Best Resume Parser Review 2021

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Resume parsing software is a key element to help your business find the right talent. In this review, we will address what resume parsing software is, why you should use it, and how this type of software works.

Resume parsing software is a type of resume reading and review software that analyzes the contents of resumes to provide hiring managers with actionable information on candidates. Resumes can be parsed and evaluated in several ways: by evaluating key words, identifying skills and expertise, and tracking years of experience.

Existing resume parsing software options typically use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read text within your resumes, which are then parsed for keywords and phrases to calculate match rates.

After walking you through the basics, we will introduce you to five of the best resume parsing software in 2021.

What’s on This Page

What is resume parsing?

Have you heard that recruiters spend just 7 seconds on each resume? Even 7 seconds may be too much in some larger corporations, regardless of how big your recruiting team is, where one position receives tens of thousands of applicants.

This is where resume parsers come in handy: they are computer programs that automate the gathering, storage, and categorization of job seeker resumes. These applications generally can scan many resumes, evaluate them, and extract keywords and skill set to identify outstanding candidates. Resume parsing aids recruiters and hiring managers in finding job seekers who meet their needs.

Resumes are a struggle to read, due to the many formatting, logos, and spacing styles available. However, resume parsers have become quite sophisticated nowadays. To develop an algorithm for improved data identification and extraction, many organizations use various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep learning, and machine learning. Many people have no trouble reading resumes like a human being!

Oftentimes, resume parsing tools are part of a bigger Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) platform that follows the entire hiring process.

Why use resume parsing tools?

If you’ve been on the hiring end of things, you’d understand that probably not all candidates that apply for your open roles are qualified. That means you’d be wasting a lot of precious time if you manually read through every single resume that comes through. Now, resume parsers have proved to work exponentially quicker than human resume processing, converting hours of labor into seconds. Some good resume parsers can even replicate human accuracy at a rate of 95%. 

Not only that, but once resume parsers have extracted key information from qualified resumes, they can sort the information into easily searchable categories. Tools like this can greatly streamline your hiring processes. 

How does resume parsing work?

Resume parsers are very powerful tools, yet the process is simple. You can upload all the applications you’ve received for a given position into the parsing software, then the software will start scanning each document and extracting all the information that is important for the recruiter or hiring manager. Important details typically include job skills, work experience, education credentials, certifications, achievements, contact information, and desired salary. 

Resumes that don’t contain information relevant to the job description are likely weeded out during the parsing process — resume parsers are great time-savers!

Top 5 Rated Products

Zoho Recruit

Best for streamlined end-to-end hiring processes

Zoho has been around since 1996 and is a multinational technology company that makes popular web-based business tools. Zoho Recruit is one of these tools — it’s a cloud-based applicant tracking system that helps staffing agencies and corporate hiring resource teams find the right talent. Zoho Recruit, like the rest of the Zoho tools, is a fun and intuitive solution for all stages of recruiting — namely sourcing, tracking, and hiring. Let’s take a closer look at Zoho Recruit’s most-loved features:

Fast parsing and sourcing

Zoho Recruit’s parsing tool makes it easy for you to identify qualified candidates from both emails and websites. The tool is great at extracting data, matching semantics, as well as corroborating with data from social media platforms.

One-click job posting

Not only is Zoho Recruit’s dashboard visually appealing, but it also allows hiring managers and staffing agencies to post jobs across multiple platforms (e.g. job boards, websites, social networks) with only one click. When applicants apply, their Linkedin information will be auto-filled to simplify the job application process.

Comprehensive screening

In order to make sure you’re only spending time on qualified candidates, Zoho Recruit allows you to create pre-screening assessments to measure candidate skills before interviewing. Their Source Boosters feature also allows you to instantly search candidates in the database.

Time-saving automation

A lot of processes are repetitive when it comes to hiring (e.g. sending follow-up emails to candidates after an interview), and Zoho Recruit is there to help you spend less time on them. With this software, you can also digitize offer letters and convert new hires to employees seamlessly. It really takes care of the end-to-end of a recruitment lifecycle!

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StackCompare.com

4.65 (Aggregate Score)


Capterra Icon

Capterra.com

4.4 (815 user reviews)


G2 Logo

G2.com

4.4 (1181 user reviews)

FreshTeam

Best for growing businesses

Founded in 2010, Freshteam is a one-stop shop for human resources activities and has been trusted by over 7,000 companies, including big names like SAP, Nissan, and JCDecaux. Freshteam’s capabilities help you automate recruiter workload, streamline the onboarding process, organize data better, and manage time off easier. Now, let’s take a closer look at what makes the platform so popular:

75% less time spent on resume screening

With Freshteam, every resume you upload to the ATS is automatically parsed and populated in the candidate profile. On their profile, you’ll find their contact info, interaction history, interview scores, feedback from the hiring team, and notes — all in one place! To organize resumes and profiles even better, use keyword tags so you can find and group similar candidates. If a candidate doesn’t seem to be the right fit right now but could be hired in the future, archive them so they remain on your system.

