previously worked in sales. Instead of hiring new sales team members, you can ask this person to step in and teach your team a new tool or a process.

3. Track employee development

A skills matrix isn’t something you set and forget. As each employee grows and develops themselves in a role, you add specific skills to their matrix. If they’ve acquired new skills or upgraded the key skills they need for their role, jot it down in your matrix.

For example, 4 in 5 people are keen to learn more about how to use AI in their work. Once they’ve mastered Chat-GPT or taken a course in AI prompt engineering, update your matrix accordingly.

This makes it easy to track the impact of employee development in particular skills and determine which employees are more eager to grow in their roles. When the time comes to promote someone to a leadership role, a glance at your skill matrix will determine who has the core skills for the job.

4. Improve employee training programs

Once you introduce a new training program to bridge a skills gap, you’ll want to track its effectiveness. Compare your skills matrices in any team over time to see whether your training program is working or needs further modification.

A well-structured skills matrix also effectively tracks if your team has the most in-demand skills required to stay competitive in your industry. Add those in-demand skills to the matrix as they change (and they do…every year). For example, Coursera highlights the following skills most valued by employers in 2025:

• Generative AI
• Data analysis
• Software development
• User experience
• Web development
• Project management
• Account management
• Content creation and management

5. Enhance workforce planning efforts

Workforce planning involves a comprehensive analysis of skills, competencies, and resources your organization needs to achieve its goals — now and in the future. A skills matrix identifies your existing competencies to determine if they’re sufficient to reach your future goals.

Without thought-out workforce planning, you may find yourself in a situation where you have ambitious goals and not enough people (or the right people) to achieve those goals. Skills matrices help you prevent these mishaps, highlighting where to upskill and train existing employees or when it’s time to hire new ones.

6. Better succession planning

Succession planning is the process of identifying high-performance individuals on your team who will fill critical leadership and management roles in the future. It’s absolutely vital to an organization’s stability, yet 28% of large companies haven’t committed to this process.

A skills matrix complements your succession planning initiative by pinpointing which team members have a high proficiency in your most desired skills, and a commitment to developing specialist or leadership expertise. With a mix of self-assessment and testing methods like Toggl Hire, a skills matrix can identify high performers early on.

Over time, you can invest training and development resources in these employees to better prepare them for their future roles.

7. Hire better employees

Ultimately, a skills matrix determines which specific skills your team is missing to meet your business objectives in the future. With a skills matrix as a tool, you can refine your hiring process and create better job ads.

You won’t need to require all the skills for a particular role. Instead, your human resources department can focus on the skill level and type to fill your skills gaps and form a better team and company.

Skills matrix vs. competency matrix

The terms “skills matrix” and “competency matrix” are used interchangeably, often used in employee performance reviews and other assessment methods to measure employee capabilities. But honestly, depending on how an organization uses them, there may be some overlaps in the definition and use cases.

👉 A skills matrix focuses on the skills and abilities of individual employees in relation to a job role. It includes the soft and technical skills required to perform a certain job, as well as the interest level of each employee in each skill. Most of all, a skills matrix quantifies the proficiency in those skills, helping you identify skills gaps or “rank” employees.

👉 A competency matrix is broader and encompasses the skills, knowledge, and behavior necessary to perform well in the workplace. It covers a broader set of skills, such as cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal skills. It measures the general competency level of an existing or potential employee, often showing the results on a scale.

You might also choose to use a skills matrix vs. a competency matrix in any one of the following situations.

Adapting to major industry changes

When a major industry change happens, a skills matrix determines what relevant skills your employees already have and which ones they need to adapt to those new changes.

For example, the recent rise in artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT turned the creative world upside down, and everyone with an OpenAI account suddenly became a writer. While we know that’s not actually the case, a skills matrix could have helped analyze internal skill sets to assess who might benefit from upskilling or even AI training.

That’s not to say that a competency matrix isn’t useful in this situation. You could use a competency matrix to determine the level of proficiency in AI skills, for example, or to assess if your employees have the broader skill sets necessary to adapt to a major industry transformation.

Implementing a new L&D program

When you invest in your employees, they tend to stay longer with you. And employers know this. LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report highlights that 90% of organizations are concerned about their employee retention rate and use learning opportunities as their top retention strategy.

A skills matrix can support both your retention and your L&D strategies by determining your training needs. In this context, a skills matrix would identify missing skills and highlight professional development opportunities.

When analyzing the skills matrix, you can choose the right type of learning and development program to fill the gaps you have. On the other hand, a competency matrix allows you to align the L&D and training programs with the broader competency requirements of your company.

Combining different teams

Let’s say you need to create a task force to launch a new feature. You’re going to need a blend of customer success, customer support, marketing, and sales teams.

With a skills matrix, you can take one quick glance at your available employees and determine the best people to join a new team and which tasks to assign them. You can even use the skills matrix to identify people with exceptional teamwork skills, or those who are potential team leaders.

How to create a skills matrix in 5 steps

We’ve included a free skills matrix template below, but it helps to know how to create your own skills matrix from scratch so you know what you’re testing for and why. As you start to analyze your employees’ skills, follow these five steps to create an accurate overview of everybody’s skill sets.

1. Identify missing or essential skills

Skills are the key ingredient in every skills matrix, and you should choose them intentionally. Choose the skills in a matrix according to the:

• Overall business needs
• Departmental needs
• Specific role requirements

It ensures you assign equal importance to hard and soft skills. For some roles, soft skills are even more important than the technical ones. Additionally, group relevant skills together. For example, empathy, active listening, and confidence all belong to the broader communication skills category.

2. Create a skills matrix scoring system

You’ll need a grading or scoring system to assess your team’s skills accurately. Here’s an example you can use:

Beginner: Any employee with basic proficiency levels or the most general skills required to perform a job at a very basic or beginner level.

Professional: An employee with the skills required to perform well in a job, extensive experience, and the ability to guide more junior employees when needed.

Expert: An employee with all the desired skills to perform and exceed in a role and the capability to manage junior employees and improve team performance. They should also stay abreast of important industry trends and know how to communicate the product or service’s value to your customers.

Depending on the complexity of your skill matrix, your HR professionals can add different levels to the scoring system and make them more or less detailed.

3. Evaluate each employee’s skills

To create a skills matrix, you’ll need to define the strengths and weaknesses of each of your employees. There are many different ways to do that, and you can choose one that best suits your needs, time frames, and budget. For example:

• Software: Using skills assessment tools such as Toggl Hire
• Self-reporting: Asking employees to rate their skills on a certain scale
• Feedback: Gathering feedback from managers about the skill sets of individual employees
• Other: Getting certifications from third-party sources

You can use one or combine multiple ways to assess employees’ skills.

4. Evaluate employee interest levels

Assessing proficiency level is one thing; evaluating an employee’s interest in improving that skill is entirely different.

Let’s say you want to improve your marketing team’s skills in paid media. While this is a relevant skill for the business, employees may have no interest in learning it. This is what makes a skills matrix important and so useful. You can use it to identify employees with a passion for upskilling and receiving training for Google Ads, for example.

Evaluating interest is ultimately a valuable tool in guiding your employees’ learning and effective talent management. Managers can identify employees with the drive and interest to qualify for a promotion and give them ample opportunities for learning.

5. Create a visual representation of the data

The last step is creating your very own employee skills matrix — what it actually looks like, we mean. For most companies, this is an Excel spreadsheet with employees’ names, skills, and competencies, all ranked according to their level of proficiency and interest levels.

However you choose to design it, a quick glance at your skills management matrix should show you:

• If you have all the necessary skills in your team to take your business to the next level
• If someone is well-equipped to perform in a particular role
• What skills and competencies you’re missing to have more productive teams

🔥 The bottom line? A skills matrix benefits your entire company — not just key stakeholders and individual employees. When you do it the right way, it can show you whether you need to replace, upskill, or hire new team members.

Download our free skills matrix template

Our internal team of hiring experts worked hard to create this skills matrix template that you can copy and customize according to your needs. No skills matrix software needed — just download the template and supercharge your talent management and hiring processes!

⬇️ Click to download your copy (no email required!)

Close skills gaps with Toggl Hire

A skills matrix is a talent management and hiring tool that can identify skills gaps in your existing workforce and either guide you to reskill existing employees or hire new ones. However, to accurately assess your current (or potential) employees’ skill levels, you’ll need a few skills tests first.

Toggl Hire’s skills test library includes 150+ pre-made, customizable skills tests you can use to test for 180+ soft and hard skills. Use these tests alongside your skills matrix to identify and fill any gaps you discover.

The best part? It’s free to create an account and start creating skills assessment tests. Browse our test library to learn more about our available tests, or sign up today and get started for free!

Only one in two employees strongly agree they know what’s expected of them at work. That’s right. Half of your workers lack clarity on the ins and outs of their own job position.

And if they don’t even understand their individual responsibilities, how on earth are they supposed to know what their teammates are up to? They won’t know who to ask for guidance, who to escalate an issue to, or who gets the final say on a decision.

A job analysis provides the details in black and white so all your employees know the expectations of each role in your org chart.

Along with being the first step in crafting detailed job descriptions (which is super useful for recruitment candidates, too), the job analysis process also supports your development processes by showing employees how they can progress in their careers.

This guide describes the steps involved in using a job analysis to gain crystal clear clarity on what everyone’s supposed to be doing round here.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

• A job analysis is a detailed breakdown of each role’s main responsibilities and tasks. When employees or candidates know exactly what’s needed from them, it often boosts their and the team’s productivity.
  
• Along with providing the data needed to create accurate job descriptions, job analysis also helps with identifying skills gaps, benchmarking performance standards, and setting fair salaries.
  
• You can use job task analysis in many ways — including recruitment, training, selection, succession planning, and boosting workplace safety.
  
• The main methods for analyzing jobs include options like observation, interviews, and task inventory.
  
• The steps to get started include gathering and analyzing data, identifying skills gaps, developing employee training programs, and crafting the job description.
  
• With Toggl Hire, your team can save time by automating the hiring process. You can also lean on our platform to assess the skills of employees and candidates quickly using ready-made skills assessments.

What is a job analysis?

A job analysis is the process of creating a detailed description of a specific role’s responsibilities, tasks, compensation, required qualifications, working conditions, and relationship to other roles.

This systematic process encompasses everything from gathering information about the role to documenting and presenting it to stakeholders.

Through performing job analyses, you establish the components of a role, which helps internally with employee career development and externally with crafting accurate job descriptions that attract suitable candidates.

The goal of a job analysis is to explain exactly what a role entails. For example, instead of telling an entry-level marketing team member they’re “responsible for social media,” a job analysis could clarify that they should “post on LinkedIn and Bluesky social media platforms twice a week.”

Job description vs. job analysis: What’s the difference?

A job description is the result of the job analysis — they’re not the same thing; one follows the other. The job description paints a full picture of a job opportunity, including:

• The role’s duties
• Core skills and experience needed
• What the company’s all about
• What’s in it for the successful candidate
• Salary and other employee benefits

But to get to this point, your job analysis is the process of gathering all the information you need to create a summary of the role’s tasks and subtasks. The findings from this analysis are included in the job description as its core responsibilities.

You might have heard of a similar concept called a competency model. To avoid any confusion, a competency model breaks down how a person performs a role. In other words, all the skills, knowledge, capabilities, and experience someone needs to succeed in a particular role.

Example job analysis for a junior marketer

Tweak this job analysis template to suit your own process:

Job title: Junior Marketer

Reports to: Marketing Manager

Location: Remote

Position summary: The Junior Marketer supports the marketing team by executing digital and traditional marketing strategies. This role focuses on content creation, social media management, campaign support, and data tracking to enhance brand awareness and drive customer engagement.

Key responsibilities

1. Content creation

• Write and schedule two LinkedIn and Bluesky posts weekly to promote company content, such as blog articles, events, and product updates.
• Collaborate with the design team to create graphics for social media posts, newsletters, and digital ads.

2. Social media management

• Monitor and respond to comments, messages, and mentions on social daily.
• Track social media metrics, including reach, engagement, and click-through rates, and create weekly reports.

3. Campaign support

• Assist in developing email marketing campaigns by creating draft copy and coordinating with the design team.
• Support promotional activities for product launches or special events, including drafting press releases and coordinating logistics.

4. Market research

• Conduct competitor analysis and trend research monthly to identify opportunities for new marketing campaigns.
• Gather customer feedback from surveys and interviews to inform marketing strategies.

5. Administrative tasks

• Organize and maintain a digital library of marketing assets (e.g., logos, images, templates).
• Update and maintain the marketing calendar, ensuring alignment across teams.

Skills and qualifications

• Proficiency with marketing tools such as Canva, HubSpot, and Google Analytics.
• Ability to analyze and report on marketing metrics.
• Basic knowledge of SEO and digital advertising platforms.

Working conditions

• Fully remote role
• Requires collaboration with cross-functional teams, including design, sales, and customer support.
• Fast-paced environment with multiple ongoing projects and deadlines.

Performance evaluation criteria

• Achieves weekly social media posting targets with high engagement rates.
• Consistently meets deadlines for campaign support and content creation.

• Provides accurate and insightful data analysis in reports.
• Builds effective working relationships with teammates and external partners.

Why should you use job analysis?

HR teams are busy. They have a lot of spinning plates, and job analysis is yet another process to commit to and invest resources in. But trust us, it’s worth it. Why?

The core benefits include:

• Improving recruitment strategies and overall employee selection
• Enhancing your HR decision-making to implement better processes
• Shaping your performance management approach
• Boosting internal mobility
• Setting clear criteria for fair promotion and salary decisions
• Identifying any skills gaps or training recommendations
• Providing the data to optimize the makeup of teams and boost productivity
• Supporting strategic workforce planning that improves business resilience

A job analysis forms a solid foundation for managing the workforce more efficiently and, in doing so, improving the employee experience and overall productivity.

More job analysis examples

HR professionals can use job analysis data in many different ways, including:

Where	Purpose
Recruitment and selection	To identify the core capabilities to include in job posts, your selection criteria and which assessment tools will best suit a particular role.
Training and development	To assess the strengths and areas of development for current employees. You’ll have a clear benchmark to use for comparison and can easily add relevant points to their career development path.
Performance evaluation	To develop performance standards for tasks employees perform and evaluation criteria aligned with the specific job requirements.
Compensation	Determine whether an employee is being compensated fairly for a particular role, especially if the analysis reveals they have many additional tasks and responsibilities.
Succession or organizational planning	To identify the essential competencies that ensure a successful role and include them in a succession plan for key leadership or management positions.
Workplace safety	To identify potential risks and hazards associated with specific duties and create safety protocols and training to keep employees safe.

6 core job analysis methods

There are a variety of ways you can perform a thorough job analysis. Choose which one (or a combo) would best suit the particular role you’re analyzing.

Method of job analysis	How to implement it
Direct observation	Gather information about all the specific work activities and tasks in a particular role by observing an incumbent employee in their daily work.
Interviews	An interview is a good way to follow up on the observation or get more detail on exactly what they do. You could also interview their supervisors to gain more context from their perspective. In either case, a structured interview process uses the same set of interview questions in each job analysis to keep things consistent and mitigate any bias.
Questionnaires	Structured questionnaires with an employee or supervisor typically include open-ended and closed-ended questions to cover all bases. They’re a great option if you’re carrying out a high volume of job analyses and don’t have time for one-to-one discussions with every employee.
Performance analysis	This approach entails analyzing job performance data, such as productivity, quality and error levels, to establish the specific tasks that should make up a role. Combing through the employee’s performance appraisals could generate some key insights here.
Critical incident technique	For this method, you gather info on any critical incidents (like a work accident) that happen on the job to differentiate between good or safe behavior and unethical or dangerous behavior.
Task inventory	Have the existing job holder list all the tasks associated with their job and get their colleagues or supervisors to rate the importance and frequency of each task.

9 Steps to conduct successful job analysis

Organizations that understand what their employees do every day and structure their roles so that everyone can give their best, maintain higher levels of morale and productivity.

The journey begins with the insights gleaned from job analysis data. So, let’s see how to get started with the data collection process.

#1. Establish the purpose

Kick-off by determining why you want to perform your job evaluation. For example, is it to improve the quality of job applicants you receive by clarifying your job ad role descriptions?

Or perhaps it’s to improve your performance management process to provide more clarity about the necessary skills and training needs for each position. There’s no right or wrong here. It’s about choosing a purpose that aligns with your particular organization.

#2. Choose the method of job analysis

Decide which method, or a combo of methods, best suits your work environment and role responsibilities. For example, if you need to get data from a busy executive, you could use a questionnaire.

#3. Collect data

Appoint a job analyst (or an entire team) to gather all the information you can about the job you’re assessing. The more sources you use, such as job descriptions, subject matter experts, employee growth plans, observations, and industry best practices, the more context you have for your analysis, and the more impactful it’ll be.

#4. Analyze the data

Next, analyze the data you’ve collected. How you do this depends on volume. For example, if you’re conducting a job analysis process in a small business, a simple Excel spreadsheet might be enough. But if you quickly outgrow the grids, you might prefer to use a dedicated human resources management platform with built-in analytics to make sense of the data.

Whatever approach you use, the aim is to distinguish which job tasks or responsibilities are essential and which detract from the role’s key outputs or goals.

