SmartRecruiters

SmartRecruiters is hiring software that now belongs to SAP. Its AI assistant is called Winston. Winston Match scores the people who apply. Winston Screen asks them questions and ranks the answers. Only one starting price is public. Everything else is quoted by headcount.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 14 Oct 2026 Last updated 14 Oct 2026

SmartRecruiters scores and ranks applicants, and you carry the legal risk

In one line

SmartRecruiters is an applicant tracking system with AI scoring and AI screening built in. Your contract makes you responsible for every AI result.

Buy it if

You hire in volume for your own company. You want scoring and screening inside the system that holds your applications. You run SAP SuccessFactors. You are happy to pay by employee count.

Do not buy it if

Your legal team will not accept AI terms that put the risk on you. You need a price before you talk to sales. You recruit for other companies, because SmartRecruiters does not currently support agencies.

Price

The Essential plan starts at $14,995. The Professional, High Volume and Complete plans are quoted on request. Fees follow your total employee count.

Winston Match scores every applicant and Winston Screen ranks their answers

SmartRecruiters is an applicant tracking system. That is the software where applications, interviews and offers are held. It adds AI on top under the name Winston. In June 2025 SmartRecruiters launched Winston Match, Winston Screen and Winston Companion. SAP bought the company in September 2025. SmartRecruiters plans to run as a standalone business inside SAP for the foreseeable future.

Winston Match reviews incoming applications and shows the top candidates first. It scores every applicant on a four-star scale. Separate models score work history, skills, seniority and education. SmartRecruiters combines them into one weighted score. The score shows how likely the person is to match the job. The lowest grade means a poor match that is probably not worth acting on.

Winston Screen can ask its questions while a person applies or after they have applied. It sends job-specific questions and collects the answers. It then ranks candidates by those answers and builds a shortlist. It also collects licences, shift availability and certifications before any interview. Your team can use it only for suggested questions. Or your team can let it run the whole screening step without a person setting up each one.

Two more parts sit around them. Winston Chat talks to candidates by text message, WhatsApp or web. It recommends jobs, sends reminders, helps people apply, screens candidates and books interviews. Setting it up means adding a link to your careers page. Winston Companion works inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, text message and WhatsApp. It prompts feedback, suggests next steps and summarises candidates.

Admins can also create rules that reject applicants on up to 10 custom conditions at each hiring step. Under the AI terms, the AI features are designed to assist and not to replace human oversight. Winston does not decide on its own who receives a job offer. Decide who in your team reads the ranking before anyone is turned away.

Candidate rankings and screening answers may be processed as candidate data. The company a candidate applies to owns the candidate’s data. Requests from candidates go to that company, and SmartRecruiters forwards any it receives. Your company answers within one month and does not charge. Name the person in HR who answers candidates’ requests about their data.

Our guide to AI sourcing and screening shows how other products in the market handle the same job.

What customers gained

Adam Reynolds, Head of Talent at Frasers Group, saw time to hire fall from 23 days to 9 days. Helene Perdue, a former talent director at Asbury Communities, cut time to fill by 33%. Asbury is a healthcare organisation in North America with 2,700 employees.

Winston Match saves 36% of screening time. Recruiters rate the value of its match scores 4.5 out of 5. Winston Screen shortlists five times faster. It also cuts manual screening time by 75% and unqualified interviews by 50%. Winston Chat brings 35% more finished applications on mobile.

More than 4,000 organisations and 140 million candidates use SmartRecruiters. Amazon, H&M, Domino’s, Frasers Group, Avery Dennison and Qantas are among its customers. Ask for a reference at your own size.

Scores come with reasons, and the price per employee stays fixed

Every score comes with a reason

Winston Match explains each applicant’s score in words. Recruiters can show separate scores for skills, experience and education in the application list. A hiring manager who asks why someone ranked low gets an answer.

Your team sets the rules before the AI runs

In Winston Screen, your team gives weights to the must-haves and the nice-to-haves. The AI writes the screening questions and the answers it will accept. Your team can review, edit or remove any of them before they go live. SmartRecruiters has an AI Control Center. It gives your team a view of what Winston sees, learns and acts on, and control over it.

The contract fixes the price per employee and the uptime

The unit price per employee in your order form cannot rise during the term. SmartRecruiters commits to 99.9% availability each year. If it falls short, you can ask in writing for a payment back. The payment is 10% of the last twelve months of fees for each 1% below the target.

You own what the AI produces from your data

Under the AI terms you remain the sole owner of your content and your candidates’ content. That includes any output the AI creates from it.

Outsiders check its security

SmartRecruiters holds ISO 27001, an international security standard. It also has a SOC 2 audit every year. SOC 2 is an independent check of a company’s security controls. Your data is hosted in Frankfurt unless your order form names another country.

The contract puts the AI risk, the data use and the growth cost on you

SmartRecruiters can train its AI on anonymised data

The AI terms let SmartRecruiters use anonymised or pseudonymised data to develop, train and improve its AI. It owns the output created from anonymised data. Ask your legal team whether your privacy notice tells candidates their data may be used this way.

You carry the legal risk of every AI result

Under the AI terms results may be wrong, incomplete or inaccurate. You decide whether a result is suitable and you alone answer for relying on it. You also answer alone for following the law. The terms allow for you using features that count as high risk. High risk is the EU AI Act’s label for AI that filters applications or judges candidates. In that case you take on the duties of a deployer, the employer that uses the AI.

Fees cannot drop and are not refunded

Fees are fixed for the term and cannot go down. Paid fees are not refunded and unpaid fees fall due if you leave early. The main exception is SmartRecruiters failing to fix a serious breach. Your total liability to each other is capped at one year of subscription fees.