100+ built-in job description templates

To attract great talent, you need attractive job listings. From Freshteam’s ATS, you can create and manage your job listings quickly by using their library of over 100 built-in job description templates. Choose to post internally on your company portal or externally on job boards. You can also customize the application form so not only do your candidates feel more special, but you can also get to know them better and separate the great from the good from the get-go.

20% faster hiring time

Different roles require different interview screening stages. Configure all the workflow stages in your software so it’s clear how candidates should be moving from stage to stage. All the automated processes can help you hire 20% faster than usual!

Powerful integrations

Freshteam understands that they’re not the only tool you use to recruit — they’re well integrated with popular virtual meeting tools like Skype and Google Hangouts so you can conduct your interviews seamlessly with candidates from different time zones. Other popular integrations to use include pre-assessment testing software and external job boards.

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StackCompare.com

4.73 (Aggregate Score)


Capterra Icon

Capterra.com

4.3 (130 user reviews)


G2 Logo

G2.com

4.6 (148 user reviews)

Affinda

Best for matching resumes

Founded in Melbourne, Australia, Affinda is all you need when it comes to building, parsing, and extracting resumes. It has processed 20 million documents so far and helped reduce 95% in document processing time. Let’s see how their machine learning technology is helping the recruitment industry save time and energy in an otherwise repetitive process:

Powerful AI-based parser

With Affinda, you can parse 25 resumes in a single bulk in 56 different languages in seconds. Imagine doing that without AI help — this could easily take hours!

Extracting over 100 fields per resume

Thanks to Affinda’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, the software can also extract more than 100 fields from each resume and organize them into searchable file formats such as Excel, JSON, or XML. These searchable details include candidate names, contact details, past work experience, employers, job titles, locations, education, degree, certifications, and skills taken from a database of 3,000 soft and hard skills.

Matching resumes with job openings

Not only can Affinda extract details from resumes, but it can also match resumes with your current job openings so you don’t waste time going through candidates that aren’t even qualified for the job. Specify target current and past job titles, years of experience, location, and skills, and Affinda will filter through the database to show you candidates that qualify for your roles — in order of relevance. You can choose to only show candidates who have not applied for other roles in your company as well.

Excellent customer service

Affinda’s product speaks for itself with great response time, but when you need to speak with a team member about more complex issues, rest assured that their team is ready and available to answer your questions and is very easy to work with. Their team is located on 4 different continents so the time difference should be the least of your concerns.

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StackCompare.com

4.6 (Aggregate Score)


Capterra Icon

Capterra.com

5.0 (3 user reviews)


G2 Logo

G2.com

5.0 (7 user reviews)

Hiretual

Best for recruitment email marketing

Founded in 2015, Hiretual is a robust talent recruitment platform that is used by over 80,000 recruiters from more than 5,000 leading teams, with the biggest names being Deloitte, Nike, and Visa. It contains over 750 million candidate profiles and has helped companies spend 50% less time on sourcing. Let’s dig deeper into how it works:

Intelligently grouped candidate profiles

Sometimes, you might need to use multiple criteria to search for the right candidate. With Hiretual, you can find them using comprehensive candidate views and insights from diversity groups, papers, and patents. For example, you not only can find a software engineer from their GitHub profile, but also a software engineer with a diverse cultural background.

30+ ATS/CRM integrations

Hiretual allows you to keep using other tools you love while you hire. Some popular apps include Greenhouse and Workday for ATS, Google and Outlook for calendar scheduling, Wedge for video interviewing, and ResumeLibrary.com for resume searching.

Engaging email marketing solution

Once you’ve integrated Hiretual with your email provider, you can create templates for emails that you frequently send out. You can also set up recurring touchpoints at a time, set reminders for future touchpoints, bulk email to up to 200 candidates, and avoid duplicate emails from team members. All this effort will make your candidates feel cared for and want to keep working with your recruiting team.