For example, a social media manager has started transcribing customer interviews in addition to their main duties. You discover the transcribing task takes a lot of their time and doesn’t contribute to improving social media metrics, so you red-flag it.

#5. Verify your findings

When you’ve completed the job analysis and analyzed the data, then you’ll need to verify your findings. As a best practice, discuss them with the current employee in the role, a supervisor, and a hiring manager. You could also compare the findings to competitors’ job ads for further confirmation.

#6. Set out the role responsibilities and job tasks

From the info you’ve verified, you’ll now have what you need to put together a detailed breakdown of the role’s essential duties.

Use your job analysis data to get a clear picture of the role and start to see what candidates or employees need to perform the duties successfully. You’ll have all the knowledge requirements to create accurate job descriptions that reflect the physical demands, day-to-day tasks, professional and legal guidelines, and any other details that apply to the role.

#7. Identify skills gaps

You can now determine if there are any skill gaps with the employees in that role by comparing the job tasks list with what they’re actually doing and the quality of their work.

Some of these gaps may be caused by a lack of knowledge or experience, but they can also be caused by the rapid pace of technological changes (ahem, Chat-GPT 4o, anyone?).

It’s important to identify skill gaps during the job analysis process, such as a lack of knowledge or need for advanced training.

#8. Develop employee training programs

If you see a skills gap, you can develop a training program for that employee to help them improve the knowledge or skills required to perform that specific task.

Successful training tools could include:

• Online training programs
• Accredited certifications
• Group training
• Mentorship
• Case studies

#9. Create the job description

Now you should have all the pieces you need to develop a job description that is:

• Detailed
• Accurate
• Covers the minimum job requirements and exact tasks
• Able to streamline recruiting and selection with quality candidates

When you’re creating job descriptions based on your job analysis, also ensure the copy is clear and concise and shows off your company culture.

The whole point of conducting a job analysis, besides creating a detailed job description, is to continually streamline and evolve the position with industry changes and organizational growth. Once you have conducted an in-depth evaluation of the job duties and identified skills gaps, remember that your efforts will only stay relevant for a couple of years or so.

AIHR | Source

Identify skill gaps fast with online skills tests

Performing a job analysis may sound like a major time suck. But, when done right, your team can actually save heaps of time in the overall hiring, employee selection, and onboarding process. Not to mention, you’ll ensure current employees are no longer in the dark about what’s expected of them. And that’s pretty darn important.

Skills testing complements the job analysis process perfectly by ensuring your employees and job seekers have the required skills to perform well in their respective roles.

Toggl Hire offers an all-in-one skills assessment platform with 150+ ready-made templates available to test 180+ skills. The whole process is automated, saving your team loads of time. You can create customized skills tests in two clicks and make them role-specific (with valid questions sourced from SMEs!)

Sound good? Oh, you betcha! Sign up for a free Toggl Hire plan today.

Project team roles describe the various roles and responsibilities that make up a structured team that works on a project. 

Structuring a project team the right way can help businesses streamline project operations and ensure they hit their project goals.

Project team roles are assigned by setting clear responsibilities and defining a reporting structure.

When your project team’s roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined, your project is at risk of work duplication, missing the deadline, and going over budget.

In this article, we’ll look at the key roles that make up a project team, the benefits of well-defined project team roles, and how to manage a project team.

What is a project team?

A project team is a group of people who work together on a particular project, task, campaign, client, or initiative. The project team members have shared objectives and goals but work on different tasks, milestones, phases, and deliverables within the project.

Project teams are important because they streamline complicated projects by assigning responsibilities and clear duties to different individuals, simplifying communication channels, and ensuring alignment between the team and its goals.

Structuring a project team requires members who represent groups that either contribute to or are affected by the project. Teams are often cross-functional, with members from different teams and departments within a business or organization.

A project team differs from stakeholders because it directly contributes to completing a project, whereas stakeholders are impacted by or influence the project either positively or negatively.

Project teams can include employees and external contributors such as subject matter experts (SMEs), freelancers, and other third parties. Sometimes, teams will consist partly of part-time members involved in only specific parts or phases of the project, while others work on it full-time.

Next, let’s look at a project team’s key roles.

What are the major roles of a project team?

Team structure can vary across project teams according to different needs requiring different roles. However, most project teams consist of the five roles below:

1. Project manager
2. Resource manager
3. Business analyst
4. Project team member(s)
5. Project sponsor

Project team roles have different duties and responsibilities, bringing different skills to the project.

Let’s look into each of these roles in detail.

1. Project manager

A project manager is responsible for daily project operations and helps guide the project toward successful, timely, and on-budget completion. They are the leader of the project team.

In small-scale projects, project managers oversee every team member. In large projects, team leaders report to the project manager with their own group of project team members.

The project manager’s responsibilities are:

• Creating the project plan
• Determining the project schedule
• Outlining the project scope
• Managing budgets
• Hiring project team members
• Delegating project tasks
• Overseeing all deliverables
• Coordinating and communicating with senior management, project stakeholders, and any relevant third parties

2. Resource manager

Resource management is a vital part of any project, so a good resource manager is crucial. On smaller projects where a standalone resource manager isn’t required, the project manager will take on this responsibility as well.

The key duties of a resource manager are:

• Identifying the right individuals for the project’s needs
• Allocating resources
• Monitoring and managing resource utilization and capacity
• Optimizing resource utilization throughout the project duration, ensuring successful project completion

3. Business analyst

A data-driven approach to project management and completion is important as it helps define, streamline, and organize project requirements. That’s why project teams need a business analyst.

A business analyst is responsible for:

• Gathering the technical requirements from all team members
• Ensuring the team has the right tools and technology
• Making recommendations for new tools
• Defining the project’s goals
• Solving problems relating to equipment
• Continuously improving solutions and systems
• Documenting project requirements

4. Project team member(s)

Project team members are sometimes referred to as the project delivery team. Different project team member roles could include copywriters, SEO strategists, graphic designers, software engineers, product managers, and more. 

The project delivery team’s responsibilities will differ depending on their individual roles and the project. They are responsible for the deliverables that affect the project outcome, so responsibilities often include:

• Flagging roadblocks to the project manager and maintaining communication channels
• Working towards the project’s goals and objectives
• Collaborating with other members of the project team
• Sticking to deadlines to ensure the project stays on schedule

5. Project sponsor

The project sponsor works closely with the project manager and champions the project from a high level. Their main responsibilities are to remove any obstacles that could slow down or halt the project’s progress and to approve all major tasks, deliverables, resources, tools, and other project components.

Additionally, they are responsible for:

• Defining the vision
• Getting executive leadership buy-in
• Approving project budget and expenses
• Making and/or signing off on critical decisions.

These are the five main roles on a project team, but many teams have several other roles, particularly on large, complex projects.

What other positions can be found in a project team?

Other roles that sometimes appear in project teams include:

• Project committee
• Customer representative(s)
• IT professional
• Program manager
• Subject matter expert
• Executive sponsors
• Project coordinator
• Steering committee
• Functional manager
• Quality assurance professional 
• Team leader

Different roles can be found in a project team based on the exact needs, objectives, and skills required to complete the project.

Project team role examples

Visualizing a project team can be confusing. We’ve put together some real-world project team examples to help make it clearer.

Content marketing team

• Project sponsor: Head of marketing
• Project manager: Content marketing team lead
• Resource manager: Content marketing team lead, content marketing coordinator
• Business analyst: Content marketing team lead, content marketing coordinator
• Project team members: Content strategist, SEO content specialist, technical SEO specialist, content creator, copywriters, content editors, publisher, graphic designer, social media specialist, PPC specialist, outreach specialist

Software development team

• Project sponsor: Head of engineering or chief technical officer
• Project manager: Product owner, scrum master
• Resource manager: Product owner, scrum master
• Business analyst: Product owner
• Project team members: Product success manager, product manager, backend developer, frontend developer, full stack developer, quality assurance engineer, database engineer, DevOps engineer, site reliability engineer, UI/UX designer, software architect

Web development team

• Project sponsor: Client
• Project manager: Web development project manager
• Resource manager: Web development project manager
• Business analyst: Web development project manager
• Project team members: Web designer, UI/UX designer, frontend developer, backend developer, product manager, quality assurance engineer, architect, technical SEO specialist, copywriter

Responsibilities of project team roles

As seen in the previous section, there is often some overlap between roles, and some people may wear multiple hats. With the different responsibilities intertwining, it can become difficult to keep track.

Let’s look at an example of an in-house marketing team launching a new product.

Project Sponsor

The project sponsor is usually the top executive who initiates and owns the project. In this example, it’s the chief executive officer (CEO). The project sponsor’s responsibilities are:

• Ensuring the launch is aligned with the company’s strategic objectives
• Approving all project plans, budgets, and expenses
• Assigning resources and support
• Acting as the escalation point for critical issues

Project Manager

This person oversees project execution and manages the team, workflows, and tasks. For our example, it’s the product marketing manager. They’re responsible for:

• Liaising between the sponsor and the project team
• Developing the product launch plan and timeline
• Setting the milestones and deadlines
• Establishing the project’s critical path
• Ensuring the product launch stays within budget and on schedule
• Monitoring project progress and adjusting if needed

Resource Manager

This team member ensures the team has all the resources for the product launch. In this case, it’s the operations manager. Their role covers:

• Using the project scope to establish the best project team roles and the individuals to fill them based on their area of expertise 
• Planning and allocating resources, including staff, freelancers, external consultants, equipment, software, and budget
• Tracking resource utilization and billable hours and managing time, budget, and resource constraints

Business Analyst

This individual is responsible for analyzing business needs, ensuring the product launch aligns with those needs, and enabling data-driven decision-making. For this example, it’s the marketing analyst. Their role entails:

• Conducting market research to establish customer preferences and needs
• Analyzing data to create sales and market impact forecasts
• Providing the team with insights and recommendations based on their data analysis
• Refining launch strategies with the project manager, informed by data analysis

Project Team Members

This group of individuals is responsible for executing the different aspects of the product launch. They report directly to the project manager. The roles that make up the project delivery team and their responsibilities include:

• Product manager: Ensures product meets market needs, defines product success, provides training to sales teams, and develops product positioning and messaging.
• Marketing specialist: Develops and executes marketing campaigns and coordinates with social media, email, outreach, pay-per-click, and content marketing teams to generate buzz.
• Graphic designer: Designs visuals for marketing campaigns like social media graphics, blog infographics, banners, and ad creatives.
• Content writer: Writes compelling copy for press releases, email outreach, social media copy, product descriptions, and other marketing materials, working with the SEO expert to optimize content for search.
• SEO expert: Conducts keyword research, optimizes product pages, establishes SEO strategy, and monitors SEO performance.
• Public relations specialist: Develops and distributes press releases, coordinates interviews, manages media relations, and organizes launch events and press conferences.
• Sales manager: Develops sales strategies alongside the product manager, gives input on sales tools and required materials, and trains the sales team on the new product.
• Customer support manager: Prepares support documentation, updates knowledge base, brings customer support team up to speed so they can handle inquiries and issues, and monitors post-launch customer feedback.

The next section will examine the benefits of clear project team roles.

What are the benefits of defining project team roles?

Clearly defining project team roles has several benefits that contribute to successful project completion. They include:

• No confusion or risk of work duplication: As every team member knows their role and responsibilities, there is no risk of task overlap or duplicated work. 
• Increased accountability: When expectations are clear, team members feel encouraged to take ownership of their responsibilities, tasks, milestones, and deliverables. 
• Better budgeting: Each team member can account for the cost of their responsibilities, making it easier to work out, set, and stick to a budget.
• Better structure: Defining project roles creates a structure and flow of responsibilities, creating space for improved collaboration, problem-solving, communication, and, ultimately, better teamwork.
• Easier performance reviews: Managers can better assess their team’s performance on a project when they have well-defined roles.

We’ll look at the best way to manage a project team next 👇

How can you manage a project team?

Managing a project team isn’t just about overseeing project activities. Getting management right is vital so the project doesn’t go astray.

We’ve put together some steps you can take to ensure your project team succeeds.

1. Assign roles and responsibilities

Each member’s responsibilities must be clearly defined and set, and every person should be aware of their responsibilities and those of their teammates. 

Here, a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix helps establish the flow of responsibility for different tasks.

Once you decide who will fill each role, you can assign those roles via your project management software.

Toggl Plan lets users create a new team for specific projects, add the relevant team members, and assign tasks on the Team Timeline. You can also create milestones to help keep your project on track.

The Team Timeline gives you a high-level overview of the deliverables each team member is working on and whether or not they are on track to meet their deadline.

It also greatly helps with resource allocation and utilization, as you can see at a glance if your team is overloaded or has more capacity.

2. Host regular team meetings

Team meetings help ensure project alignment and maintain momentum, so it’s important to have them regularly. They bring the team together to communicate any updates, issues, progress, and successes.

Create a structured meeting agenda and schedule asynchronous daily check-ins and weekly stand-up meetings to keep up with any challenges and stay updated on progress.

3. Ensure effective communication

Aside from meetings, your team needs effective communication channels to collaborate, request help, and share ideas asynchronously. Email and Slack are great communication tools, as are your project management tools.

With Toggl Plan, users can leave comments on tasks and @mention other users in the workspace to quickly and effectively communicate any feedback, issues, or guidance.

4. Regularly monitor project progress

Checking the project’s progress is important in team management. It lets members know how the project is going, and managers can make changes and assign more resources if needed.

Toggl Plan’s Project Progress Overview breaks down task progress into a percentage so users can quickly see if they’re on track and how far they are from project completion. If Toggl Plan is integrated with Toggl Track, users can see how their tracked time compares to the project’s estimated time.

Manage projects with ease with Toggl

Project teams are vital for business operations. Clearly defined and managed project team roles help ensure everyone knows their responsibilities as they work toward a shared objective. 

However, managing a project team without the right tools is difficult, especially on lengthy or large-scale projects.

That’s where Toggl Plan comes in.

Toggl Plan allows users to communicate quickly and asynchronously and provides project managers with an intuitive, user-friendly way of assigning roles and tasks and tracking project progress. Sign up for Toggl Plan and see how to improve your project team management processes today.

Humans are slightly chaotic creatures. One day, we make it a point to say “Hi” to every co-worker and be the center of the workplace chat. Another, we put on a gloomy face, can’t focus on our tasks, and don’t bother answering an important email. 

Behind that chaos hides a lot of internal and external drivers, from our personality traits to situational context. Behavioral job interview questions help hiring managers better understand each candidate’s thought process and the reasons why they might act a certain way on any given day.

While we don’t think interviews are the most important stage in the hiring workflow (we’re big on skills-based hiring), asking behavioral interview questions is a good way to understand candidates’ strengths, weaknesses, and personality quirks.

TL; DR — Key Takeaways

• Common behavioral interview questions help HR teams develop a better picture of candidates’ on-the-job behaviors. But behavioral interview questions alone won’t provide an accurate assessment of a candidate’s skills and ability to succeed in their role.
• Common behavioral interview questions assess teamwork, adaptability, motivation, self-management, leadership, and general culture fit.
• Since they’re so subjective, hiring managers need to have a clear understanding of what a “good” candidate answer is and why.
• Candidates also benefit from behavioral interview questions. Sample questions are essential for interview prep and also assess how skills and personalities align with a potential employer.
• The STAR method helps candidates present clear, concise, and structured examples of their skills and experiences (it’s also a great tip for candidates practicing answering these types of questions!).
• HR teams can use hiring software and skills-based assessments alongside behavioral interview questions to reduce unconscious bias, improve quality of hire, and ensure a consistent interview process for all candidates.

What are behavioral interview questions?

Behavioral interview questions help a hiring manager or recruiter understand how potential candidates think and act. They provide insight into the candidate’s thinking process, problem-solving abilities, leadership potential, and personality. 

You can easily recognize behavioral interview questions from the way they’re phrased:

• Give me an example of…
• Tell me about a time when…
• Talk about a time when…
• Describe a time when…
• Can you share an example of a situation when…
• What did you do when…

Asking behavioral interview questions also helps determine whether a candidate will be a good fit for the team. After all, people quit “bad companies” all the time. 29% of workers have left a job within the first 90 days, and 38% of talent expect to quit at some point next year.

A behavioral interview helps pre-screen for bad hires — people who may have the right hard skills but miss the mark in terms of soft skills and character attributes.

Situational vs. personality vs. behavioral interview questions

Wait a second, though. The interview toolbox also features situational and personality questions. People often mix these categories up, so it’s worth clarifying how they differ.

Personality questions prompt candidates to reveal more about their temperament and personal attitudes. For example, “Are you more of an introvert or an extravert?” These questions give HR teams a sense of the candidate’s character and interpersonal skills. Meanwhile, they allow applicants to demonstrate how they will fit into a new company culture.

Situational questions focus on specific situations. For example, “Describe how you would deal with a team member who is good at their job but difficult to deal with.” These questions help hiring managers understand how a candidate will handle conflict and adapt to challenging situations on the fly.

For candidates, situational questions showcase qualities that aren’t on your resume. You can demonstrate your ability to shine in a specific situation — not just on paper or in skills test data.

Why ask behavioral questions in an interview?

While you do need to mix up your approach, behavioral interview questions play a special role (and are maybe the most valuable of the three question types). Here’s why.

