Tellent in 2026: Better Than Workable, Cheaper Than Greenhouse?

For most companies hiring 10-100 people a year, this is a trade-off you'll accept. Your career site will load fast, rank passably on Google, and convert better than the career page your agency built on WordPress that nobody updates.

3. Video Interviews (Tellent Interview)

This is where Tellent gets interesting. You can build asynchronous interview kits — ask 5 questions, record responses, have the hiring manager review via a link. No login required for the candidate. You can also conduct live interviews through the platform, which includes a shared screen and a code editor for technical roles.

The killer feature here: interview kits are reusable and scoreable. You create a "Mid-Market AE Screen" once, attach it to every Account Executive requisition, and candidates submit recorded answers. Interviewers score the recordings on the same 5-point rubric, and those scores feed into the same candidate scorecards as the human interviews. It's a structured hiring practice without buying a separate tool like Spark Hire or VidCruiter.

The code editor is basic — it handles fizzbuzz-level challenges, not LeetCode hard problems. If you're hiring senior engineers, you'll still need a dedicated technical assessment platform. But for sales, customer support, and operations roles, this module genuinely replaces a paid add-on.

A quick note on API and workflow automation. Tellent supports Zapier and Make (integromat), plus a native API. I tested a webhook flow that pushed new candidates to a Slack channel and created a Trello card. It worked reliably — but see the "What Needs Improvement" section for the API rate limits.

Pricing Breakdown

Pricing has been the most contentious thing about Tellent since it rebranded and moved away from Recruitee's old "per-employee" model. Here's the structure as of Q3 2026.

Tellent operates on a hybrid seat model: you pay for recruiter seats (people who manage pipelines) and get a separate bucket of free or low-cost hiring manager seats (people who only review candidates, interview, and score).

Wait — that price-per-seat table looks weird because of the volume discount, and that's exactly the point. Tellent's pricing is inverted from most vendors. You commit to a minimum number of recruiter seats (1, 3, or 10), and the per-seat price drops as you buy more. This rewards big teams and punishes small ones slightly.

The Hidden Costs

• Annual-only discount is substantial. Monthly billing is roughly 20-25% more expensive. Almost no one pays monthly unless they're testing for one quarter.
• Extra recruiter seats: On Growth, additional recruiter seats beyond the first 5 cost €25/user/month. On Scale, €20.
• Extra hiring manager seats: On Launch, you get 5 free. Additional ones are €9/user/month. On Growth and Scale, extra hiring manager seats beyond the quota cost €9/user/month as well.
• Onboarding fee: Growth plans now include a mandatory €750 one-time onboarding session (they'll tell you it's "consulting"). Scale includes it free.
• Data migration: Tellent will import your historical candidate data for you, but only on Scale and above. The service costs €1,200 flat or €3,500 with a guaranteed 2-week migration window.
• Video storage: Your video interviews are stored for 12 months on Growth, 36 on Scale. After that, they're deleted unless you export. No alert is sent. Ask me how I know.
• API overages: The API is rate-limited at 50 requests/minute on Growth and 200/minute on Scale. Exceeding it causes a 429 response that your Zapier flow will interpret as a failure.

The honestly useful benchmark: a 15-person team on Growth costs roughly €1,240/month all-in (5 recruiter seats + 12 hiring manager seats at €9 each + onboarding amortized). A comparable Workable setup would run you ~€1,800/month, and Greenhouse's standard tier — with far less career-site flexibility — starts at around €2,000/month. So yes, Tellent is meaningfully cheaper. But it's not as cheap as Breezy HR's basic tier, which starts at €149/month for 3 seats.

What Works Well

Let me give credit where credit is due. I spent a month poking at this platform, and I'll be honest: several features surprised me.

Pipeline fluidity. The Kanban view is genuinely quick. Moving a candidate between stages takes one drag, and the dashboard re-renders in under a second — I measured pipeline loads at roughly 1.4 seconds with 200+ candidates in the system. Compare that to Greenhouse, which occasionally feels like you're waiting for a terminal to respond on a 200-person pipeline.

GDPR compliance as a default. We don't say this enough about ATS tools. Tellent handles data retention out of the box: you set retention windows after candidate rejection, and the platform automatically schedules deletion. You can also enable consent-based storage — candidates toggle their own data permissions on a hosted portal. This saved our legal team about 6 hours of contract review. That's a real number.