Get insights on your talent pool:  Before you start your hiring activities, you need to have a plan. Hiretual can help you understand your talent pool with insights on top locations, popular skills, available languages, and diverse representation. With all that updated talent market data, you can then plan targeted campus recruitment campaigns and events

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StackCompare.com

4.27 (Aggregate Score)


Capterra Icon

Capterra.com

4.7 (187 user reviews)


G2 Logo

G2.com

4.8 (86 user reviews)

Sovren Resume Parser

Best for parsing resumes

Sovren Resume Parser is part of the Sovren Group founded in 1996 and is typically used within more robust human resource software and on recruitment websites to extract, match, and sort resumes. The company strives to use AI to understand candidates as humans and not a string of keywords. Let’s take a closer look at why Sovren might just be the most powerful resume parser out there:

Over 53 languages available

Sovren can detect and operate in more than 53 languages and 43 locales. Dialects are no big deals for Sovren — this is key to hiring diverse talent for your company!

Guaranteed 100% uptime

This may sound like a big promise, but Sovren has been able to keep it — the platform has never been down for maintenance and probably won’t be in the future either thanks to Amazon AWS, their cloud provider.

Secure data privacy

Sovren claims to never store personal data, which means neither the software algorithm nor recruiters are biased. Recruiters will only be able to see anonymized data, making the hiring process much more objective and fair.

Impressive 406ms parse time

Sovren happily boasts its ability to parse a million resumes in just a matter of hours. To be more exact, they can parse a resume in less than 500 milliseconds, which is 5 to 20 times faster than competitors!

24,000 skills in built-in taxonomy

With Sovren, you can choose how many details you want out of each resume. Feel free to enable or disable sub-parsers like patents and security clearances. With different jobs come different skill sets. Sovren has an impressive built-in taxonomy that contains 24,000 skills — the largest in the industry — so be confident to find candidates to fill even the rarest roles

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StackCompare.com

4.75 (Aggregate Score)


Capterra Icon

Capterra.com

4. (2 user reviews)


G2 Logo

G2.com

4.0 (1 user reviews)

Our Rating Process

There are many quality resume parsers and applicant tracking software programs out there, but we’re here to help you pick the right one for your hiring needs. We have assessed 5 products based on their abilities to parse resumes, sort, and filter applicant data, create job posts and track applicants. Each of these criteria will receive a score out of 5 points so you know where these providers stand among their competitors.  

Functionality
Sorting Efficiency
Applicant Tracking
Application Monitoring
Functionality

How fast can a resume parsing tool parse resume? Can it read texts of different fonts and sizes? Can it read images? Can it read sentences that are oddly spaced?

Sorting Efficiency

Recruiters want to know the strengths and specific skill sets that each candidate has. Resumes are not only important at the beginning of the hiring process but also later when a company has a different role open and wants to look for candidates with similar skills.

Applicant Tracking

We mentioned that resume parsers are oftentimes part of an applicant tracking system (ATS). But to start receiving resumes, you first need a job post. The ability to create job posts means this software is a one-stop-shop where you can attract candidates, check if they’re qualified, and schedule interviews with them — all in one place.

Application Monitoring

Resume parsing is only the beginning of the hiring process. Usually, candidates must go through multiple rounds of interviews before they receive an offer. And during each interview, interviewers need a place to type their notes. Therefore, a good ATS should provide a centralized space for note taking as well.

Product Features

Zoho Recruit

$25
/ month

  • Post jobs across platforms with one click
  • Automate repetitive hiring processes
  • Easy screening and sourcing


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FreshTeam

$59
/ month

  • Shorter time-to-hire
  • Powerful recruitment automation
  • Reduced recruiting costs by 50%


Sign Up

Affinda

$59
/ month

  • Parse up to 25 resumes in one bulk
  • Powerful natural language processing capabilities
  • Responsive customer service


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Hiretual

$49-$149
/ month

  • •Cloud-based eSignature solution
  • Bulk email to up to 200 candidates
  • 30+ ATS integrations


Sign Up

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Frequently Asked Questions


A lot of people! Recruiters, hiring managers, staffing agencies, corporate HR teams — to name a few. Resume parsing is an important part of identifying qualified candidates and eliminating those that don’t meet the job requirements as of now. These tools can significantly help reduce time spent on manually looking at resumes, which in turn streamlines the entire hiring process. You can now hire more talent in less time!

There are many benefits to using resume parsing tools. First, it saves recruiters a lot of time from reading resumes and identifying good candidates. Not only do recruiters have to look through hundreds or even thousands of resumes for a job opening, but they also have to go through lots of resumes that aren’t a match, so a resume parser is very helpful in this regard. Second, parsed resumes can be sorted into different categories. So, depending on your company needs, you can easily filter them with keywords and find candidates that can fill other roles.

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