Behavioral interview questions build a better picture of candidates’ on-the-job behavior. Questions relate personality traits and motivations to the situations when the behavior occurs. The result? A better match-up between what candidates bring to the table and what companies need to succeed.

That’s not all. Behavioral questions help job seekers prepare for interviews and determine whether they are a good fit for the company culture. Applicants should expect questions about how they handled a tight deadline or conflict resolution. Think about how you behaved in those situations, and what it says about you as an employee.

45 great behavioral interview questions

With those benefits in mind, it’s time to explore some sample behavioral interview questions.

Before browsing the list, remember HR teams need a well-rounded impression of each candidate to truly evaluate and compare them. That’s why we recommend asking behavioral job interview questions related to teamwork, adaptability, motivation, self-management, leadership, and general culture fit. 

Applicants should also think about how they might approach each category. Anticipate questions on leadership skills and communication, and relate them to your behavioral traits.

Teamwork questions

1. Give an example of a time when you had to work with someone with a personality that was very different from yours.

What to look for in a great answer: Five generations are present in the workplace — not to mention multiple nationalities and personality types. Candidates must handle interactions with diverse teams. 

When answering behavioral interview questions like these, candidates should display cultural awareness, absence of -isms, and a general openness to different perspectives, management styles, and character traits. 

Sample answer: “I once managed two senior employees who were used to top-bottom, directive leadership. I’m more of a servant leader. I had private talks with both, explaining I wanted them to take more initiative in decision-making, as I respected their judgment and trusted their expertise. They became two autonomous team members who excelled in their work and positively challenged my thinking.” 

2. Have you ever had to motivate team members who weren’t inspired to do their work, and how did you motivate them?

What to look for in a great answer: Honesty and specific examples. A mature team manager can candidly admit problems with employee engagement (globally, only 23% of workers are actively engaged). Moreover, they can name several strategies they’ve tried, plus share the results. 

Sample answer: “Before the annual review, I noticed one of my best sales managers was 40% below her KPIs. I scheduled a Zoom to discuss an upcoming client demo but wanted to learn how she’d been doing. It turned out she was experiencing family issues. I insisted she take more work-from-home days and negotiate a better family insurance plan. Soon, Yuan was back at her peak and secured one of our biggest accounts.”

3. Give me an example of a time you faced a conflict with a coworker. How did you handle that?

What to look for in a great answer: Communication questions like this reveal high emotional intelligence (aka acknowledgment of both personal shortcomings and the actions of others). Almost two-thirds of employees deal with a conflict at work, but far fewer do so successfully. Impressive respondents show they can diffuse a difficult situation with ease.   

Sample answer: “Last year, a new data scientist joined our research team. They are very talented, but made many passive-aggressive remarks about constructive feedback. I was annoyed at first, but realized Jay might be feeling slightly insecure as the youngest hire. In a private chat, I casually talked about how great it is to have them on the team and how valuable their recent analytics have been for an MVP.”

4. Describe the best partner or supervisor you’ve worked with. What was your favorite part of their management style?

What to look for in a great answer: Concrete examples of specific practices and/or personality traits the candidate values in a team member. The ability to describe a preferred management style indicates high self-awareness. These people know how to leverage their strengths and weaknesses to guide, coach, and motivate colleagues in their daily work.

Sample answer: “I prefer companies with flat hierarchies and a democratic leadership style. In my last job, I had an amazing Design Lead who was candid and gave great feedback. Rather than instructing you what to do, Luan challenged you to solve problems while always offering extra resources to help you succeed.”

5. Explain some of your favorite parts of working as a team.

What to look for in a great answer: Some teams are more result-oriented and competitive, while others are more analytical and methodical. When evaluating responses, use specific characteristics the candidate mentions to assess how they manage group dynamics. Candidates should understand the dynamics of the team they are joining and show they have the right approach to succeed.

Sample answer: “I loved being part of the Customer Success team at Acme because I could work without close supervision (aka no micromanagement) and easily get support from my colleagues. For example, when I didn’t know how to calculate progressive customer discounts properly.”

6. Can you describe your process for getting information from unresponsive coworkers?

What to look for in a great answer: Strong communication skills are vital. Many teams are understaffed and overworked. Good employees can follow up with their colleagues tactfully, even if the request is urgent, while also demonstrating creative problem-solving skills. 

Sample answer: “Once, three hiring managers got sick just before a campus recruiting event. I asked our IT service manager to help me gain access to Marta’s email (with her knowledge) to access important event documents. When another interviewer returned from the hospital three days later, we also had a quick call to finalize our marketing materials, which I worked on with the designer. Fortunately, they were well-briefed and knew all the deets.”

7. Have you acted as a mentor for a co-worker? How did you approach the challenge?

What to look for in a great answer: Candidates should mention how they assessed the mentee’s needs before providing guidance. A little enthusiasm about the value of mentoring goes a long way, too!

Sample answer: “I recently mentored a junior teammate struggling with project prioritization. I built trust through one-on-one conversations and guided them with actionable frameworks and regular feedback. Seeing colleagues build confidence and efficiency is always incredibly rewarding.”

8. How do you handle situations where team members aren’t fulfilling their duties?

What to look for in a great answer: Candidates should demonstrate an ability to handle productivity dips with diplomacy and empathy while focusing on team goals. They must also show how to maintain performance levels and find solutions for different team members.

Sample answer: “When team members lag, I act promptly. I use one-on-one meetups to understand obstacles, whether workload, clarity, or motivation. We focus on solutions — reassigning tasks, building knowledge, or setting clearer expectations. I emphasize accountability but support colleagues to feel equipped to meet team goals.”

9. Give an example of how you worked with colleagues to solve a challenging problem.

What to look for in a great answer: Candidates should present a specific workplace problem and describe how they (and their team) overcame it. Good answers also mention teamwork, collaboration, and harnessing diverse skills to achieve better results.

Sample answer: “Recently, I faced a tight product launch deadline. I enabled cross-departmental collaboration by aligning marketing, engineering, and sales teams. Daily standups resolved conflicts quickly, and we focused on critical goals, delivering a seamless launch that exceeded expectations.”

Adaptability questions

10. Describe a situation in which you embraced a new system, process, technology, or idea at work that was way different from your usual way of doing things.

What to look for in a great answer: Enthusiasm for exploring new things and affinity towards self-development. Job descriptions have evolved greatly for many roles, but about 56% of the core skills, such as analytical and creative thinking, remain in universal demand. Shortlist people with strong meta-skills, as they’re indicators of employees with high development potential and openness to new knowledge. 

Sample answer: “Last year, our firm adopted Power BI for financial analytics. Although I’m an avid Excel user and familiar with MATLAB, at first the app felt foreign to me. So, I asked Inès, our business analyst, to show me the ropes, and she helped me figure out how to use all the features.” 

11. Describe a time when you had to think on your feet.

What to look for in a great answer: Strong answers walk through the thought process for solving an urgent problem. They prove the candidate can handle difficult situations when the clock is ticking. Answers showing decisiveness and effectiveness indicate people with high confidence, competence, and leadership potential.   

Sample answer: “In one stressful situation, our team detected a possible data leak from a cloud bucket. It wasn’t 100% confirmed, but our policies require us to notify clients and managers. To avoid crying wolf, I re-checked our log data for evidence of a breach. I found a misconfiguration in the settings, but the data leak wasn’t public. We fixed everything quickly, and I notified the CTO about the incident.” 

12. Describe a time when you were asked to do something you had never done before. How did you react, and what did you learn?

What to look for in a great answer: A STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) answer provides ample details about how the candidate mastered a new task, including concrete steps and takeaways from this new project. A great response will talk about how their actions benefitted the company.

Sample answer: “In my first job, I was asked to use keyword analysis to identify new content clusters. I watched an Ahrefs tutorial on YouTube and read a few guides. Next, I ran the analysis twice, building my initial file and sharing it with my manager. She was pleased but noticed several gaps and overlaps in my research. I refined the list based on the feedback. The result was a 25% increase in organic traffic.”

13. Tell me about a time you failed. How did you deal with the situation?

What to look for in a great answer: The ability to candidly talk about mishaps, mistakes, and derailed projects. Things don’t go as planned all the time. What separates great employees from mediocre ones is the ability to self-reflect on what went wrong, acknowledging personal responsibility and external factors like corporate inertia or limited budgets. 

Sample answer: “We had a long-term project of migrating 20+ sensitive on-premises databases to cloud storage. Everything had to comply with zero-trust architecture principles but we overlooked one compliance requirement and didn’t correctly configure the cloud instance. I admitted this mistake during a meeting, but the situation led to us creating a tech document of all correct configs to ensure standardization and compliance.” 

14. Describe a time when you had to adjust your approach to complete a task successfully.

What to look for in a great answer: Flexibility and creative problem-solving skills. In today’s workplace, no job description is rigid. Behavioral interview questions gauge the worker’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances and think on their feet. 

Sample answer: “Last year, our CFO left on short notice, and everyone on the finance team had to assume some of her duties. I had to prepare and submit a financial disclosure report on our sustainability activities. I researched official reporting standards, checked past reports, and teamed up with another colleague, who assisted the CFO previously. Together, we figured everything out and met the deadline.” 

15. Describe a time when you felt intense pressure to deliver. How did you adapt to stay productive and avoid burnout?

What to look for in a great answer: Resilience is important, but look for more than toughness in candidate responses. Great answers talk about self-care and discussing issues with managers. Candidates show they can meet goals without damaging their mental or physical health.

Sample answer: “During an app roll-out, tight deadlines and shifting priorities created intense pressure. Needing a plan, I triaged tasks daily, delegated effectively, and scheduled short breaks to recharge. Staying focused and rallying the team ensured we met the deadline without sacrificing quality — or sanity.”

16. Have you needed to switch between remote and office-based work? How did you respond?

What to look for in a great answer: Good answers discuss challenges arising from hybrid work and how candidates used problem-solving skills to overcome them. This question also probes the candidate’s ability to collaborate and communicate remotely — a really important modern-day business skill.

Sample answer: “Yes, since the pandemic, I’ve seamlessly navigated between remote and office-based work. Clear communication helps, alongside tools adapted for collaboration and team alignment. For example, transitioning during a global CRM launch, I maintained productivity by prioritizing flexible schedules and hybrid touchpoints.”

17. How do you stay motivated when taking on a new project or task?

What to look for in a great answer: Self-aware people are easier to manage and coach to ensure their high engagement. Great answers consider internal and external motivating factors.

Sample answer: “I’m excited about trying new things as it’s always a great learning opportunity. While the initial learning curve can be steep, I try to keep my eyes on the prize — a good outcome that awaits when I’m finished with the project or task.” 

Motivation and values questions

18. What’s your proudest professional accomplishment, and why?

What to look for in a great answer: Sample answers range from specific business outcomes (e.g., hitting the quarterly goal early) to personal achievements like mastering a new skill, giving a major public presentation, or launching a community initiative. 

Sample answer: “Reducing new customer churn levels by 20% in Q1 2023 by launching a cheaper pricing tier and additional features. It was hard to ‘sell’ the idea of lowering our price to the company executives, but I built a case that retaining users on a cheaper offering vs. losing them to competition is better.”

19. Describe a situation in a previous role you’d had that you wished you’d handled differently.

What to look for in a great answer: This behavioral interview question warrants a sincere retrospective about a past shortcoming (and learnings) from the situation. Great answers admit the mishap and calmly explain how the candidate should have acted instead. 

Sample answer: “I once had a difficult decision of laying off ten people from the team. In hindsight, I should have negotiated more with the upper management about keeping at least half the people on the payroll or pushed their transfer to another department.”  

20. Give an example of a time when you set a goal for yourself (professional or personal) and achieved it.

What to look for in a great answer: Strong answers describe specific goal-setting frameworks and a walkthrough of the candidate’s actions. Good managers don’t set moonshot goals. They go for a to-do list of atomic and achievable objectives, which build towards the ultimate goal. 

Sample answer: “I use SMART goals, like ‘Increase newsletter open rates by at least 20% and CTR by 25% in the next six months for our segmented repeat buyers mailing list.’ To accomplish this, I audited past emails with high open rates and reverse-engineered some of the practices. In six months, the average open rate grew from 20% to 35%, and CTR increased from 10% to 15%.” 

21. Tell me about a skill you recently learned.

What to look for in a great answer: The best answers mention in-demand skills for the role. They provide evidence of the candidate’s interest in their field and general acumen about new industry developments. Both are great qualities of a future-proof workforce. 

Sample answer: “This year, I’ve learned how to automate processes in Power Automate — a low-code platform. Now, instead of manually inputting invoice payment data, I get everything added, validated, and cross-checked with one click of a button. Saves me tons of hours per day!”

22. Have you ever changed your values or beliefs due to workplace experiences?

What to look for in a great answer: Strong candidates are open to growth and diversity. They welcome different perspectives and constantly integrate the insights of others into their worldviews. Too much confidence can be bad if employees close their minds to new approaches.

Sample answer: “I once valued strict hierarchy, feeling co-workers needed clarity. I shifted to prioritizing collaboration after seeing how team input improved project outcomes. Brainstorming sessions showed me innovation thrives when everyone’s voice matters, regardless of rank.”

23. How do you visualize and plan your personal development? Do you have goals in mind?

What to look for in a great answer: The ability to set and achieve goals is critical. Good answers show candidates have a trusted process to develop their skills towards a specific professional goal.

Sample answer: “Simple: planning and dedication. I visualize my development through quarterly goals aligned with company objectives and personal growth areas, tracked in a digital planner. I prioritize skills like team leadership and cross-functional collaboration, with monthly reviews.”

24. How do you expand your horizons and strive to become a more rounded and productive individual?

What to look for in a great answer: This question can trip up candidates. Bad answers waffle and lack detail. Great answers describe concrete strategies to upskill and enrich professional and personal lives.

Sample answer: “I never stand still, expanding my horizons via cross-functional projects, leadership workshops, and reading industry insights. Mentoring junior colleagues sharpens my skills, while volunteering fosters empathy. Both enrich my perspective and productivity.”

25. How do you handle roadblocks or obstacles?

What to look for in a great answer: Problem-oriented behavioral questions help you better evaluate the candidates’ cognitive abilities and analytical skills. Add some bonus points if the answer references the usage of data analytics for more informed decision-making.  

Sample answer: “Generally, I try to dig to the root cause of the blocker. Is it a people problem or a process problem? Do I lack the tech or the skills to overcome it? Once I have the data, I’d usually evaluate if I can resolve, circumnavigate, or ignore this to proceed with my goal.” 

26. Give an example of a time when you received criticism. How did you deal with criticism, and did you change your work as a result?

What to look for in a great answer: This question forces candidates to be honest, so look for frank, straight-down-the-line responses. Great answers demonstrate emotional maturity and the ability to learn. Candidates should welcome criticism if it allows them to grow.

Sample answer: “In a past role, a manager critiqued my handling of a customer complaint. At first, I was surprised, but he was right. I listened actively, apologized, and came back with solutions to improve my communication approach. After that, I provided much clearer explanations, which enhanced customer satisfaction and retention.”

Time management questions

27. How do you prioritize and organize your workload when juggling several projects at the same time?

What to look for in a great answer: Strong self-management skills, with the ability to prioritize tasks on a to-do list to meet the deadlines. They can launch into focus mode, using different tools and frameworks to deliver on different expectations. 

Sample answer: “I’m a Gantt chart person and love visual timelines. I break down each project by task or stage, then stack these on my work timeline. I use Toggl Track to track my personal productivity, so I can estimate how much time different stages will take to complete to avoid overlaps.” 

28. Give an example of a time when you delegated an important task successfully.

What to look for in a great answer: A good understanding of when extra help is warranted. Delegation is a key skill for a good manager. A good response shares examples of effective task hand-overs and parallelization, coupled with the ability to oversee and manage others’ work.

Sample answer: “Last quarter, my entire team was overwhelmed when preparing for Black Friday sales. We couldn’t shoot all the planned media content based on the pre-planned schedule. Having realized that, I recruited several influencers (with whom we partnered before) to create brand content for our Instagram and TikTok, while the in-house team focused on site visuals and YouTube videos.”

29. Tell me about a project that you planned. How did you organize and schedule the tasks?

What to look for in a great answer: Answers will differ depending on the role. For example, a senior-level manager may describe specific project management frameworks (e.g., Scrum, Six Sigma, Kanban). In any case, successful candidates must demonstrate their ability to break down bigger projects into steps or stages and then effectively manage the commitments and time.  

Sample answer: “Personally, I like the 1-3-5 rule: I break down the big project I have into one major task for the day (e.g., design a new wireframe), three smaller tasks (e.g., review user research, check past references, and draft several comments), and five ancillary tasks like responding to emails, organizing meeting notes, etc.” 

30. Describe a time when a project went way off the rails. How did you get everything back on track?

What to look for in a great answer: Great candidates show they can handle the unpredictable. Answers demonstrate patience, perseverance, and imaginative problem-solving. People who stay calm and collected in difficult situations will positively add to any company culture. 

Sample answer: “I was in charge of organizing an Annual Gala Dinner. Four weeks before the event, the venue canceled us. My team phoned every contact with no luck, but I found a small private museum in a historical building. They don’t do events, but I persuaded them to accept us by increasing the price. We even saved on entertainment as the guests could browse the museum’s botanical collection.”

