How to Build a Recruitment App in 2026: Cost, Timeline, and Best Practices

Recruitment faces several challenges today. These are skill gaps, competition for top talent, an increasing number of applications, and the introduction of AI, which poses both opportunities and risks. With these uncertainties, HR professionals get more workload and need to find new ways to manage the flood of applications from potential candidates. This is when technologies come into place. Recruitment apps give a helping hand in leading candidates through the hiring process. This brings positive results for employing companies and recruiters.

If you already have an idea for a recruitment app, you are at the right place. This article highlights trends and features to consider when you build a recruitment app. Also, you will learn how much time and cost you need for that, so you can plan your resources. Let’s get started.

Recruitment today: the main trends

The recent global shifts have led to significant changes in the recruitment industry that continues to evolve. According to a survey, it is projected that the recruitment solution market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 5.85% from 2026 to 2032, reaching $4,220.51 million by 2032.

With talent shortages that reached 74% in 2025, recruiters need to be more creative in finding the right candidates. So, organizations change their approaches to looking for talent and the hiring process.

Many companies shifted to online recruitment processes, such as posting vacancies, checking applicants’ status, and holding interviews. Recruitment companies and departments invest more in software to streamline operational processes. Also, recruitment apps help in performing administrative tasks and tracking candidates’ engagement. Recent changes include the transformation in technologies and the adoption of AI. These points contribute to recruitment market growth.

Recruitment software types overview

Recruitment apps are often an extension of a full web version of a recruitment product. So, before diving into recruitment app peculiarities, let’s consider what types of software recruiters use today that are supplemented with a mobile app version.

Applicant tracking system (ATS). This system helps in the human resources, recruitment, and hiring process. As a survey by JobScan shows, 97.8% of recruiters from companies included in the Fortune 500 list of the most successful companies use an ATS. The most prominent ATSs are Oracle Taleo and Greenhouse.

HR information system (HRIS). It is a system that helps collect and keep data on the organization’s employees. Also, you can store information on the current employees and their qualification improvements.

Candidate relationship management. This recruitment management software helps recruiters make the best candidate experience during the entire hiring process. The recruitment software keeps a list of candidates who can fill vacancies once openings appear. This talent pipeline includes full-time candidates, hourly candidates, and remote workers.

Job boards and aggregators. These are platforms where employers advertise job vacancies to job seekers. Such websites allow recruiters to keep job listings in one place and receive applications from candidates. The prominent job board platforms are Glassdoor, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter. By the way, according to Indeed’s data, mobile app users get hired 30% faster.

Video interviewing tools. This recruitment software helps hold video interviews with candidates. Thanks to these tools, recruiters can streamline the recruiting process, avoiding inefficiencies. Video interviewing tools help recruiters hold live video conversations with candidates. Also, the tools help check recorded responses from job seekers.

According to G2, the top tools in this category include Willo, Spark Hire, and InCruiter. For example, Willo offers optimization and hiring efficiency for the world’s fastest-growing businesses. It boasts accelerating time-to-hire by up to 30% thanks to top-notch hiring functionality.

How you can make money with a recruitment app

According to Appcast, 69 to 86% of job applications were completed via mobile devices. So, creating a mobile application for recruitment is a profitable deal. How can you monetize it? Let’s see the opportunities below.

Charging employers

Resume access. Recruiters or employers can access candidates’ resumes to reach a wider talent pool in a shorter time with a mobile app. An additional fee can be charged for sorting resumes by specific requirements.

Job posting. Listing a job in an app ensures that more potential candidates will see the suggestion and respond to the job posting. You can collect a flat fee per listing or set a recurring fee for a fixed number of listings.

Featured listings. Recruiters and companies can pay for promoting their job listing, putting them above the offers from other companies. Thus, featured listings can be visible to more prospective job seekers in recruitment apps.

Charging job seekers

View job details. Job seekers can view the job descriptions for free. But you can charge them for viewing detailed information about job openings or companies. Also, job-seeking subscribers can get updates on new jobs and recruiters' details via the mobile app.

Featured resumes. A resume listed in the first lines increases the chances of being noticed by the right company or recruiter. So, you can charge job seekers who want to show their resumes first in recruitment apps.

Creating professional resumes. The mobile app can include additional features, such as creating a resume or analyzing an existing one. The company offering a recruitment app connects to professional resume writers. Thus, the company gets revenue for every referred candidate.

Below, we summarized monetization approaches that you can apply to your recruitment app.

Essential features for your recruitment app

Recruitment apps significantly help HR professionals to do their tasks. When you plan how to build a recruitment app, choosing the right features is crucial. They ensure that recruiters and candidates can easily post and find job openings and contact each other through recruitment apps.

For example, the recruitment industry uses chatbots to interact with candidates. According to Jobvite, even in 2022, chatbots were helpful, and 63% of candidates who used them found that chatbots improved the recruiting process.

In 2025, chatbot functionality improved even more thanks to smart LLM and ML algorithms alongside the rise of AI assistants. In fact, 89% of recruiters who improve their processes with AI use it frequently or very frequently.

