Toggl Hire vs. Lever

The traditional hiring model is outdated and inefficient. It’s time-consuming, filled with repetitive manual tasks, and overly reliant on exaggerated resumes and “gut feel” to steer decisions. Savvy hiring managers know that there’s a (much!) better way.

Choosing the right recruitment software can make all the difference between a stellar hiring process and a subpar one for both you and your candidates. Toggl Hire and Lever are two of the best-in-class full-cycle hiring platforms designed to streamline your efforts and save your organization critical time and money.

Both assist recruiters with candidate relationship management, as well as screening, interviewing, and reporting. Boiled down, Toggl Hire emphasizes aptitude and data-driven decisions, while Lever focuses on automation and analytics for building candidate relationships at scale.

If you’ve narrowed it down to these two, you’ll need to understand more about each of their own unique strengths to make your selection. So, let’s see how they compare.

Toggl Hire wins over Lever because only Toggl Hire:

• Lets you shortlist candidates based on skill with one click
• Uses objective tools to help reduce bias instead of self-reported proficiencies
• Allows for asynchronous video interviews
• Lets you assign homework tasks to high-potential candidates
• Is super-intuitive to use, built with busy hiring managers in mind

What is Toggl Hire?

Toggl Hire is a full-cycle hiring platform that leans on skills tests to help you identify and shortlist your candidates in one click.

But it doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve found your diamonds in the rough, you can send them a longer homework assignment, invite them for an async video interview, and manage the full pipeline seamlessly.

Here are some of Toggl Hire’s key features users love most.

Talent pipeline

Easily drag and drop candidates along your customizable candidate pipeline. Toggl Hire is big on customization, offering more options and flexibility than most other applicant tracking software.

Stack different stages, like qualifying questions, video interviews, and more, into a pipeline that’s purpose-built for your hiring needs.

Candidate management

Get access to an organized and centralized database of current and past candidates. Easily add, update, or remove candidates as needed, streamlining your recruitment process and simplifying your candidate records.

Collaborative hiring tools

Toggl Hire uses dynamic hiring feeds and built-in notifications to keep hiring managers, recruiters, and others connected. Collaborate with your team via notes and tags, and keep candidates up to speed with built-in communication functionality.

Expert-crafted skills tests

Toggl Hire has hands-down the most robust and extensive question library on the full-cycle recruitment software market. All the questions are expertly-crafted and peer reviewed by industry professionals, so you can be sure your skills tests are of the highest quality and accuracy.

Async video interviews

Interview multiple candidates simultaneously and at your own pace with asynchronous video interviews. Spend less time coordinating schedules and more time focusing on finding the perfect fit for your job opening.

Candidate experience

4 out of 5 candidates love Toggl Hire, which means it’s one of the best hiring platforms for companies looking to enhance the candidate experience.

Thanks to automatic candidate feedback on skills tests, email integrations, and quick communication filters, you can start building your employer brand with ease.

What is Lever?

Lever is an applicant tracking and candidate management software designed for enterprise level businesses. It focuses heavily on providing robust automations and analytics that help you keep track of your recruiting targets and impact your hiring efforts have on overall business goals.

With Lever, candidates can submit their resumes for application and schedule their own interviews. On your end, you can automate the hiring process with triggers and workflows, visualize your pipeline with custom dashboards, and even gain key DEI insights from the data already at your fingertips.

Here are some of Lever’s key features:

• Candidate screening and evaluation: You can set up triggers and workflows in Lever to automatically move candidates through a pipeline based on their answers to different questions on the initial application form.
• High-volume hiring automations: Lever offers a high-volume hiring feature, their Fast Resume Review, to help you hire faster at scale. By setting up triggers, you can build an automation that lets you handle manual tasks like archiving, tagging, emailing, and advancing candidates.
• Reporting & analytics: See the overview of all your historical recruitment data in one place. Lever’s native talent analytics feature, Visual Insights, provides actionable data on recruiting performance and hiring metrics. It’s great for optimizing your talent acquisition strategy based on past performance.
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI): Lever offers a few different DEI tools, such as a dedicated dashboard for insights into your candidates’ backgrounds and an equal employment opportunity survey that helps you gather demographic data at scale.
• Candidate nurturing: Taking a proactive approach to candidates relationship management, Lever boasts built-in email templates for nurturing your talent. These can be customized with employer branding and personalized messaging to keep candidates engaged at every step of the hiring process.
• Integrations: Lever integrates with hundreds of other tools, such as BambooHR, LinkedIn Recruiter, Slack, Zoom, Indeed, and more. It’s designed to fit seamlessly into your recruitment ecosystem and help you get more done in less time.