31. Tell me about a time when you didn’t meet a deadline and how you presented it to your team and supervisor.

What to look for in a great answer: This behavioral interview question forces candidates out of their comfort zones. However, it gives an interviewer a good idea of whether the person can openly discuss mistakes as learning opportunities. 

Sample answer: “The design team needed data from observational UX studies. However, due to the large number of participants, I was behind in completing the report. Having realized I needed at least two more days, I contacted the Team Lead and asked for a three-day extension.”

32. Give an example of a time when you were given too much work by a manager. How did you respond?

What to look for in a great answer: Great answers explain the importance of prioritizing work and self-managing employee time. Candidates should show they adapted to stressful situations, finding workable strategies without diluting quality.

Sample answer: “Recently, a manager assigned multiple urgent projects with overlapping deadlines. I immediately prioritized tasks, negotiated to delegate non-critical items, and kept open communication, ensuring I met expectations without sacrificing quality or excessive stress.”

33. Have you ever intervened to ask managers to reduce a struggling colleague’s workload?

What to look for in a great answer: This question demands a diplomatic and subtle answer. Good candidates prove they can cooperate with co-workers and managers to find solutions.

Sample answer: “Yes, I noticed my creative lead Liu was overwhelmed with tasks. I approached my departmental manager, suggesting we reassign some projects. We redistributed work, and the colleague’s creative performance and morale improved significantly.”

Leadership questions

34. Give me an example of a time when you successfully persuaded someone to see things your way at work.

What to look for in a great answer: People who can rewire old employee habits and remove process hurdles are rare gems. 73% of hiring managers admit their leaders and managers aren’t equipped to lead change. Great candidates give evidence of effective change management and drive successful transformation.

Sample answer: “My previous company used the waterfall method for project management, but it wasn’t effective. So, I decided to implement Agile project management processes, starting with an internal app development. After that went well, the management team was on board with a full switch, and I hired a great Scrum master to smooth the transition.” 

35. When was the last time you asked for direct feedback from a superior? Why?

What to look for in a great answer: Great leaders proactively seek one-on-one feedback from others. They realize that asking questions doesn’t make them appear less knowledgeable. On the contrary, regular feedback from superiors and peers helps make more informed decisions and ensure alignment with the wider company goals. 

Sample answer: “Recently, a key supplier increased prices, but consistently delayed shipments have affected our manufacturing capacities. I asked the department head for their opinion on the situation, presented the facts and the alternatives. He thanked me for bringing this up because he wasn’t aware of the problem, and we decided to change providers.”

36. What skills do you have that you think make you a great leader, and why?

What to look for in a great answer: Management styles vary. Good responses align with the workplace values and behaviors the company cultivates. To get this right, HR teams should ask the team or other managers about the preferred characteristics of a new hire. 

Sample answer: “In short, I’d say strong active listening skills, an analytical mindset, and strategic long-term thinking. I identify more as a visionary leader who inspires the team to go after moonshot projects, but always grounds my decisions in analytical data.” 

37. What was the hardest decision you have taken as a leader? What did you do to try and make the best decision?

What to look for in a great answer: Leaders face tough decisions daily, from changing the selected strategy to determining the best candidates for promotion. Great leaders know how to effectively execute change management and balance team dynamics to avoid confrontation or unmet expectations and ensure positive outcomes.

Sample answer: “Our blog was generating 50k visitors per month, but only attracted 50 total sign-ups. After consulting the customer success and product teams, I realized our content didn’t target the ideal ICPs. We created brand new keyword clusters, topic pillars, and editorial plans based on that data. Although our monthly traffic dropped 30%, product sign-ups increased by 45%.”

38. Have you ever had to lead a team in a completely new area of work? How did you adapt your leadership style?

What to look for in a great answer: Great answers are positive but honest (it’s not easy to master a new work area, after all.) Look for self-awareness and understanding of how to solve novel problems using previous work experience. Using data to measure progress is also a bonus.

Sample answer: “Yes, in my second major project I led a team through a software implementation with zero prior experience. I focused on clear communication, frequent check-ins, and fostering a collaborative, problem-solving mindset to harness the team’s skills, build confidence, and maintain momentum.”

39. How do you improve the leadership skills of others?

What to look for in a great answer: Look for robust examples of how interviewees have detected potential leaders and built their confidence. This question shows candidates possess empathy and want to improve the collective culture, not just their personal records.

Sample answer: “I upskill team members by taking a proactive approach — mentoring regularly, offering feedback, and using software engineering challenges to develop problem-solving leadership. I encourage autonomy, creating opportunities for them to lead projects, build confidence, and level up their decision-making skills.”

Culture fit questions

40. Describe what gives you energy in the workplace and what drains that energy.

What to look for in a great answer: This question helps companies find people whose expectations match what they have to offer. Great candidate responses align with company practices.

Sample answer: “I feel energized by smart, knowledgeable colleagues and creative challenges. I’m slightly competitive, so I like personal OKRs and team leaderboards. Things that drain me are excessive meetings with 10+ people where you have to listen in when you could be finishing more productive tasks.”

41. What’s the most interesting thing about you that’s not on your resume?

What to look for in a great answer: A good answer will reveal some extra (and unexpected) details about the candidate’s personality, values, morale, or professional aspirations. Humorous answers can be fine, too, as long as they’re appropriate and at least somehow related to the job.

Sample answer: “I could mention me winning the Corporate Karaoke contest last year…but instead, I’d probably add that I’m a leisure videographer and shoot travel content with one of your drone models. So, I’m quite familiar with your products.” 

42. How do you think coworkers perceive you? Is that accurate, and if not, why not?

What to look for in a great answer: A good sense of self-awareness about their personality and their abilities in impression management. As social creatures, we also often practice impression management. This question is a great way to assess how well the employee handles themselves in the work environment.

Sample answer: “I’m an introvert, so people perceive me as shy or distant at first. But once I warm up to you, I’d be really fun and bubbly. After they get to know me, coworkers usually say I’m a good listener, a great supporter, and naturally funny.” 

43. What’s most important to you in a job?

What to look for in a great answer: Different factors drive employee engagement and retention. For some, it’s a transparent career path with regular bonuses. For others — flexible working hours and the ability to make a good impact on society. The values of a good candidate match those of the company they want to work for.

Sample answer: “Three things: A good degree of autonomy and support for the project I lead from the superior, lean, optimized processes, and regular performance reviews. I thrive when I get regular feedback and financial incentives if I go beyond the set KPIs.”

44. Have you ever tried to reshape your company culture?

What to look for in a great answer: Look for instances where candidates took a strategic view of improving their company culture while remaining aligned with business needs. Strong answers show an ability to make their case, build support, and maintain changes over the long term.

Sample answer: “Always. For example, in my last post, I led an initiative to boost collaboration by hosting cross-team brainstorming sessions and leveraging social media for real-time feedback. Engaged stakeholders early, driving transparency and fostering a more agile, inclusive company culture.”

45. How do you detect and handle cultural problems before they damage professional relationships?

What to look for in a great answer: Good answers show a proactive approach to analyzing cultural problems, an appreciation of great communication skills, and the ability to detect subtle evidence of problems early on.

Sample answer: “I spot cultural issues by staying attuned to team dynamics and fostering open dialogue. Past experiences have taught me that miscommunication can snowball, so I address concerns early, clarify expectations, and promote inclusivity.”

How to crush a behavioral interview as a candidate

Behavioral interview questions help candidates explore their past behavior and personal skills or traits. This makes them an ideal foundation for interview prep from both sides of the table.

Even so, there are ways to get more from behavioral questions and set yourself up to succeed. Here are some tips drawn from our interview experiences.

• Connect practice questions with your target role: Build a shortlist of common behavioral interview questions relating to your future role. For instance, focus on communications if you’re applying for a customer-facing role. Read the job description and choose 3-4 core behaviors. Focus on them as you workshop responses.
• Always be specific: Notice many of the sample responses above include examples based on real-life experience. Brainstorm a few past situations relating to your behavior shortlist and be prepared to discuss them. This is where the STAR approach shines (see below for more about how to apply it).
• Research the company culture: One purpose of behavioral questions is to determine cultural fit. Outpace the pack by reading the employee handbook, watching YouTube content, and following potential colleagues on social media. Small details could tell interviewers you are the perfect match.
• Think about your personal narrative: Behavioral interviews are about storytelling—about who you are and what you bring to the workplace. Come armed with a narrative about your past achievements, current skills, and how you see your future.
• Relax and answer the question: Listening and adapting on the fly are critical traits in exceptional employees. Interviewers want answers to specific questions, not memorized responses. Prepare thoroughly, take a deep breath, and be yourself. Your answers will be so much more powerful as a result.

Tips for assessing common behavioral interview questions

Due to their difficulty and subjectivity, some candidates may struggle with answering behavioral interview questions. Don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions until they’re comfortable with their answers.

Though a behavioral interview question cannot accurately predict a candidate’s future performance alone, it will, at least, give the hiring manager an overview of the applicant’s preferred approach to important factors such as communication style, how they might handle a difficult client, etc.

Here are a few tips to help uncover a candidate’s true potential while minimizing unconscious bias.

✅ Use the STAR method when interviewing

The STAR method is an effective interviewing technique that stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Asking candidates to frame their responses using this method allows them to present clear, concise, and structured examples of their skills and experiences.

The STAR method enhances the quality of responses and provides a consistent basis for assessing all candidates, thereby promoting fairness in the interview process.

✅ Beware of canned or hypothetical responses

Canned or hypothetical responses, such as “I always meet deadlines,” can mask a candidate’s true abilities. They lack the depth and specificity that genuine experiences provide.

It’s essential to probe further when you encounter such answers to ensure authenticity. Identifying canned responses involves keen listening and critical questioning. Addressing them effectively might mean asking for more examples or rephrasing the question to elicit more detailed responses.

✅ Assess emotional responses

Emotional responses explore a candidate’s problem-solving skills, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. Questions like “Explain a time when you faced a significant challenge at work” can trigger such responses.

When assessing these, it’s crucial to remain objective and fair. Look for signs of resilience and empathy and how they manage stress or conflict. Remember, the goal isn’t to evoke discomfort but to understand their emotional maturity and capacity to handle work-related situations.

Ask the right questions with Toggl Hire

Behavioral interview questions reveal a candidate’s true abilities. However, it’s important to remember that face-to-face interviews can sometimes be influenced by unconscious biases.

Toggl Hire helps you ask the right questions and ensure a fair hiring process (and great hires!). Our skills tests offer a fair and efficient way to pre-screen candidates with the right questions before they reach the interview stage.

Ready to revolutionize your hiring process? See it in action by checking out our critical thinking skills test, or browse our entire skills test library.

38% of the workforce are full-time or part-time freelancers. As a company of one, managing your time efficiently and effectively allows you to deliver projects and get paid accurately.

Many freelancers turn to time tracking apps to optimize their work processes, improve productivity, and turbocharge their billing. Throw in project management integrations, handy mobile apps, and detailed financial reporting, and it’s easy to see how time tracking apps are revolutionizing the way freelancers work.

Never tried one before? You’ve come to the right place! Below, we have analyzed tracking tools for freelancers, comparing the 11 best options on the market so you can make an informed choice.

Best time tracking app for freelancers at a glance

Tool	G2	What is It?	Best For
Toggl Track	4.6	A well-designed, user-friendly tool for freelancers requiring immediate time tracking, project planning, and invoicing functionality	Free, user-friendly time tracking, timesheets, and invoicing to manage multiple client projects with ease
Clockify	4.5	Simple and clean time tracking for freelancers on a budget	Freelancers on a budget looking for lean and simple time tracking
Harvest	4.3	A solid all-rounder for finance-conscious freelancers needing to track billable hours	An easy tool for tracking billable hours, managing hourly rates, and creating invoices
Hubstaff	4.4	Great for freelancers with a larger budget who need to track time seamlessly across multiple device	Freelancers looking for a well-connected time tracking app (and have a little more money to spend)
TimeCamp	4.7	Detailed productivity and profitability analysis for freelancers who need to optimize their time	Freelancers requiring deep productivity and profit boosts
Timely	4.8	AI-based tracking for freelancers who want to track their work in the background	AI-based monitoring for freeing up time to focus on client work
RescueTime	4.1	Great for freelancers focused on time management and productivity but don’t need invoicing	Freelancers needing help improving their productivity and time management
MyHours	4.6	Spreadsheet-style tracking for freelancers working across multiple projects	Spreadsheet-style time tracking for freelancers requiring simplicity and ease of use
TrackingTime	4.5	Slick time tracking with a dedicated single-user freelancer package	Time tracking across multiple devices
Memtime	4.7	Automatic time tracking in the background for Windows, Mac, or Linux users	Automatic background time tracking for those who don’t want to start/stop timers
EverHour	4.7	Strong time tracking for project-based freelancers with integrations into well-known project management tools	Project-based focused time tracking

What to look for in freelance time tracking tools

At Toggl Track, we’ve spent years tailoring time tracking tools to support freelancers. We know time tracking is all about simplicity, cost, and ease of use for freelancers, turbocharging their earning power without investing thousands of dollars or wasting resources.

So, here are a few key features to look out for in the perfect freelancer time tracking tool:

• User-friendly: Time tracking tools must be intuitive and easy to use. Look for tools with automatic time tracking functionality and compatibility with web apps, iOS, and Android devices.
• Flexibility. Freelancers spend their lives moving from one client to the next, so make sure your tool can accompany them. It’s important to be able to manage different clients and projects through customized key workflows.
• Feature-packed: Freelancers aren’t blessed with giant budgets. So, look for a tool with time tracking features and functionality in other areas, like task management.
• Integrations: No time tracking tool does everything, so check it syncs up with other tools, especially project management software, calendars, and email.
• Invoicing features: Time management and billing clients go hand-in-hand. Prioritize software with built-in invoice templates and real-time reporting to speed up your billing cycle.
• Set billable rates: To simplify your invoicing workflows, hunt for a tool that handles different billable rates, billable hours, and non-billable hours. No two clients, projects, or days are the same, so having flexibility enables you to manage your finances and get cash into your bank.
• Detailed reports: When working across different clients, you need insights into your time usage, project time, and profitability. A tool capable of producing attractive reports, including those via Excel spreadsheets and PDF, will be a hit here.
• Pricing: For freelancers, budget is often the biggest driver when selecting the right tool. Apps with free plans or low monthly costs achieve good value for money and allow you to stay within your budget.

A deeper look at the best time tracker tool for freelancers

Because you’re a busy freelancer with a lot on your plate (to accomplish solo, nonetheless), let’s get straight into the top time tracking tools for freelancers.

To curate this list, we analyzed customer reviews and tested different functionalities, focusing on tools that offer a great user experience and the features freelancers need to deliver outstanding client results.

Toggl Track

📌 Toggl Track blends user-friendly time tracking, timesheets, and invoicing to manage multiple client projects with ease.

Toggl Track prides itself on being super easy to use, highly accurate, and automated. Our platform enables freelancers to manage multiple client projects end-to-end with ease. Native time tracking through Chrome and mobile apps helps you quickly start and stop timers, with those tracked work hours automatically converting to professional client-ready invoices when you’re ready to get paid.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Clean and simple time tracking with integrations into other project and work management systems • Shareable timelines providing project progress updates for clients • Fast and humane customer support, maximizing the value you receive from Toggl Track	• Limited functionality on the app versus the full web version • The free plan has a five-user limit

Pricing and plans

• Free: Up to five users with unlimited tracking across all platforms. Includes Google and Outlook integrations, and six months of data storage.
• Starter: From $9 per user/mo for project management tools, extra project templates, and no data storage limits.
• Premium: Get extra integrations, SSO, and API customization for $18 per user/mo.
• Enterprise: Clients can manage multiple workspaces, while a dedicated Customer Success Manager provides priority support. Ask the Toggl Track team for customized pricing.

🧠 G2: 4.6 (1,570), Capterra: 4.7 (2,362)

Clockify

📌 Clean and simple time tracking, great for freelancers on a budget.

For freelancers requiring no-nonsense time tracking, Clockify’s core focus is on accurate timesheets, automatic tracking, and detailed analytics. Clockify has a desktop, browser, and mobile app and includes decent invoicing functionality to get you paid fast and effectively.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Multiple clean and simple time tracking options (such as Pomodoro) that are easy to use • Link time entries to different projects and raise invoices with ease • The free plan is generous for freelancers or small teams looking to get started with time tracking	• Free and basic plans lack invoicing functionality • Users report Clockify’s support can be patchy, making it difficult to resolve issues

Pricing and plans

• Free: Unlimited projects and unlimited users, access to the iOS and Android app, and automated time tracking
• Basic: From $3.99 per user/mo. Adds security features, templates, and enhanced exporting
• Standard: From $5.49 per user/mo. Includes invoicing and QuickBooks integration
• Pro: From $7.99 per user/mo, you can add in forecasting and multi-currency
• Enterprise: From $11.99 per user/mo. Adds extra customizations such as SSO and audit logs

🧠 G2: 4.5 (170), Capterra: 4.7 (4,905)

Harvest

📌 A solid all-rounder for tracking billable hours, managing hourly rates, and creating invoices.