Your bill rises if your headcount grows past the order form

Fees depend on your total number of employees. If you grow past the number in your order form, tell SmartRecruiters around each anniversary. You then pay more from that point on. SmartRecruiters may check your headcount against public information.

SAP customers face gaps in early releases

The native link with SAP SuccessFactors started in March 2026. A second phase was planned for about June 2026. In early releases, candidate attachments do not transfer to Employee Central, which is SAP’s core employee record. SmartRecruiters is not moving active recruiting records out of the older SuccessFactors Recruiting module. Those records stay where they are.

It suits companies hiring in volume, especially those on SAP

You hire for your own company, in volume

The product suits organisations with at least 50 employees and many open roles at once. It suits corporate hiring. It does not currently support recruitment agencies.

You already run SAP SuccessFactors

SmartRecruiters for SAP SuccessFactors builds on and replaces the older SuccessFactors Recruiting module. User, setup and position data move from SuccessFactors into SmartRecruiters. After an offer is accepted, hire details go back to Employee Central, SAP’s core employee record, or to Onboarding. You can buy it without any other SAP product, with a minimum order of 250 users.

You hire in many languages

SmartRecruiters offers 37 languages for candidates and 31 for hiring teams.

You use Workday, ADP or UKG for HR records

SmartRecruiters has ready-made links to Workday, ADP, UKG and SAP SuccessFactors. It also links to Zoom, LinkedIn and Docusign.

Plans start at $14,995 and the rest depends on your headcount

SmartRecruiters has four plans. Essential starts at $14,995. Professional, High Volume and Complete are priced on request. The AI Talent Matching Engine sits in the Professional plan. AI-powered Candidate Screening sits in the High Volume plan.

Subscription fees follow your total employee count. SAP sells SmartRecruiters for SAP SuccessFactors by quote with no public price. SAP’s contracts for SmartRecruiters for SAP SuccessFactors run one to three years and renew automatically. With SmartRecruiters directly, your order form sets the term and the renewal. In 2024 UAB Ignitis grupės paslaugų centras, a buyer in the EU, awarded SmartRecruiters a contract. Its value was EUR 300,000 for rental and development of the system. SmartRecruiters also offers pricing based on actual use and the value delivered. Ask what that means in your order form.

Leaving takes planning. After the contract ends, you get free API access for 30 days. Use it to take out your content and your candidates’ content. An API is a link that lets your IT team pull the data out. After that, SmartRecruiters removes access and deletes your data. The API also has a report download that returns a spreadsheet file. Either side can end the agreement for a serious breach that stays unfixed after 30 days’ notice. The governing law depends on which SmartRecruiters company signs your order form. It is Delaware, German, French or English law.

You could also find and screen people with agents built on your own systems. We have mapped what that looks like. The HR Agent Map

Eight questions to put to SmartRecruiters

Which plan includes Winston Match and Winston Screen, and what does it cost per employee at our headcount? Good answer: A written price for each product on our own order form.
Has the second phase of the SuccessFactors link shipped, and what does it add? Good answer: A release date and a list of what changed.
Local Law 144 is a New York City law. It requires a yearly independent bias audit of hiring software that scores or ranks candidates. Can we read your latest audit? Good answer: The full audit report, with the date and the auditor’s name.
Can we opt out of having our data used to train your AI? Good answer: Yes, in the order form, and for data you already hold.
Who on our side can set Winston Screen to run fully automated, and does the setting leave a record? Good answer: Named admin roles and a log of every change.
What do candidates see about the AI, and how do they ask for a person to look at their application? Good answer: A clear notice, plus a named route to a human reviewer.
Which country holds our candidates’ data, and which outside suppliers touch it? Good answer: A named country and a full supplier list.
When the contract ends, how do we take out all our candidate data? Good answer: A file format and a time window longer than 30 days.

Alternatives to SmartRecruiters

If SmartRecruiters comes off your shortlist, look at Workable, Greenhouse, Workday Recruiting and iCIMS. Buying no AI at all is the fifth route.

Workable’s AI has a public price list. Its Workable Agent charges per action. Evaluating a candidate costs 1 unit. Finding a person who has not applied costs 2 and a candidate chat costs 10. Bundles run from 5,000 units for $600 to 50,000 for $4,750, and every paid account starts with 3,000 free. That lets you work out a bill before a sales call.

Greenhouse sells Real Talent as an add-on. Talent Matching is part of that add-on and is available on the Core, Plus and Pro plans. Greenhouse invites buyers to request Real Talent pricing through a form. Workday sells its AI agents on usage. Customers buy a yearly block of “Flex Credits” that agents use up. Workday also gives a free yearly allowance based on company size. iCIMS’s Sourcing Agent has been available since 1 September 2026.

Buying no AI is a fair answer if your team can read every application today. SmartRecruiters is built for teams with more applications than their recruiters can read.

More in this guide

The AI sourcing and screening guide
Compare the 41 with their own page what each of the 41 products with its own page here does, what it costs, what it can decide alone and which have an outside bias audit.
Mid-market companies which AI sourcing and screening tools suit a company of 200 to 2,000 people, the prices you can see, how the bill grows and what to ask before signing.
Enterprise companies which platforms replace an applicant tracking system and which add to one, what they cost, how the contracts end and the hiring rules by place.
Hiring in India what Indeed charges for search in India and how Naukri sells Resdex, which products host data or launched in India, what India’s data protection law asks of employers and ten questions to ask sellers.
High-volume hiring which AI screening products can reject applicants with no person involved, how they text and call, and what they cost at volume.