Toggl Hire is best for…

• Evaluating competence based on skills tests
• Shortlisting candidates with one click based on objective performance
• Stellar candidate experience
• Hiring managers juggling hiring and day-to-day work
• Intuitive, user-friendly interface and design
• Reducing hiring bias through objective tests, not self-reported metrics

Lever is best for…

• Full-cycle hiring data visualization
• Keeping on top of hiring metrics
• Gaining data-based insights to improve DEI
• Monitoring the impact of recruitment on the bottom line
• Enterprise-level businesses with recruitment teams
• Those looking for high-volume hiring

You deserve more from your recruitment software

The biggest difference between Toggl Hire and Lever is the level of objective data collection.

Toggl Hire emphasizes skills-based hiring, putting candidates to the literal test and evaluating their knowledge against technical questions crafted by subject-matter experts. Based on that score, you can create a shortlist and decide who to move on to the next stage.

While Lever offers similar functionality, the data these automations rely on is self-reported. For example, you could set up an automation like: “continue with candidate if ‘Spanish fluency’ is marked as ‘Fluent’ in the [application] form.” Self-reported data isn’t as objective as performance-based answers and can leave your recruitment process open to insincerity or bias.

Toggl Hire also allows users to create customized hiring workflows by stacking skills tests, async video interviews, homework tasks, and regular interview notes under one position. This flexibility helps in tailoring the hiring process to specific job roles and company needs while evaluating candidates from various angles quickly and fairly.

Lever doesn’t seem to be quite as intuitive to use. Some users, including experienced hiring managers and recruiters, report struggling to learn how to use it. For example, setting up pipeline automations can be tricky, especially if they don’t end up working as expected. If something goes wrong, it can be very hard to figure out what or why.

Finally, while both tools offer extensive integration capabilities, Lever’s integration with DocuSign seems to be unpopular with its users.

Toggl Hire vs. Lever pricing

Toggl Hire offers a tiered subscription model. Starting on the free plan unlocks unlimited job openings for up to 3 candidates. This jumps to 20 candidates with the $20/month Basic plan and 45 candidates with the $75/month Premium plan. For full-scale customizable features and unlimited candidates, you’re looking at $469/month.

Lever’s website doesn’t offer transparent pricing, instead prompting you to request a free quote. Their pricing model is more reminiscent of client relationship management software like Hubspot, with two base packages (LeverTRM or Lever TRM Premium) and several add-ons you can bolt-on to your plan. Estimates place the price range between $3,500/year for 1–10 employees and $140,000/year for >1,000 employee firms.

The verdict: What makes Toggl Hire the best Lever alternative to manage full-cycle hiring

Overall, Lever and Toggl Hire serve two different types of businesses.

Lever is best suited to larger, more traditional companies with established recruitment teams, while Toggl Hire is designed for smaller and leaner businesses that might not have their own dedicated recruitment department yet.

There are a few essential other features that make Toggl Hire stand out, too, including:

• Robust skills tests: Toggl Hire offers thousands of skill-based questions crafted by industry leaders and vetted by professionals in their fields. Access skills tests questions written by an actual SEO expert or Java developer to ensure your candidates know their stuff.
• Objective candidate shortlists: The software lets you screen and evaluate candidates based on their actual performance, not what they say about themselves. This is often easier for candidates, as it’s a better alternative to having them submit CVs (which everybody hates).
• Intuitive interface: The platform is constantly evolving to become more inviting and intuitive, making it easier to use for hiring mangers who have to juggle recruitment alongside their day-to-day work and don’t have weeks to spend onboarding or figuring out clunky tech.
• Reduce bias natively: Toggl Hire is data-first by design. We belive in helping you hire the best person for the job, and to do that, we know you’ll need to focus on what matters. Our skills tests and homework assignments help you easily hone in on standout candidates.
• Friendlier pricing: Get more bang for your buck. Start with a free plan and grow to a very accessible $20/month plan.

Try Toggl Hire for free

Sign up for a free Toggl Hire account today and experience hiring so smooth it’s almost…fun.