Harvest could be the right option for freelancers looking to manage their billable hours and expenses. It’s a well-connected system with automated tracking, productivity reports, and system-system integrations, helping freelancers combine and simplify their day-to-day workflows.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Integrates well with payment tools such as PayPal and Stripe and project management tools such as Asana • Allows you to set hourly or fixed fee budgets for each project and get instant alerts when you reach your threshold • Its simple pricing structure makes it easy to unlock more premium features	• Limited ability to customize the system makes it difficult to automate workflows • Limited reporting features make it hard to get detailed time reports and business-critical insights

Pricing and plans

• Free plan: Provides all Harvest’s features for one user, working on two projects
• Harvest Pro: $10.80 per seat/mo gives you everything Harvest has to offer

🧠 G2: 4.3 (806), Capterra: 4.6 (595)

Hubstaff

📌 A well-connected time tracking app useful for slightly larger budgets.

Hubstaff’s well-connected platform allows freelancers to track their time wherever they are. Its integrated invoicing, timesheeting, and reporting functionalities make turning tracked hours into cash in the bank easy. The platform is compatible with Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Great connectivity across different device types, including a desktop app • Automated workflows make it easy to simplify tasks and basic project work • 35+ native integrations, including Trello, Microsoft Outlook, and Slack	• For small freelancer teams, features such as screenshot monitoring feel like surveillance and can erode trust • The user interface is a little dated, making it harder to onboard and work with day-to-day

Pricing and plans

• Starter: Basic tracking and timesheets start at $4.99 per user/mo
• Grow: From $7.50 per user/mo, get one integration, expenses, and idle timeouts
• Team: From $10 per user/mo, you can start tracking time on tasks alongside unlimited tracking and integrations
• Enterprise: Suitable for larger businesses (advanced features such as location tracking, SSO, and compliance tools start from $25 per user/mo)

🧠 G2: 4.4 (1,040), Capterra: 4.6 (1,489)

TimeCamp

📌 Great for freelancers requiring deep productivity and profit boosts.

TimeCamp supports freelancers in billing every minute of their workday so they can transform any freelancing gig into a steady, income-generating business. Calendar integrations, one-click timers, and customizations send freelancers deep into their productivity, identifying ways to streamline their processes while delivering work their clients love.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Detailed insights into productivity and process improvement opportunities • Integrations with lots of other well-known tools, including Asana, Jira, and monday.com • Strong billing and invoicing capabilities to get freelancers paid	• Users report a weak offering on mobile apps that reduces flexibility • Limited reporting features make it difficult to get detailed time tracking insights without exporting data to CSV

Pricing and plans

• Free plan: No time limit on users or projects, but only includes very basic tracking
• Starter: From $2.99 per user/mo for invoicing and unlimited tasks
• Premium: From $4.99 per user/mo, customize billable hours and integrations
• Ultimate: From $7.99 per user/mo, add customizable rates per project/client
• Enterprise: Become a VIP with priority support and custom integrations for $11.99 per user/mo

🧠 G2: 4.7 (318), Capterra: 4.7 (598)

Timely

📌 AI-based monitoring frees up time for freelancers to spend on client work.

Timely’s AI-based time tracking removes any manual intervention, tracking each of your activities automatically and saving them as ‘memories’ to review later. This allows freelancers to optimize their day, reducing admin while creating detailed insights into the tasks that take more or less of your time.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Automatic, AI-based time tracking on a desktop device without starting or stopping timers • Detailed insight and analytics to influence rates, manage productivity, and create professional invoices • A fresh and sleek user interface	• High price compared to competitors, especially for smaller freelance budgets • While some integrations work well, users report challenges, bugs, and the need for workarounds

Pricing and plans

• Starter: From $9 per user/mo for time tracking, AI assistance, and in-app support
• Premium: From $16 per user/mo for broader team management, budgeting, and costs
• Unlimited: From $22 per user/mo for all the Premium features, with additional time types, currencies, and integrations

🧠 G2: 4.8 (419), Capterra: 4.7 (215)

RescueTime

📌 Rescues freelance time by boosting productivity and time management.

As the name suggests, RescueTime is all about helping freelancers find more time. Unlike competitors that focus on invoicing and billing, RescueTime boosts productivity by tracking screen time, setting ‘focus time’ goals, and providing detailed productivity insights.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Strong focus on productivity, with detailed insights into time management habits • Automatic time tracking for app-based work • Offline mode for tracking if you’ve not got WiFi	• No invoice or billing features mean you’ll need other tools to turn hours into cash • The user interface is a little dated compared to competitors

Pricing and plans

• Individual users: Can get additional features such as insight reports from $6.50 per user/mo
• Teams: For $9 per user/mo, you get real-time projects, time sheeting, and integrations (minimum 2 users)

🧠 G2: 4.1(90), Capterra: 4.6 (139)

My Hours

📌 Spreadsheet-style time tracking for freelancers requiring simplicity and ease of use.

My Hours’s spreadsheet-style user interface makes it easy for freelancers to track their time across multiple projects before turning hours worked into professional invoices. You can create reports and filter by project, client, or task level.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Spreadsheet style user interface is easy to learn and simple to use • Detailed reporting by client or project makes it easy to track performance and profitability • Generous free plan with unlimited projects and clients for up to five users	• Invoicing functionality is basic compared to competitors • The user interface and reports aren’t very well-designed and appear outdated

Pricing and plans

• Free: Unlimited clients, unlimited projects, and basic time tracking
• Pro: Priority customer support, invoicing, and detailed reporting come for $8 per user/mo

🧠 G2: 4.6 (263) Capterra: 4.8 (990)

TrackingTime

📌 Slick time tracking across multiple devices with a dedicated single-user freelancer plan.

TimeTracking’s all-in-one solution helps freelancers track their time, manage their projects, and complete time cards from one place. While focused on small teams, there are loads of features here for freelancers, including productivity hacks such as time blocking, auto time tracking, and real-time app sync.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Flexible browser, desktop, and mobile app tracking keeps you synced on any device • The AutoTrack feature captures hours worked in the background, reducing manual effort • Integrations with 50+ well-known tools, including Google, Airtable, and Ring Central	• Users report occasional crashes in the platform and integrations • Limited invoicing features compared to competitors

Pricing and plans

• Free: AutoTrack and Unlimited tasks, projects, and clients for up to three users
• Freelancer: $8 per user/mo requiring project management and basic integrations (one user max)
• Pro: $5.75 per user/mo for all the features you need (three users minimum)
• Business: Gives you the Pro experience plus SSO, priority support, and onboarding for $10 per user/mo

🧠 G2: 4.5 (86) Capterra: 4.6 (40)

Memtime

📌 Automatic background time tracking for those who don’t want to start/stop timers.

Memtime’s mission is to help freelancers work less and get paid more with their automatic, in-app time tracking. With the desktop app installed, Memtime runs in the background to track your work, storing by application, project, or client to produce accurate bills for every freelance task or project.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Automatic time tracking saves time for Windows, Mac, and Linux users • Integrations with numerous platforms, including Toggl Track • For small teams of freelancers, Memtime has a strong approach to privacy and anti-data sharing	• No invoicing features • User reports the user interface is hard to navigate

Pricing and plans

• Basic: From $10 per user/mo, you get Memtime’s automatic time tracking and reporting
• Connect: Add in integrations and project management sync for $15 per user/mo
• Premium: For $20 per user/mo, you get priority support and SSO login

🧠 G2: 4.7 (158) Capterra: 4.6 (119)

Everhour

📌 Time tracking with a strong bias towards project-based working.

If you’re looking for a time tracker and project management hybrid, Everhour could be a solid option. With simple start/stop tracking across web and mobile devices, it’s easy to track time against your client projects, with notifications when you’re approaching a project’s budget and detailed reporting on expenses and costs throughout.

✅ Pros	❓Cons
• Simple time tracking across browsers and mobile devices • Lots of project management integrations, including Asana, ClickUp, Jira, and monday.com • Detailed reporting on project budgets, costs, and expenses keeps you on track	• The pricing structure may put off individual freelancers or small teams of four or fewer • Limited customization can make it hard for teams to onboard

Pricing and plans

• Free: Up to five seats with basic time tracking, projects, and tasks
• Team: For $8.50 per user/mo, you get additional integrations, budgeting, and expense management features (minimum five seats required)

🧠 G2: 4.7 (174) Capterra: 4.7 (425)

How to choose the best time tracking software

Now you’ve reviewed each software, it’s time to decide. What’s right for one freelancer isn’t always right for another, so use these steps to evaluate your needs and decide on the best-fit tool.

• Understand your requirements: Make sure you’re clear on exactly what you need from a time tracking tool. While timesheets are the basics, consider other features, such as integrations and workflows, to optimize your work time.
• Trial different tools: Many of the tools we’ve covered have a free plan or offer a limited free trial. Don’t be afraid to try out various apps to ensure they align with your working style.
• Consider mobility: For many busy freelancers, being able to work on the go is important. Ensure your tool works across all your devices so you can clock in no matter where you are.
• Seek customization: Look for a tool that can adapt to your specific time management needs, such as workflows, custom billing rates, or integrations.
• Read freelancer reviews: Lastly, time tracking tools are used by businesses of any size. And what works for a large enterprise probably won’t be best for a solo business. Check out user reviews to ensure your chosen platform is valuable for freelancers like you.

Try time tracking software for free

We’ve worked with a lot of freelancers in our time, so we know time tracking can really make a difference to how you manage and bill clients. While every tool on our list offers something great for freelancers, we think Toggl Track is the best offering on the market.

Toggl Track’s billable and non-billable time tracking (automatic, start/stop timer, and manual), invoicing, and simple project/task management features are essential for freelancers looking to improve their client management. With a clean user interface, Chrome extension, and mobile app, it’s easy to incorporate Toggl Track into your daily routine without a steep learning curve.

But don’t just take our word for it, create a free account and give Toggl Track a try for yourself today!

Everhour integrates time tracking into popular project management apps, enabling teams to gain better visibility into capacity levels, resource availability, and billing practices. 

It has received numerous glowing reviews from independents and teams, who praise its usability, simplicity, and streamlined expense tracking. 

But just like any product, Everhour can’t be everything for everyone. Some users miss advanced project management features, and others would prefer automated time tracking over a timer-based one.

If you’re looking for an Everhour alternative, we’ve examined eleven better options.

The 11 best Everhour alternatives

Tool	G2 Rating	What It Does	Best For	Lowest Paid Plan
Toggl Track	4.6	Combines automatic, timer-based, offline, and manual time entry options across all devices and 100+ business apps	Teams wanting to turn time-tracking data into profitable decisions.	From $9/user/month
Harvest	4.3	Helps improve your invoicing through accurate billing, expenses, and time-tracking	Anyone charging hourly	From $12/user/month
TimeCamp	4.7	Basic timekeeping app with real-time GPS tracker for seamless attendance monitoring, payroll management, and client billing	In-field teams	From $3.99/user/month
Hubstaff	4.5	Workforce management solution with customizable employee performance monitoring features	Remote and distributed teams	From $7/user/month
Clockify	4.5	Offers excellent time-based scheduling features and full visibility of resource utilization	Companies seeking better shift planning	From $4.99/user/month
Time Doctor	4.4	Employee monitoring app that provides in-depth reporting on employee activities and insights into productive and time-wasting practices	Teams struggling with time management	From $6.70/user/month
Timely	4.8	AI-powered time-tracker for automatically categorizing tasks and generating timesheets	Larger teams that love automation	From $26/user/month
RescueTime	4.1	Personal productivity tool for blocking distractions and practicing deep work	Anyone struggling to stay focused	From $12/user/month
DeskTime	4.5	Provides a percentage-based calculation of teams’ effectiveness and productivity based on logged time and desktop activity	Benchmarking employee performance	From $6.42/user/month
TMetric	4.6	Offers unlimited time-tracking across tasks, projects, and clients with customizable billing rates	Agencies and service-based businesses	From $5/user/month
Paymo	4.6	Digital workplace platform with project management, in-app time-tracker, file manager, and invoicing features	Small businesses needing a task manager-time-tracker combo	From $3.90/user/month

Toggl Track

Toggl Track is an all-in-one time management tool marrying ease of use with reporting depth and flexibility in use cases. Our goal is to provide reliable insights into work styles, performance blockers, and productivity boosters.

Everhour only offers a clock-in and clock-out experience for employee timekeeping. But Toggl Track enables continuous time-tracking and analytics for precise performance management, capacity planning, and cross-team productivity.

Using our browser extension, web, desktop, or mobile apps (Android and iOS), you can switch between fully automated, timer-based, and manual time tracking. With over a hundred pre-made integrations, you can bring time-tracking to all major digital workplace apps.

If you didn’t see the right logo, use our well-documented application programming interface (API) to embed Toggl Track features into other apps. Everhour only has about 40 integrations, and its API has been in beta since 2020.

Everhour limits employee time tracking to timesheets, while Toggl Track offers more in-depth data analytics. Use different dashboard views to calculate payroll, track project profitability, issue client invoices, and compare task performance. Visualize productivity trends to discover new profitability opportunities.

⭐ G2: 4.6 from 1,500+ reviews, Capterra: 4.7 from 2,000+ reviews

Standout features

• Manual and automated time-tracking online and offline 
• Instant sync across devices for high data accuracy 
• Project time tracking to estimate revenue and manage profitability 
• Editable online timesheets for payroll management 
• Custom dashboards and report views

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Create and export attractive visual reports or raw data for in-depth analysis with no limits • Reduce busywork with one-click time entry duplication, project templates, and other built-in workflow automation	• Geofencing and GPS-based tracking

Integrations

Over 100 integrations to track time inside popular project management software (Jira, Basecamp, Trello, etc), communication apps (Slack, Outlook, Gmail), sales, marketing, accounting, and IT platforms. Use Toggl Track API to embed time-tracking into any other web, mobile, or desktop app.

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Solo users or teams of up to five who need a time tracker with an intuitive interface
Starter	$9 per user/month	Teams with basic time tracking need
Premium	$20 per user/month	Teams needing online and offline functionality for tracking time and profitability
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Enterprise teams needing custom solutions (we can build it for you!)

What users are saying

“Switching to Toggl Track has been one of the best decisions for our team. From the moment we started using it, the platform’s intuitive and user-friendly interface stood out, making it incredibly easy to track time and manage projects. The detailed, customizable reports provide invaluable insights into our productivity and project progress, helping us identify areas for improvement and celebrate our successes,” shared Yugo Miyahara, founder of  Instituto Taqtile.

Amanda Cada, President at Cada & Associates, Inc., praises Toggl Track for its reporting features. “It’s nice to see what employees are working on, where we are on a project’s estimated time, and specific tasks within that project. Toggl also takes product improvement suggestions seriously!”

Toggl Track vs. Everhour

Feature	Toggl Track	Everhour
Time tracking	Privacy-focused, consent-driven time tracking across business apps	Time tracking, combined with optional screenshot captures
Capacity planning	Accurate time tracking data to understand team workloads, predict project timelines, and gain accurate revenue forecasts	Basic attendance insights for team management. Ability to track logged hours against a fixed-fee or recurring budget
Reports and analytics	Detailed time logs with multiple segmentation views for project estimation, profitability management, resource management, and more	Focuses on attendance, time-off, and billable hours analysis. Limited data into productivity or profitability trends
Integrations	100+	40+

📚 Check the full Everhour vs. Toggl Track comparison guide for more details.

Harvest

Harvest combines invoicing, expenses, and time-tracking into one interface. Power up the live time or add entries manually for offline work. Harvest accurately detects idle time. The time-tracker will auto-stop after 10 minutes of inactivity (no mouse movements or keystrokes).

Harvest combines budget and progress tracking to improve project management. It makes project-critical information available to stakeholders, helping to keep projects within budget and profitable. The reporting dashboard shows all tracked billable hours, total and remaining budgets, internal costs (expenses), and uninvoiced amounts.

You can also burrow deeper into the Reporting tab to review team members’ entries. Analyze team’s work habits, detect overworked or under-utilized staff, and compare actual hours vs initial estimates for project management. However, Harvest lacks attendance tracking features (which Everhour has).

But there’s a simple workaround: create separate tasks for different non-billable hours like vacations, PTO, and business travel to track these alongside billable hours for better resource management.

⭐ G2: 4.3 from 807 reviews, Capterra: 4.6 from 605 reviews

Standout features

• Manually activated time tracker for desktop, web, and mobile 
• Streamlined workflow for client billing and invoicing 
• Intuitive expense tracking for client reimbursements 
• SAML-based SSO for secure team log-in
• Create time reports with custom filters

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Visual charts to model project/business profitability, track budgets, and document internal costs beyond billable hours • Simplified bookkeeping and accounting thanks to instant data sync with QuickBooks Online or Xero	• More payment integrations (the only two native options are PayPal and Stripe, which aren’t universally used)

Integrations

Over 60 different integrations with popular project management apps (ClickUp, monday.com, Asana, etc), workflow automation tools (Zapier, IFTTT), and other business apps. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Solo users
Pro	$12 per user/month	Small teams

What users are saying

“Synchronization between platforms is flawless,” says Diana Moreno, Project Manager at Ogilvy. “Time entries entered using the browser are immediately reflected in both the mobile and desktop versions.”