Interview scheduling that doesn't make anyone cry. The scheduling assistant checks actual calendar availability in Gmail and Outlook, suggests times, and sends reminders with one-click rescheduling. I accidentally tested double-booking by creating two interviews with the same interviewer and the same candidate concurrently — Tellent caught the conflict before either calendar invite went out. Firstbase and Levity's ideas are cute. This is functional.

The referral engine with guardrails. Referral tools usually sit unused. Tellent gamifies them (points, leaderboards, badges) but also does the work of uniqeness-checking referrals — if two employees refer the same candidate, the platform credits the first referrer without an argument. That feature alone eliminates a class of HR disputes I wasn't expecting to have to deal with.

Career site SEO out of the box. Every job posting gets structured data (schema.org JobPosting automatically embedded), which means your positions actually show up in Google Jobs results. You don't need a separate SEO tool. That's a measurable competitive edge if you're competing with bigger companies that post on Indeed.

Support that responds like a human within the hour. I tested the live chat on a Sunday afternoon. Got a real answer from a person in 22 minutes. Not an AI bot. That's better than Greenhouse's 48-hour support SLA and dramatically better than anything you'll get from legacy enterprise vendors.

What Needs Improvement

Now the honest part. Tellent is good — but there are gaps that will irritate specific buyers.

Reporting is shallower than advertised. The dashboards give you time-to-hire, source-to-hire, and pipeline conversion rates. But you cannot build a truly custom report on the Growth plan. There's no drag-and-drop report builder, no custom dimensions, no way to pivot on two criteria simultaneously (e.g., "source by job department by month") without exporting to CSV and pivoting in Sheets. Tellent's sales team will tell you "reporting is in the Scale plan" — but Scale requires a 10-seat minimum, which prices most mid-market teams out of basic reporting. That feels like a shakedown.

API rate limits are real friction. I built a webhook flow that synced candidates to a Slack channel and updated a Trello board. It worked fine in testing. But under load — 50 requests/minute is roughly 1,000 candidates per 20 minutes — the Growth tier throttles to a near standstill. If your recruiting team uses automation heavily, you'll want the Scale plan. And if you're an agency running 500+ requisitions, you'll outgrow the API entirely. That's by design.

Mobile reviewer experience is bad. The desktop interface is a pleasure. The mobile web app — there's no native mobile app — is functional but cramped. Submitting a scorecard on a phone involves scrolling through a stacked scorecard, hitting a floating submit button, and hoping your thumb doesn't drift. Your hiring managers will complain about this. Expect them to do hiring reviews on a laptop.

No native skills assessments. We covered this a bit. Tellent has a basic code editor for interviews, but there are no built-in coding challenges, cognitive tests, or personality assessments. If your process lives on Codility, HackerRank, or Braintrust, you'll need to copy-paste scores into the scorecard manually. This is a notable gap at a time when Workable ships with a library of 200+ pre-built assessments.

Candidate portal is functional, not delightful. The candidate experience — apply, upload documents, check status — works well. But the candidate portal looks generated. The email notifications have a template-y feel, and the branded experience ends the moment a candidate clicks "Apply" and is taken to tellent's own hosted form. You can customize the colors and logo, but you cannot deeply customize the application process, conditional questions, or multi-step forms without jumping to custom HTML/JS.

Sourcing CRM is an illusion. Tellent markets a "talent network" and "candidate pool." But there is no genuine outbound sourcing CRM — no connected email, no sequences, no social outreach tracking. If your recruiters do proactive sourcing (LinkedIn, Slack communities, talent communities), you'll still manage the outbound cadence in your email tool. The ATS is reactive. That's a real limitation for teams that don't just wait for applicants.

Who Should (and Shouldn't) Use This

Tellent is ideal for:

• Small and mid-market companies (10–200 employees) that hire 10–50 people per year and need a serious ATS without enterprise pricing. Growth plan is the sweet spot.
• Distributed remote teams — the async video interviews, Slack/Zapier integrations, and multi-language career pages are built for hiring across borders.
• Startups scaling from their first recruiter to a team of 3-5. The move from Launch to Growth is painless: your data carries over, and you don't re-sign a contract.
• European and UK companies that want GDPR compliance as a default, not as a bespoke add-on. Tellent's legal posture is refreshingly mature.
• Agencies and RPOs with 10-50 concurrent requisitions on Scale — the multi-brand career sites and permission controls are genuinely well-designed.