Freelance SEO Consultant Shannon also admires the app’s UX. “The interface makes it dead simple to task-switch and start logging hours for a different client. And when it’s time to assess how many hours are left to spend on a client, the analytics reporting is easy to understand and offers several great ways to manipulate the data.”

Harvest vs. Everhour

Feature	Harvest	Everhour
Time tracking	Timer-based or manual entry	Timer-based or manual entry
Invoicing	• Auto-convert timesheets into invoices, use different billing models, include expenses, and accept payments • Integrates with Xero and Quickbooks	• Simple invoice generator with minimal customization features • Integrates with Xero and Quickbooks
Reports and analytics	Visual insights on project progress, budgeting estimates, and more options to drill down into the time-tracking data	At a glance analytics of employees’/teams’ capacity, billable hours, rates, and tracked time
Integrations	60+	40+

📚 Check out more Harvest alternatives. 

TimeCamp

TimeCamp meshes employee attendance tracking with profitability tracking tools. Your team can log work hours manually or automatically using web, desktop, and mobile apps. All the insights are aggregated on a personal activity timeline alongside activity screenshots (if activated).

Unlike Everhour, TimeCamp also offers GPS-based real-time time tracking with its mobile app. Once the contractor enters a geofenced job site, the timer will start and assign a time entry to the corresponding task.

You can simultaneously track people at multiple sites to optimize shift scheduling and team dispatches. The Time Clock Kiosk feature lets you set a stationary tracker for monitoring employee attendance for payroll processing, an alternative to paper punch cards or expensive digital systems.

On the billing side, you can auto-log billable hours (based on team rates), monitor labor costs, and create customer invoices. And you’ll receive an immediate notification if your project risks exceeding the budget or timeline.

⭐ G2: 4.7 from 334 reviews, Capterra: 4.7 from 598 reviews

Standout features

• Daily and weekly timesheet generation with approvals 
• Overtime and idle time detection 
• Offsite time tracking with geo-fencing features 
• Employee attendance monitoring with a kiosk app 
• Budget planning and tracking against billable rates

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• With TimeCamp, you can set billable rates based on project type, client, worker expertise, or seniority • Customizable time-rounding in time entries and reports for accurate billing and payroll processing	• Reminders to start/stop running the timer for the forgetful types

Integrations

Auto-sync projects and tasks from 26 popular tools (Asana, Microsoft Teams, Notion, monday.com, etc). Auto-log time from 80+ websites. Add custom integrations using available API.   

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0 per user	Freelancers
Starter	$3.99 per user	Small teams and start-ups
Premium	$6.99 per user	Growing teams
Ultimate	$10.99 per user	Mid-sized teams
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Large enterprises

What users are saying

People rave about TimeCamp’s usability. “The interface of TC is easy to grasp, so there isn’t time wasted figuring out how to log my time. Even when the application or site is updated with new features or a new look, you can get to where you want to go very quickly again,” says Ivan Wiehahn, an IT Consultant. 

Video editor Germans Relinsh is also sold on various automations. “It has a lot of useful features, such as an automatic project tracker, task widget, weekly timesheets, and progress reports. And it’s so very convenient to use. I simply installed it on my PC, and it tracks my activity every day.”

TimeCamp vs. Everhour

Feature	TimeCamp	Everhour
Time tracking	• Timer-based or manual time entry • Off-site time tracking with a mobile app • Admins can add time entries for other users manually	• Timer-based or manual timekeeping without any geofencing features • No kiosk app is available
Billing	• Log billable hours across tasks, teams, and projects • Get a full picture of project profitability and expenses • Streamline invoice generation and uploads to accounting software	Create custom invoices, record received payments, and track and non-billable time you have for each client and project from a convenient user interface
Account management	• Track unlimited users, tasks, subtasks, and projects • Create custom user roles and bulk edit all entries • Self-hosted deployment is available	• Create custom user groups and multiple team roles with different permissions • Lock time editing for users, program auto-track reminders
Integrations	80+	40+

📚 Learn more about other TimeCamp alternatives. 

Hubstaff

Hubstaff offers workforce management tools for attendance tracking, employee scheduling, billing, and payroll management. Similar to Everhour and TimeCamp, it includes features for monitoring employee activity. Screenshots, URL tracking, and device activity rates are logged during active time tracking. Users can delete or blur screenshots to avoid storing sensitive corporate data online (which may breach security policies).

Time logging is manual or automatic with a Chrome-only extension or installed app. Mobile users can auto-report hours using a GPS tracker with geofencing. Offline tracking syncs entries once you’re connected. You can configure per-user timekeeping settings, lock time entries to avoid manual changes, and automate timesheet approvals.

Like Toggl Track, Hubstaff provides in-depth reporting. Choose from 20 pre-made time report templates or create custom views. Optimize task management with insights into teams’ average completion time. Identify chores that take up the most effort and bring the least returns by comparing billable rates. Build better employee schedules with real-time visibility into workers’ availability, location, PTO, and holidays.

⭐ G2: 4.5 from 1200+ reviews, Capterra: 4.6 from 1500+ reviews

Standout features

• Simple time tracking across tasks, projects, and job sites 
• Automatic timesheet approvals based on custom rules 
• Timeline reports highlight bottlenecks and identify trends and work habits. 
• Productivity analysis that helps with workflow optimization. 
• Gamification functionality to celebrate top performers

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• The team reports feature provides plenty of insights into team performance and helps identify areas of improvement • Streamlined payroll management with individualized team pay rates (fixed or hourly) and payouts via PayPal, Pioneer, Wise, Gusto, or Bitwage	Simpler billing plans; Hubstaff upsells a lot of its features — time insights, GPS-tracking, and corporate apps — as separate add-ons, making it harder to budget subscription costs

Integrations

Offers 30+ different integrations with apps like Basecamp, Trello, Slack, Quickbooks Online, PayPal, and Asana. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Freelancers
Starter	$7 per user/month	Start-ups
Grow	$9 per user/month	Fast-growing small teams
Team	$12 per user/month	Mid to large teams with complex needs
Enterprise	Contact Hubstaff for prices, starting at $25 per user/month	Enterprise organizations

What users are saying

The time tracking feature is incredibly precise and easy to use, which has helped us manage our tasks and projects more efficiently. The detailed reports and real-time insights provided by Hubstaff have been a game changer for optimizing performance,” shared Zuhair Thabit, CEO of CrypSol Technologies. 

Many users also praise Hubstaff’s customer support. “Whenever there is any sort of issue, the customer support is super supportive and very prompt. They literally fix issues within 1 hour,” said Manideepa Purkait, a small business owner.

Hubstaff vs. Everhour

Feature	Hubstaff	Everhour
Time tracking	• Multi-platform timer app with screenshot, URL, and activity rate captures • Limited manual time adding and editing	Automated and manual time tracking across platforms with the ability to run the tracker inside popular project management apps
Team management	• Set daily/weekly work limits, detect overtime, and schedule work breaks and time off • Automatically calculate payroll and schedule payouts	See a timeline for staff attendance, visualize team schedules, manage time off, and manually adjust workloads
Productivity insights	• Auto categorization of work time into predefined blocks • Data on employee utilization rates, performance trends, meeting time, and suspicious activity	Insights about project profitability, team attendance, and tasks completed
Integrations	30+	40+

📚 Read more about other Hubstaff alternatives. 

Clockify

Clockify packs a punch with comprehensive time-based scheduling features — timer apps, timesheets, task progress, resource availability, and planned hours. It’s available on Windows, Mac, and Linux (desktop) and iOS and Android (mobile).

Clockify lets you assign logs to clients or projects, schedule time-bound assignments, and track attendance and PTO. Scheduled work entries can be viewed on a project timeline to understand who’s working on what, when, and for how long.

You can also track team availability and resource utilization in another dashboard. Build custom team schedules, set project milestones, and monitor revenues and costs for planned activities.

⭐ G2: 4.5 from 170+ reviews, Capterra: 4.8 from 9000+ reviews

Standout features

• Digital timesheets with automatic time logging 
• Personal calendar view for time-blocking 
• Per-user work activity breakdowns 
• Multi-view reports for teams and projects 
• Project performance forecasts

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Clockify suits multiple use cases with auto clock-in/clock-out, offline mode, GPS-tracking, idle detection, and an automated tracker • Visual resource scheduling across projects and tasks for better team collaboration • Easily track all assignments on a timeline from multiple reporting views	Easy way to edit time entries within the desktop app if you’ve forgotten to start the time and notes to add extra comments

Integrations

Over 30 integrations with popular project management and productivity apps, including Jira, Asana, GitHub, HelpScout, Zendesk, and HubSpot. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Basic	$4.99 per user/month	Solo users with basic time tracking needs
Standard	$6.99 per user/month	Small teams with more complex time-tracking needs
Pro	$9.99 per user/month	Teams needing very robust project and time tracking
Enterprise	$14.99 per user/month	Complex client projects that require advanced time-tracking features

What users are saying

“Clockify’s UI is simple and clear, and it’s easy to find anything you need. If you need help, the resources are easy to use. The cost for us was important, and we found Clockify to be really good value for our money,” says Jeff Kayton, an Operations professional. 

Graphic designer Victoria also enjoys the Gantt charts for time management. “Colour-coded projects, the ability to add as many different projects as you need to, adding new clients, checking out your reports, and analyzing how you spent your time while working easily [are major pros].”

Clockify vs. Everhour

Feature	Clockify	Everhour
Time tracking	• Stopwatch timer for accurate entry logging across tasks, projects, and job sites • Screenshots and activity logging reports are available	Auto-timer or manual entry with the ability to add notes, edit entries, and share screenshots
Planning	• Visualize team capacity with color-coded charts • Schedule work hours, review log hours, and track project progression across the key milestones	Configure weekly capacity for all team members, allocate available hours towards different tasks on a visual timeline, and stay updated on progress
Budgeting	• Add billable rates (hourly only) • Set and monitor project budgets to optimize profitability • Import billable hours and expenses to create invoices and record payments	Set fixed-fee or recurring budgets for all projects, set unique employee rates for each project, capture expenses, and easily exclude non-billable hours
Integrations	30+	40+

📚 Discover more Clockify alternatives. 

Time Doctor

Time Doctor provides in-depth time insights for remote, office, and on-site workers. You get a slew of analytics views showcasing productivity KPIs like productive and unproductive time, web and app usage, and daily timelines.

The tracker can run in silent mode (i.e., fully automatically with employees’ consent) and capture all device activity, including screenshots, inactivity periods, breaks, suspicious actions, and video screen recordings. Note of caution: such monitoring may border on employee surveillance, promoting unhealthy management habits.

When used responsibly, Time Doctor can be a great tool for identifying organizational inefficiencies, time-wasting activities (like too frequent meetings), and missing work-life balance. The app delivers users and managers a good dose of insights into their productivity trends.

Unlike Everhour and Harvest, Time Doctor doesn’t offer billing and client invoicing features. However, there’s a basic payroll management tracker for estimating compensation based on attendance.

⭐ G2: 4.4 from 380+ reviews, Capterra: 4.5 from 500+ reviews

Standout features

• Automatic time and attendance tracking with offline mode 
• Employee activity monitoring includes screenshots, video recording, and app activity tracking 
• Daily workers’ activity summaries with the benchmarks and best practices for improvement 
• Work-life balance metrics to prevent burnout and turnover
• Custom data exports for sorting time-tracking data beyond the retention period

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Time Doctor does a good job on its productivity analysis and reporting features, which can highlight bottlenecks, top performers, and areas for improvement • Configurable productivity ratings for different units to promote healthy work habits and performance coaching	Better user interface; the app UI has grown more complex over time, and some admin features are buried too deep in the menus

Integrations

Over 50 integrations with business apps like Trello, Wrike, Pluto, Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and more. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Basic	$8 per user	Small teams and start-ups
Standard	$14 per user	Mid-sized teams with complex tasks
Premium	$20 per user	Large hybrid teams
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Large multinationals

What users are saying

“Time Doctor gives us an overview of the whole CS operations in terms of agent performance, be it productivity, attendance, idle time, and productive hours,” shared John Epok Pascual, Regional Platforms Lead at Circles.Life. 

Alicia, a CEO at a Law Practice, also loves how “Time Doctor allows me to make sure my employees are working and billing their time without me being a nag.”

Time Doctor vs. Everhour

Feature	Time Doctor	Everhour
Time tracking	Online and offline automated tracking	Timer-based or manual time entry
Employee monitoring	User-controlled or silent tracking of web/app usage, screenshots, video screen recording, and suspicious activity reports	Optional, user-controlled screenshots for proof of work
Productivity insights	• Individual and team dashboards with a detailed view of employees’ activity, engagement, and productivity • Inactivity alerts and email summaries for managers	• Time tracking is pegged to specific tasks to provide insights into resource availability and track project progression • Fewer individualized insights into workers’ activity
Integrations	50+	40+

Timely

Timely automates time tracking more than Everhour. You can set most logging on auto-pilot with Memory Tracker (manual time adding and bulk editing are available, too) and use AI for automatic timesheet generation.

The app’s algo will match entries with projects and clients in your workspace. The accuracy is about 80%-90%. From meetings and emails to coding and design work, Timely’s Memory tracker remembers everything you’ve worked on throughout your day.

Similar to Toggl Track, Timely prioritizes anti-surveillance, so there aren’t any direct employee monitoring features like screenshots or activity logging. But the app auto-detects idle time, so you don’t need to log off. For the manual tracker, you’ll get an email nudge to stop it.

The project management dashboard provides a detailed view of team activity and financial metrics. You can track billable rates, internal costs, and set budget limits. For greater clarity, you can also add required tags and notes for all entries. Use the same few to assign work to others and review team capacity to avoid overbookings.

⭐ G2: 4.8 from 400+ reviews, Capterra: 4.7 from 700+ reviews

Standout features

• Memory tracking across multiple products with automatic entry categorization 
• Multi-currency billable rates and internal project cost trackers 
• Team dashboard with group and individual capacity insights 
• Seamless report sharing via private URLs or downloadable files 
• Optional location tracking via Android and iOS apps

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Automated time-tracking helps you stay focused on work instead of remembering to track time while eliminating manual data entries and minimizing human error • AI Timesheets feature automatically logs and categorizes all your activity throughout the day and matches your entries to the relevant projects	If you want to add tasks on project timelines with tracked time, you’ll have to pay an extra $5/mo per user (other tools offer this feature for free)

Integrations

Over 30 integrations for memory tracking in apps like Adobe, Airtable, Asana, Figma, GitLab, and more. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Starter	$11 per user/month	Basic automated time tracking
Premium	$20 per user/month	More complex time tracking and project profitability features
Unlimited	$28 per user/month	Teams with advanced time-tracking needs
Unlimited+	Contact Timely for pricing	Enterprise companies

What users are saying

“I’ve been using Timely for about eight years now. It integrates with all my tools. I do contract work and am constantly multi-tasking and switching between projects. It is tough for me to fully track the exact hours that are needed. With Timely, the time tracking is quick and clean. I love too that I can go back in time and review all my past time entries for better invoicing to the client,” raves Rosangela Manfredo, Marketing Operations Manager at Applied Visions, Inc.

Laurence Collings and other users also love the product’s simplicity. “Zero learning curve, just install, and it tracks in the background. Saves me a huge mental effort and time trying to track back what I’ve done across multiple projects to enter manually into previous apps I used. I can go back weeks later and see exactly what files I was working on and assign to projects easily.”

Timely vs. Everhour

Feature	Timely	Everhour
Time tracking	Switch between click-free automated time tracking and manual timers	Timer-based or manual time entry only
Timesheets	Automate timesheet generation with a drag-and-drop reporting tool or an AI-powered assistant	Calendar and timeline view of employee availability, based on logger hours (note that manual steps are required to create a report)
Budgeting	Project dashboard combines budget and time insights, showing profitability trends, tracked vs planned hours, and unbilled hours	Project dashboard features budget insights based on the team’s billable hours and submitted expenses
Integrations	30+	40+

📚 Learn about other Timely alternatives. 

RescueTime

RescueTime is a personal time-tracking app that helps you stay focused on work. Once installed, it tracks all your desktop and mobile activity in the background and provides a summary of app usage. You can manually turn tracking on and off or program the app to launch only on your workdays.

RescueTime helps eliminate distractions by blocking ‘unproductive apps’ (your choice!) during your Focus Session. This product trains you to maintain a longer focus and prioritize deep work over ‘busy work’ like meetings, emails, or casual browsing.

The reporting dashboard provides ample insights into your daily activity. You can edit or delete entries and organize them into sub-categories. Or, try setting productivity Goals — a commitment to doing three Focused Sessions per week or spending less than four hours on Instagram. RescueTime will monitor your progress and send alerts when you hit or miss your goals.

⭐ G2: 4.1 from 90+ reviews, Capterra: 4.6 from 160+ reviews

Standout features

• Automated time-tracking in the background 
• Distraction blocking and alerts to stay focused 
• Timesheets AI automatically assigns time to projects or clients
• Exportable daily/weekly/monthly activity reports 
• Detailed reports on productivity trends

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• RescueTime is excellent at eliminating distractions by blocking specific sites and apps during focus time • Live Guided Focus Sessions are a great add-on for those looking for extra accountability	RescueTime does what it says on the tin — it enables employees to become more intentional about their time management…but it doesn’t give any further insights for capacity planning, budgeting, or project management

Integrations

Has 10 pre-made integrations with messenger, calendar, and data analytics services. You can also use Zapier and IFTTT to create ones.

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
RescueTime Lite	$0	Solo users with basic time-tracking needs
RescueTime	$12/month	Teams with more complex time-tracking needs

What users are saying

University professor Sebastian is a fan of RescueTime, as it “tracks what you work on completely automatically, reliably records all applications used, and gives automatic ratings of how ‘productive’ certain applications are.”

Clinical Director Sam Kordik also appreciates the intuitive experience. “By far, the best part of RescueTime is how streamlined and easy it is to use. Painless. Install it, install the browser extensions, and then it runs quietly in the background, tracking and capturing data.”

RescueTime vs. Everhour

Feature	RescueTime	Everhour
Time tracking	Automatic activity tracking across websites, apps, and desktop documents with offline tracking mode available	Timer-based tracker and manual entries requiring further notes and categorization across projects
Distraction blocing	• Block access to specified apps and websites during work sessions • Set productivity goals and receive alerts when you’re falling behind	None available
Project management	None available	Create project schedules with pre-made templates, assign tasks, add estimates, and monitor project performance on a visual timeline
Integrations	10	40+

DeskTime

DeskTime is a time-tracking platform with employee monitoring and performance evaluation features. It provides a summary of accessed URLs, apps, documents, and idle time. Activity screenshots are also available.

The Private Time feature lets employees pause all time-tracking activities. All aggregated data is quantified on the Productivity dashboard as a percentage-based calculation of effectiveness and productivity.

In addition, DeskTime allows assigning shifts, viewing absences, and tracking activity across tasks. You can integrate tasks from supported project management apps, add hourly rates, descriptions, and assign tracked time. You can also generate daily, weekly, and monthly reports on your team’s results.

Real-time dashboards provide a bird-eye view of everyone’s activity levels, logged time, and project progress. Based on this data, you can set your team’s specific productivity or other goals.

⭐ G2: 4.5 from 300+ reviews, Capterra: 4.6 from 500+reviews

Standout features

• Automatic time capture of visited apps, URLs, and documents 
• Worker productivity and effectiveness calculations 
• Seamless shift scheduling for optimal resource usage 
• Team dashboards with availability statuses and active projects 
• Shared absence calendar

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Color coding! The productivity bar classifies working hours as green (productive), grey (idle), and orange (unproductive) • Easy shift scheduling using pre-made templates, visual timelines, and easy functionality for shift request approvals	The productivity tracking feature doesn’t account for meeting attendance (and, if it’s important to you…the surveillance features may feel intrusive to some employees)

Integrations

Native integrations include Trello, Gitlab, Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Jira, Basecamp, and Asana. You can also create extra ones with Zapier. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Lite	$0	Solo users
Pro	$7 per user/month	Teams needing basic time tracking features
Premium	$10 per user/month	Teams with more complex time tracking and project-scheduling needs
Enterprise	$20 per user/month	Enterprise teams

What users are saying

“I love how easy it is for employees to see their own hours and what they are doing at the time. It is very clear to managers to see what their employees have been doing and how productive they are,” says Brian, a Systems Administrator. 

“DeskTime is incredibly easy to use, with very little fanfare. It’s simple to assign apps to productive and non-productive ones. I love especially that DeskTime even shows the time on what project I’m working on, and not just the name of the software”, echoes Natasha, a Digital Marketing Coordinator.

DeskTime vs. Everhour

Feature	DeskTime	Everhour
Time tracking	• Automatic tracking of all desktop activities, categorized as productive or unproductive • Manual entry of offline time	Timer or manual logging with optional screenshots
Performance management	Team and individual productivity and effectiveness scores with a full view of workers’ daily activities	• Monitor attendance, logged hours, and inputs across projects in calendar view • Visualize resource availability on a Gantt chart
Reporting	Exportable time data and real-time reports on team activity and task progress	• Customizable time tracking reports for individuals and teams •Use different filters and arrange columns to drill down into your data
Integrations	7	40+

📚 Read about other DeskTime alternatives. 

TMetric

Similar to Evernote, TMetric links time tracking and project management for better resource management. Users can automatically link tasks to timer-tracked entries, add time manually, log offline time, and see their schedule on a visual timeline. Admins also enable or disable manual time entries and add mandatory fields for data consistency.

A major plus is you can track unlimited clients and projects (even on a free plan) — a great feature for agencies or larger service providers. Assign unique billing rates for different work types, projects, or team members to gain reliable budgeting and profitability data. Easily duplicate budgets across standard projects and receive email alerts when you’re about to hit the spending threshold.

On the reporting side, TMetric offers multiple filter views to analyze time, task, and project data. The Business plan includes user activity reports with aggregated stats for teams’ most-used apps and websites.

⭐ G2: 4.6 from 100+ reviews, Capterra: 4.5 from 250+ reviews

Standout features

• Timer-based time tracking with idle time detection and screenshot capture 
• Link time entries to external tasks in project management tools 
• Attendance and absence management 
• Invoice generation, based on tracked billable hours 
• Personalized team workspaces with detailed reports

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Customizable billable rates allow you to set different rates for different people, projects, and task types for accurate budgeting • The biggest selection of browser extensions on this list, as TMetric supports Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, and Safari	Timesheets for payroll processing are still in beta mode, and the functionality is somewhat buggy

Integrations

60+ integrations with apps like Assembla, Zoho, Bitbucket, Coda, Figma, and more. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	Free	Simple time tracking
Professional	$5 per user/month	Teams with budgeting and invoicing needs
Business	$7 per user/month	Enterprises needing payroll or HR integrations

What users are saying

“What I like most is its simplified yet detailed reports on a chosen time period. You can actually enumerate the different tasks you have worked on within your preferred timeline(hour/day/week/year). You can also choose how your summary reports will be shown—will it be by projects, by tasks, by team, or by whole,” says Renelene Jay, a lead generation specialist. 

“TMetric is simple. Since I’m the admin in the workspace, I had to configure the settings, and now I’m the one who manages the account, and it’s really easy. Also, the support team is friendly and eager to assist anytime,” adds Marie Sharapa, Head Of Communication at OWOX BI.

TMetric vs. Everhour

Feature	TMetric	Everhour
Time tracking	Timer-based and manual tracking with bulk editing and offline mode	Timer-based and manual tracking without offline mode
Project management	Break down projects into tasks, link time entries, and receive detailed analytics into project scope, progress, and budgets	Use project templates to visually organize work, assign tasks on a timeline, and review team performance from one dashboard
Reporting	Detailed and summary reports for projects, teams, and people, combining time tracking and budget data	Dashboard-based and exportable reports you with tags, sections, or custom fields
Integrations	60+	40+

Paymo

Paymo is a feature-rich Everhour alternative. It combines key project management features, an in-app time tracker, file management, resource management, and financial functionality. But without the steep learning curve of complex (and expensive!) workforce management tools.

A built-in timer logs hours spent across clients, projects, and tasks, giving managers a full view of employee workloads and availability. But it only works for internal entries. If you’re using a third-party task management app, Paymo’s time tracker won’t work. But it does automatically log other desktop activity and link it to respective tasks. 

For project management, you can switch between Kanban Boards and Gantt Chart views. You can also build critical path charts to map task dependencies and add overlapping or buffer days between two dependent tasks for optimized scheduling.

Based on time and task data, Paymo provides a real-time resource load chart with estimates for bookable hours for each team member. On a separate dashboard, you get financial insights about the projects’ health in terms of budget and on-time execution. Budgets can be built with fixed-price and hourly rates, input on a user- or project-level. Users can add expenses to all projects.

All project information can be converted into an estimate and shared with clients. You can create multi-language, one-time, or recurring invoices and accept payments via PayPal, Stripe, or Authorize.net.

⭐ G2: 4.6 from 500+ reviews, Capterra: 4.7 from 600+ reviews

Standout features

• In-app task management with multi-user assigning 
• Mobile, desktop, and web app-based time tracking 
• Customizable project templates with Gantt charts and critical path views 
• Resource calendar with real-time view of the workloads and availability 
• Convenient file manager with proofing and versioning

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Using task hour budgets, you can assign a fixed number of hours to each task and compare them against work hours for better project estimation • Automatic deadline adjustments for dependent tasks based on estimated lead & lag time	Flexible shift scheduling would be nice, as Paymo doesn’t let you plan our employee shifts without assigning them to specific projects or tasks.

Integrations

Paymo integrates with 14 third-party apps, including Slack, Typeform, QuickBooks, and Shift, among others. For extras, you can use Zapier or Pabbly. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	Free	Small teams starting out with time tracking
Starter	$3.90 per user/month	Small teams needing collaboration tools and basic time management
Small Office	$6.90 per user/month	Small companies with project management needs
Business	$10.90 per user/month	Medium-sized businesses needing full Gantt chart functionality

What users are saying

“I like the way Paymo has been designed. With its straightforward menu sidebar, it’s easy to access everything your business needs quickly and easily. From adding users or managing subscriptions at the click of a button to creating tasks in the ‘Project’ tab for members within my organization or working with accounting by invoicing expenses, inputting estimates, and making one-off payments, I no longer have any problems keeping track of finances,” says Jamie Lee Jahn, Sales Manager at CaliforniaRetail Data Systems.

Small business owner Dan Anderson also loves Paymo’s versatility. “We use it to track clients and projects and for all our time tracking. We have both fixed-rate and hourly projects. We can track both and view our performance either way. It manages teams well, so I can see what other users are doing. The interface is clean and efficient. It is easy to create and save various reports which I run regularly.”

Paymo vs. Everhour

Feature	Paymo	Everhour
Time tracking	In-app timer for time logging across tasks and a desktop app for automatic activity logging	Manual and automatic time tracking across supported apps (optional screenshots are available)
Project management	Task-based project management system with Kanban and Gantt views, built-in collaboration tools, file management, and built-in activity streams	Simple task manager with list or board views, time-based task estimates, and budget tracking
Invoicing	Estimates and invoice generator with multi-currency billing and online payment processing	Simple invoice generator that integrates tracked billable hours; no payment processing is available
Integrations	14	40+

How we chose this list of Everhour alternatives

Toggl’s Editorial and Product teams regularly collaborate to test, vet, and evaluate dozens of time management apps to guide our product growth strategy.

Our reviews are based on internal comparison tables assessing each product’s features, strengths, and missing capabilities. We evaluate each tool against 10 to 20 attributes like time tracking accuracy, ease of use, native integrations, pricing, scalability, etc. Internal spreadsheets helped us shortlist the above Everhour alternatives. 

To provide accurate reviews, we also trialed the tools across several teams for different use cases and analyzed public user sentiment to avoid internal biases.

Why do users switch from Everhour?

Everhour helps you track time spent on tasks to improve your project management, resource management, budgeting, and invoicing process.  

It has a low learning curve and covers the basics for smaller organizations — providing visibility into teams’ capacities and workflows. But it lacks the seamless automatic time-tracking experience and reporting depth of similarly-priced time tracking apps.

“With Everhour, you need to stay on the page of the project you’re working on or make sure you remember to stop the timer if you’re doing something else. This can be problematic, sometimes you might be doing something like using a CRM that is updating plugins or something for the job, but it won’t track that time on that page,” noted Timothy Beukman, a freelance web designer. “So you need to make sure your time is correct in the end. Toggl Track is another tool that seems to do the page swapping better and keep tracking the time.” 

Users also have issues with Everhour integrations, which often fail to capture data as advertised. Many reported syncing problems between Everhour budget data and Asana tasks, and logging hours in a desktop app. Others complained about disappearing Everhour timers from Asana dashboards. ClickUp integrations disconnect frequently, according to another reviewer. 

What to look for in an Everhour alternative

Choosing the right Everhour alternative depends on your specific needs. But generally, you should consider the following criteria when choosing an Everhour alternative:

• Advanced time-tracking. Timer-based logging requires manual effort and may lead to forgotten hours. Other tools allow users to choose between fully automatic, start/stop time, manual, and offline time entry.
• Billable rates customization. Everhour only supports hourly rates and lets you mark entries as billable/non-billable. Also, you can’t have different currencies in your Team account, which is a big limitation for international companies.
• Productivity analytics. Everhour only provides data on team capacity, project progression, and billing. But it doesn’t indicate how well your teams manage their time. Look for alternatives with more detailed activity reports and extra features for promoting productivity and accountability.
• Scalability. Also, look for a time and activity tracking tool that can scale with your business. It should seamlessly integrate with a wider range of business systems, workflows, and time management strategies.

Start with a free time tracking tool

If Everhour isn’t a match for your business, you have many great alternatives to try.

Toggl Track offers full product functionality, unlike other Everhour alternatives. Seamlessly track time across 100+ business apps using our browser extension, web, desktop, or mobile app without worrying about privacy. 

Our tool measures your actual output instead of just logging time spent in ‘unproductive apps’ or staring at the same document. Customizable reports show where your people’s focus lingers and which tasks need the most hours but bring the least revenue. Analytics provide deeper insights into capacity, resources, and billing.

Create a free account to compare how Toggl Track stacks against Everhour.

More than half of employees report being unproductive at work, which sometimes boils down to the software we use. Yes, even the tools we use to track time.

If you’ve been using DeskTime for time tracking and monitoring team productivity but struggle with random connection loss, slow performance, or disengaged employees, you could be in the market for an alternative.

This article can help you kickstart your research with the 11 best DeskTime alternatives, including how each tool’s functionality, price, and user reviews compare with DeskTime.

The best DeskTime alternatives for accurate time tracking

Tool	G2 Rating	Best for	Lowest Paid Plan
Toggl Track	4.6	Highly accurate time tracking from a simple, intuitive interface, complete with detailed reporting.	From $9/user/month
Clockify	4.5	Simple time tracking and basic employee monitoring and attendance	From $4.99/user/month
Float	4.3	Teams looking to improve their resource planning alongside simple time tracking	From $6/user/month
TimeCamp	4.7	Anybody looking for a close fit to DeskTime with a slant back towards time tracking	From $3.99/user/month
Time Doctor	4.4	Detailed time monitoring and productivity analysis, coupled with scheduling and attendance	From $6,70/user/month
Hubstaff	4.5	Those on a slightly higher budget looking for a time tracking solution with a good all-round feature set	From $7/user/month
RescueTime	4.1	Detailed insights into team time management without invasive employee monitoring	From $12/user/month
Jibble	4.5	Large distributed teams looking to manage clock-in/clock-out time tracking and workforce management	From $2.49/user/month
Everhour	4.7	Optimizing team project delivery, budgeting, and expense management	From $6/user/month
Harvest	4.3	Those requiring a solid time tracker with extra functionality for managing billable hours and creating invoices	From $12/user/month
ManicTime	4.3	Detailed employee monitoring with the option to respect worker privacy	From $7/user/month

Toggl Track

Toggl Track is a highly accurate and automated platform that enables freelancers, small teams, and enterprises to manage their time and work easily. Quickly start and stop timers through native Chrome and mobile apps, with those tracked work hours and hourly rates automatically converting to professional client-ready invoices when you’re ready to get paid.

G2: 4.6 (1,570), Capterra: 4.7 (2,362)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Toggl Track has a powerful reporting and analytics system, particularly for time tracking, billing, and team productivity. • The simple and clean user interface makes for a small learning curve when onboarding to Toggl Track.	• There is limited functionality on the app versus the full web version. • Toggl Track doesn’t have surveillance and employee monitoring features. We firmly believe in trusting employees and respecting their privacy, and we won’t change our mind on that.

Toggl Track is best if you need a highly accurate time tracking platform that’s easy to use and provides detailed, flexible reporting.

Top features

• Multi-platform time tracking from your desktop, phone, or the web, alongside a handy Chrome browser extension to track time from inside other workplace tools.
• Smart integrations with 100+ other platforms such as Slack, OneDrive, and Quickbooks.
• GDPR-compliant with high-grade data security features, such as admin rights and audit checking.
• Tracking reminders, alerts, and required fields cuts down admin work and automates your end-to-end billing workflow.

How Toggl Track compares to DeskTime

• Time tracking: DeskTime’s automatic desktop apps track indiscriminately in the background, whereas Toggl Track uses browser and app-based automatic timers.
• Employee monitoring: DeskTime has a range of employee monitoring features, such as URL tracking and screenshotting. Toggl Track takes a strong stance on employee monitoring and doesn’t include these features.
• Invoicing: DeskTime has no invoicing capabilities. Toggl Track automatically turns your tracked time into professional, client-ready invoices and integrates with platforms such as QuickBooks.

Why customers love it

“Toggl makes it extremely easy for me to track time spent on various tasks/projects/clients. In comparing several time-tracking tools, Toggl ended up being the clear winner.” —A small business user

“Toggl is very simple to use and extremely helpful when invoicing clients. It’s nice to see what employees are working on, where we are on a project’s estimated time, and specific tasks within that project.” —Amanda C., a small business president

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Personal use
Starter	$9 per user/month	Teams with basic time tracking need
Premium	$20 per user/month	Teams needing online and offline functionality for tracking time and profitability
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Enterprise teams needing custom solutions (we can build it for you!)