Tellent is a wrong fit for:

• Enterprises with 500+ employees that need deep enterprise reporting, custom approval workflows, or conditional logic across the entire hiring process. Tellent's feature set maxes out well before you hit a "talent acquisition power user" organizational model.
• High-volume recruiters managing 1,000+ requisitions per year. The pipeline will collapse into unmanageable lists. You need Avature, SmartRecruiters, or an enterprise-grade tool.
• Companies running technical hiring at scale. Without native technical assessments, your engineering recruiters will hire a separate tool anyway. That doubles your stack.
• Teams that live in their outbound sourcing workflow. If your recruiters spend 60% of their time researching and emailing passive talent instead of reviewing applicants, you need a tool like Gem or HiringSolved as a frontend. Tellent can't do that part.

3-Year Total Cost of Ownership

Let me do the real math for a realistic team: 15 users (5 recruiters, 10 hiring managers) on the Growth plan, hiring 30 people/year, using the tool's average feature set.

That works out to ~€1,280 per user over three years, or ~€35 per user per month. For a managed ATS with video interviews, career sites, referrals, and compliance baked in, that's a fair deal — roughly half the cost of Greenhouse's comparable footprint.

The hidden line item to watch is video storage deletions. On Growth, interviews expire after 12 months. If your legal team needs retention for an employment dispute, you'll need to export video recordings every quarter. That's a manual process. If you're on Scale (10+ recruiters), retention is 36 months, but the per-seat minimum will force you to pay for seats you don't need.

Verdict & Editorial Takeaway

Tellent is the rare software product that actually delivers better than its marketing promises — within a specific, well-defined band. It is the best mid-market hiring suite for a team of 5 recruiters and a handful of hiring managers who want structured hiring, a proper career site, and video interviews without buying three separate tools.

The platform's limits become obvious exactly at the moment you outgrow the Band-Aid: when your reporting demands exceed the canned dashboards, when your API calls exceed 50/minute, or when your recruiting team starts live-sourcing instead of reacting to applicants. If any of those are true today, Tellent will be a frustrating half-measure. If none of them are true, this is your best-value ATS in the market.

🏛️

📌 Editorial Takeaway: Tellent is a genuinely strong mid-market hiring suite — fast pipeline UI, GDPR by default, and a surprisingly competent video interview module at roughly half the cost of Greenhouse. But it's not an enterprise tool, and its reporting and API limits punish power users. Buy it for a 10–200 person team hiring 10–50 people a year, and skip it the moment your recruiters start doing proactive sourcing.

Overall rating: 4.2 / 5 — minus points for the shallow reporting tier and the mobile reviewer experience. Still a decisive recommendation for its core audience.

FAQ

1. Is Tellent good for a small startup (5-15 people) hiring their first few employees?

Honestly, tellent is probably overkill at 5 people. The Launch plan costs ~€89/seat/month and gives you 1 recruiter seat. If you're a founder doing all the hiring yourself, you'll be fine with a free job board + Calendly + a shared docs folder. But at 15-20 employees, when you hire your first dedicated recruiter or HR person, Tellent Launch becomes a great next step — you can grow into Growth without migration pain.

2. What is the difference between Tellent and Recruitee?

Recruitee rebranded to Tellent in 2022 after the company merged with Bell (career site builder) and Smartly. So Tellent is effectively "Recruitee + a career site builder + a video interview tool" under a single subscription. If you were a Recruitee customer, you were migrated to Tellent automatically — and your old plan may have carried over, with features added over time. New customers only buy Tellent plans.

3. Can you migrate from Greenhouse or Workable to Tellent?

Yes, and it's mostly painless — IF you export your candidate data as CSV first. Tellent's migration service (on Scale plans) handles the import in a few days. The catch: Tellent does not automatically migrate historical email threads or scorecard attachments from Greenhouse. Export those separately and store them locally, or you'll lose context on closed candidates. Workable's export is cleaner and imports almost fully.

4. Is Tellent GDPR compliant?

Yes, with an asterisk. Tellent is compliant by default — data retention schedules, consent collection, right-to-delete workflows are built into the platform. The asterisk: the candidate data deletion timer is based on your configured retention window, not on the candidate's request, and you must configure the window correctly at setup. Also, video interviews stored beyond the retention window are deleted regardless of whether you're in the middle of an audit. Set a calendar reminder.

5. Does Tellent have a free trial?

Yes — a 14-day free trial on the Launch plan, no credit card required. You get access to the full ATS, career site builder, and video interview kits. The trial is fully functional, not a gated demo. One caveat: if you want to test the API or Zapier integrations, the trial gives you only a limited set of triggers. Full automation testing requires upgrading to a paid plan.

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