Clockify

Clockify is one of the world’s most-used time tracking applications, with a strong focus on simple, easy-to-use timesheets. It has desktop, browser, and mobile apps, as well as attendance features to accurately track employee clock-in and clock-out times. Clockify’s forever free policy is great for basic use cases, but don’t worry; premium features are available, too.

G2: 4.5 (170), Capterra: 4.7 (4,905)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• A super simple and clean user interface makes Clockify easy to use. • Real-time insights to monitor billable hours worked versus targets or budgets. • The in-browser tracking extension is easy to install, use, and operate for busy legal professionals.	• Regular reports of system bugs leading to lost time and a drop in productivity. • The support from Clockify can be patchy, with users reporting difficulty in finding knowledge articles and FAQs.

Clockify is great if you need simple time tracking and basic employee monitoring and attendance.

How Clockify compares to DeskTime

• Invoicing: DeskTime has no invoicing capabilities, whereas Clockify has a range of financial features such as invoicing, payroll, and expenses.
• Time tracking: Both tools offer time tracking across several platforms, including Chrome, Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. DeskTime takes a passive background approach, while Clockify’s tracking requires more user engagement.
• Scheduling: Both tools offer great scheduling capabilities, making it easy to plan shifts and resources across different projects. Plus, Clockify includes GPS tracking.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Basic	$4.99 per user/month	Solo users with basic time tracking needs
Standard	$6.99 per user/month	Small teams with more complex time-tracking needs
Pro	$9.99 per user/month	Teams needing very robust project and time tracking
Enterprise	$14.99 per user/month	Complex client projects that require advanced time-tracking features

Float

Float’s mission is to help teams plan and deliver their best work thanks to its complete resource management platform. Alongside their planning and scheduling features, Float’s time tracking syncs heavily with its task management capabilities, with on-the-go hours tracked effortlessly on its mobile app.

G2: 4.2 (1,578), Capterra: 4.5 (1,604)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Makes team planning and resourcing simple and easy thanks to strong workload management features. • Automatic timesheet integrations with platforms such as ServiceNow. • Clean and modern UI makes it easy for teams to adopt and enjoy using day-to-day.	• Time tracking is only available on Pro and Enterprise subscriptions. • Calendar integrations can be a little messy, thanks to errors and out-of-sync data.

Compared to DeskTime, Float is better for teams looking to improve their resource planning alongside simple time tracking.

How Float compares to DeskTime

• Scheduling: Both tools have a range of features for scheduling, but Float is definitely stronger functionally and for detailed reporting.
• Employee monitoring: Float doesn’t offer screenshots, URL tracking, and app monitoring, so DeskTime users may struggle if they need those use cases.
• Integrations: Both tools do well with integrations to common SaaS platforms, including Google Calendar, Trello, and Jira.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Starter	$6 per user/month	Solo users or small teams working on unlimited projects and capacity planning guest users
Pro	$10 per user/month	Small teams needing more robust time tracking features
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Large teams that need priority support and enhanced SLAs

TimeCamp

TimeCamp’s motto of ‘time is a resource’ sums up how it helps businesses make the most of every hour of the day. With a mix of automatic time tracking, attendance, project management, profitability, and monitoring features, it’s a good all-rounder that matches DeskTime in lots of different areas.

G2: 4.7 (318), Capterra: 4.7 (598)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Detailed insights into productivity and time tracking to monitor work time and performance. • Lots of integrations with other collaboration and project management tools, such as Asana, Jira, and Trello. • Strong billing and invoicing capabilities for turning time management into cash in the bank.	• Users report a weak offering on mobile apps that reduces flexibility and app usage. • At times, users report logging hours is a bit clunky, leading to a loss in productivity.

TimeCamp is great for those looking for a close fit to DeskTime with a slant back towards time tracking.

How TimeCamp compares to DeskTime

• Activity tracking: Both DeskTime and TimeCamp have in-depth employee activity tracking, with features such as website monitoring and productivity analysis.
• Time tracking: Both tools leverage background time tracking, with manual options tracking features to enhance the accuracy of time entries if required.
• Interface: TimeCamp definitely wins when it comes to a user-friendly interface with a far cleaner and more modern look and feel.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0 per user	Freelancers
Starter	$3.99 per user	Small teams and start-ups
Premium	$6.99 per user	Growing teams
Ultimate	$10.99 per user	Mid-sized teams
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Large enterprises

Time Doctor

If you’re looking to track productivity, optimize workflows, and reduce cost, Time Doctor’s focus on performance and profits could align with your way of thinking. Combining time tracking with other employee monitoring and productivity analysis tools, the platform gives a deep understanding of how team members use their time, enabling you to optimize your workflow for success.

G2: 4.4 (285), Capterra: 4.5/5 (530)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• User-controlled, silent, and offline time tracking makes it easy to monitor remote teams. • Client login access creates transparency for customers and fee-paying clients. • A range of interfaces, including Zendesk, Wrike, and Redmine.	• Some of Time Doctor’s features, such as taking screenshots without the user knowing, may cross the line from employee monitoring to breaching employee privacy. • Limited mobile functionality makes it difficult to track employee time on the move.

Compared to DeskTime, Time Doctor is better suited for users looking for detailed time monitoring and productivity analysis coupled with scheduling and attendance.

How Time Doctor compares to DeskTime

• Activity tracking: DeskTime and Time Doctor have many of the same productivity tracking features, including screen recording and inactivity alerts.
• Scheduling: While both double up as schedule management software, DeskTime is slightly stronger when it comes to task management.
• Reporting: With a focus on productivity, both have strong reporting functionalities, with real-time notifications and the ability to export to formats such as CSV and PDF.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Basic	$8 per user	Small teams and start-ups
Standard	$14 per user	Mid-sized teams with complex tasks
Premium	$20 per user	Large hybrid teams
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Large multinationals

Hubstaff

Hubstaff is a bit of a jack of all trades, with features for time tracking, productivity, payroll, invoicing, and attendance. It’s also one of the most well-connected platforms, with compatibility across Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome or integrations with some of the biggest tools on the market. It’s a strong option if you’re looking for a bit of everything.

G2: 4.4 (1,040), Capterra: 4.6 (1,489)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Strong workforce management capabilities, including scheduling, leave management, and detailed timesheets. • Detailed productivity insights make it easy to identify efficiency improvements. • 35+ native integrations, including Trello, Microsoft Outlook, and Jira.	• Some users have concerns about privacy, especially for remote employees who may end up micromanaged. • The user interface is a little dated, making it harder to onboard and work with day-to-day.

Hubstaff is better for those on a slightly higher budget who are looking for a time tracking solution with a good all-around feature set.

How Hubstaff compares to DeskTime

• User interface: Both tools have a slightly dated user interface. While in most situations, this would be considered a negative, it may make the transition easier for existing DeskTime users.
• Invoicing & billing: Hubstaff is streets ahead when it comes to invoicing, expenses, and billing, making it a complete end-to-end solution.
• Employee monitoring: Both have similar monitoring features, such as screenshots, URL tracking, and app monitoring, providing continuity if you transfer from DeskTime to Hubstaff.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Freelancers
Starter	$7 per user/month	Start-ups
Grow	$9 per user/month	Fast-growing small teams
Team	$12 per user/month	Mid to large teams with complex needs
Enterprise	Contact Hubstaff for prices, starting at $25 per user/month	Enterprise organizations

RescueTime

As the name suggests, RescueTime is for teams who want to maximize their time. The platform focuses on boosting productivity by tracking screen time, setting ‘focus time’ goals, and providing detailed productivity insights. You won’t find features for billing or invoicing here, though.

G2: 4.1 (90), Capterra: 4.6 (139)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• RescueTime has a focus on team productivity, with detailed insights into your ways of working and suggestions to optimize your time. • Notifications and focus time goals gamify productivity, making it rewarding for users to be more productive. • Offline mode means teams can keep tracking when they’re not on WiFi.	• Users sometimes report connection loss, meaning certain activities aren’t tracked. • The user interface is a little dated compared to competitors.

RescueTime is a great option for anybody needing really detailed insights into team time management without invasive employee monitoring.

How RescueTime compares to DeskTime

• Reporting: Both platforms offer detailed insight into productivity and time management, helping managers better coordinate their teams.
• User interface: Both tools have a slightly dated user interface. While in most situations, this would be considered a negative, it may make the transition easier for existing DeskTime users.
• Employee monitoring: DeskTime has far stronger employee monitoring tools, such as URL tracking and screenshots. If you need these features, RescueTime may come up short.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Lite	$0 per user	First-time time tracking tool users
Premium	$12 per user	Teams with tight deadlines

Jibble

Jibble is all about accurate attendance management, helping large distributed teams clock in and clock out wherever they are. Unlike some other time trackers on this list, Jibble doesn’t use start/stop timers but uses a clock in/out approach paired with holiday, overtime, sickness, and payroll functionalities.

G2: 4.5 (60), Capterra: 4.9 (1,179)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• A strong free plan lets teams get on board with Jibble for a low cost. •Offline mode means users can clock in and clock out even when they’re offline. •Strong integrations with other platforms such as ADP, BambooHR, and Intercom.	• No employee monitoring features such as URL tracking or screenshots for those who want to closely monitor productivity. • Users say reporting could be improved to be more insightful.

Jibble is a good option for large distributed teams looking to manage clock-in/clock-out time tracking and workforce management.

How Jibble compares to DeskTime

• Scheduling: Both tools offer great scheduling capabilities, making it easy to plan shifts and manage employees start and end times.
• Absences: Both tools are great at managing workforce absence, aligning with payroll tools to manage salaries and overtime.
• Employee monitoring: Jibble isn’t as strong when it comes to employee task monitoring, but it does include GPS tracking for workers on the move.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	Free	Unlimited time tracking for an unlimited number of users
Premium	$2.29 per user/month	Smaller teams expanding into absence management
Unlimited	$4.59 per user/month	Project-based tracking and personalized support
Enterprise	$5.49 per user/month	500+ sized teams that need integrations and SSO

Everhour

If you want to move away from tracking productivity and towards tracking projects, Everhour could be the best tool for you. As a time tracker x project management hybrid, it combines automatic and manual time tracking options across web and mobile devices with detailed project planning and delivery features. Throw in budgeting, expense management, and invoicing, and it’s a great end-to-end project delivery tool.

G2: 4.7 (174) Capterra: 4.7 (425)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Simple time tracking across browsers, mobile devices, and inside commonly used apps. • Lots of SaaS integrations, including Asana, ClickUp, Jira, and monday.com. • Detailed data on project budgets, costs, and expenses enable teams to quote accurately.	• Users say reporting lacks depth and could benefit from stronger visualizations. • Limited customization can make it hard for teams to onboard.

Choose Everhour if your biggest pain point is optimizing your team’s project delivery, budgeting, and expense management.

How Everhour compares to DeskTime

• Employee monitoring: Harvest doesn’t include any employing monitoring features; instead, it focuses on time tracking, invoicing, and client billing.
• Reporting: Both platforms offer detailed insights into team time and productivity, which helps small and large teams improve their working methods.
• Invoicing: Harvest is very strong when it comes to invoicing and payments, so if you’re looking to boost this area, it’s worth switching from DeskTime.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0 per user	Freelancers and small teams
Team	$10 per user	Mid to large teams with complex time-tracking requirements.

Harvest

One of the market’s most well-known time tracking tools, Harvest combines automated tracking, productivity reporting, and system-to-system integrations to boost any team’s efficiency. The simple UI makes for a quick learning curve, with desktop and mobile apps ensuring teams can continue tracking on the move.

G2: 4.3 (806), Capterra: 4.6 (595)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Clean UI makes it easy for any team to come on board and start time tracking straight away. • Integrates well with payment tools such as PayPal and Stripe and project management tools such as Asana. • As a time tracker at heart, there’s lots of customization available for hourly billing rates. Automatic time mapping to invoicing and payment features is also available.	• Limited ability to customize the system makes it difficult to drive team optimization. • Limited reporting features make it difficult to get detailed time reports and business-critical insights.

Overall, Harvest is a solid time tracker with extra functionality for managing billable hours and creating invoices.

How Harvest compares to DeskTime

• Employee monitoring: Harvest doesn’t include any employing monitoring features, instead focusing on time tracking, invoicing, and client billing.
• Reporting: Both platforms offer detailed insights into team time and productivity which helps small and large team improve their ways of working.
• Invoicing: Harvest is very strong when it comes to invoicing and payments, so if you’re looking to boost this area, it’s definitely worth switching from DeskTime.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0 per user	Students and solo users
Pro	$12 per user	Teams of all sizes
Premium	$17.50 per user	Enterprise, larger teams

ManicTime

ManicTime focuses on keeping track of your time so you can focus on your business. Much like DeskTime, ManicTime’s automatic background tracking allows you to monitor applications, take screenshots, and track the GPS location of your staff to keep tabs on their productivity. It also has offline tracking, detailed reporting, and comprehensive attendance tracking.

G2: 4.3 (13), Capterra: 4.5 (22)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
• Automatic background time tracking thanks to desktop Windows, Mac, and Linux apps, with iOS and Android mobile options, too. • Strong privacy features to only track at certain times and limit the data shared with managers or system admins. • It provides detailed insights into how teams work and when they’re most productive.	• No free plan, even for reduced functionality. • Some users report bugs that impact the ability to track time consistently throughout the day.

ManicTime is a good time tracking alternative to DeskTime for those requiring detailed employee monitoring while respecting employee privacy.

How ManicTime compares to DeskTime

• Employee monitoring: Both have similar monitoring features, such as screenshots, URL tracking, and app monitoring, but ManicTime also includes GPS tracking.
• Reporting: Both platforms offer detailed insights and reporting, with a strong focus on productivity and attendance.
• Privacy: While both platforms emphasize employee monitoring, ManicTime offers a range of customization options to monitor productivity while respecting employee privacy.

Plan	Cost	Best for
Standard	$10 per user/month	Full time tracking functionalities on three devices per user
Ultimate	$13 per user/month	More devices (up to five devices per user) and unlimited cloud-based screenshot storage

How we chose this list of DeskTime alternatives

DeskTime is a good tool used by small and large teams across the globe, so alternatives need to stack up well. When putting together the alternatives, we considered the following factors for each tool:

• Time tracking: At their core, each of our chosen tools tracks employee time, whether manually, automatically, or silently in the background.
• Ease of use: We’ve only chosen tools we know are usable and well-tested across the market.
• Integrations: No modern-day software tool can work in isolation, so all the tools in our list have integrations with other well-known products.
• Pricing: Budget plays a big part in any buying decision, so we’ve chosen tools across the pricing spectrum, including free and premium plans.
• User reviews: Each tool includes references to real user reviews and the overall review scores from G2 and Capterra.
• Personal experience: We’ve tried many of these tools ourselves, testing them against common time-tracking use cases.

Why do users switch from DeskTime?

As we mentioned in our intro, DeskTime is great for time tracking and employee monitoring, with a range of automatic performance-monitoring features, detailed reporting, and smart integrations.

But it isn’t perfect. Here’s why some users decide to make the switch: 

• Cost-to-value: While DeskTime offers a free plan for single users and freelancers, team packages start at $7 per user/mo, which is expensive compared to competitors.
• Customer support: Some users say it takes too long to get a response (days or weeks), and it isn’t helpful when they do. 
• Reporting: Other users found project reports lacking detail. For example, the reports did not include total work hours or hours worked by each team member.
• Surveillance: The activity tracking tool’s screenshot and URL tracking features can intrude on employees’ privacy and may harm a trust-based company culture. 
• Performance: DeskTime’s UI feels outdated and difficult to navigate, leading to reduced performance and reports of bugs.

What to look for in a DeskTime alternative

Every user is different and looks for specific features and functionalities in their time tracking and employee productivity systems. That said, several key criteria pop up more often than others, so make sure to consider these when making the switch: 

• Customizable time tracking features: Look for DeskTime alternatives with flexible time tracking capabilities. This can include automated timesheets, manual time entries, real-time project and task management, billable hours, and attendance tracking. 
• User-friendly UI: Choose employee time tracking software with an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. It’ll improve your time management strategy and streamline user onboarding.
• Scalability: Look for a platform that scales as your business grows, adapting to your specific needs and workflows. Specifically, always go for a cloud-based solution that allows you to add or remove users as you need.
• Mobile-friendliness: To ensure functionality for remote teams on the move, consider time-tracking tools with mobile apps and responsive web interfaces.
• Good pricing options: Find a tool that strikes the right balance between its cost and offers, either with a monthly per-user fee or an upfront subscription. 

Get started with a free time tracking software

While all the alternatives in our roundup are great tools, if you’re looking for an awesome time tracking tool, we think Toggl Track is by far the best. While we don’t offer employee monitoring features such as URL and app tracking, we do offer automatic time tracking, 100+ integrations, invoicing, and detailed time management and productivity analytics.

Don’t believe we’re the best? Here’s what Greg Martel, COO and co-founder of Newlogic, had to say after coming on board with Toggl Track:

“It’s been quite easy to get people to use Toggl Track. What makes it really smooth and seamless is that it’s very straightforward to use. So even for people who have never used time tracking software before, it’s extremely easy and intuitive, as well as non-invasive. That’s why there was no resistance when we introduced the tool to our team.”

Sounds good, right? Sign up for a free Toggl Track account and see for yourself how we make time tracking and improving productivity a walk in the park. No credit card required!