Another case of how the recruitment industry wins from technologies is Talview, an AI recruitment solution. Its integration with the LinkedIn Talent Hub applicant tracking system allows companies to discover, recruit, and manage applicants from a single source.

Let’s see what features your recruitment app should include to help recruiters and job seekers connect better.

General features for a recruitment app

These features are necessary for an admin as an owner of a recruitment app, for candidates and recruiters. Thus, they need to have tools for app moderation. Let’s see in detail what features allow for that.

Administration dashboard with real-time analytics. For managing app-related data and collecting data on users’ journey through the recruitment website. These include users’ daily activities, new and regular users, bounce rate, sources of new-coming users, session length, free and paid users.

Also, this feature allows admins to analyze the job-searching approaches and see their dynamics. For example, with analytics in the Workday app, you can see where the hiring process stagnates, so you can improve it.

Candidate and recruiter profile verification. For checking the candidate and recruiter profiles with the verification process. This helps exclude fake jobs, companies, and users in recruitment apps.

Job ad management. For managing ads running on the recruiting app. This tool assists in validating ads for users and controlling where ads run. This feature also gives insights into how your ads perform.

Payment options. For choosing payment plans. Recruiters and candidates can add, remove, or switch payment plans as they need in a desktop or mobile application.

The list above covers the basic recruitment app features. The functionality is chosen depending on the particular needs that a certain recruitment app covers.

Best features for candidates

Profile management. For updating, adding, and deleting candidates’ profile information. Candidate can edit profile, social media account details, update their personal info, training, skills, workplaces, and referrals. They also can specify personal job preferences, such as remote work.

Resume form or upload. For uploading candidates’ resumes from a recruiting app. It can be created as a form with fields to fill in or as an option for uploading a resume document.

For example, we included this feature in the job match system created for a client from the Netherlands. The function allows you to upload resume or highlight your skills in the system. You can specify the desired salary, job preferences, and extras, such as working on weekends. The image below presents the feature view.

Job filters. For viewing open positions matching candidates’ skills and experience. Candidates can prioritize or select jobs fitting their professional knowledge via recruitment apps.

Job notifications. For learning about job or recruiters’ updates. Candidates can view the positions matching their experience or if a recruiter wants to contact them via desktop or mobile application.

Save jobs. For saving jobs serving candidates’ preferences. A candidate can bookmark jobs and view them later in recruitment apps.

Related reading: How Much Does It Cost to Build a Website Like Indeed

Best features for recruiters

In recruitment apps, HR professionals can create and manage the company’s profile. They can add, delete or update data on the company’s working conditions, benefits, and location. Thus, candidates get all the necessary information and can decide whether they will apply for a job in the company. Let’s see what other essential features your app needs to streamline recruiters' work.

Job posting. For placing new vacancies. Job postings include information on the opening, such as required skills, duties, and a company overview. Recruitment apps enhance this feature thanks to AI technologies. For example, with TurboHire, you can match candidates and jobs with an accuracy of 98%, thanks to AI algorithms. This eliminates errors and speeds up candidate search after posting jobs through the platform on multiple sources.

Candidate search. For filtering candidates via a recruiting app. The options to filter candidates can include education, skills, and location. Also, recruiters can add custom indicators, such as advanced training courses and preferred working schedules. For example, Jobvite enhanced this feature with a task planner that helps HR specialists plan their interactions with candidates.

Source: Jobvite

Resume download. For downloading candidates’ resumes. Thus, recruiters can review resumes later.

Resume filtering. For filtering candidates with the most relevant skills. This feature streamlines candidates’ selection for recruiters in recruitment apps. For example, MokaHr allows HR specialists to filter resumes with AI shortlisting.

Talent pool management. For handling the talent pipeline. This feature allows recruiters group candidates with diversity, equity, and inclusiveness in mind. For example, Fetcher provides recruiters with the stats on candidate engagement and diversity metrics.

Employee profile tracking. For tracking employees’ onboarding and progress. For example, Oracle Taleo, a cloud-based solution, allows HR professionals to view profiles and onboarding and working progress of employees.

Collecting insights from social media. For gathering additional information on candidates. For example, the recruiting software Manatal has an AI engine that searches over 20 social media platforms to enrich candidates’ profiles.

Recruiting analytics. For discovering the stats of the recruiting process. Recruitment apps show the stats for better performance in the recruitment process. For example, Ashby provides recruiters with in-depth analytics of their hiring processes and stats.

Additional features for a recruitment app

If your app needs more reliability and robustness, you can enrich it with enhanced functionality. Let’s see below what they are.

Electronic signature. An electronic signature or e-signature is a digital form of signature proving the intent of signing electronic documents. With this feature, you can streamline offer approvals wherever your candidates are. It is nice to have the e-signature built into your app. So, recruiters can work with just your app without the need to switch.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning. These technologies can help find the best candidate match for a job, parse resumes according to certain criteria or find candidates’ background information from social media. So, integrating them into your recruitment app will help recruiters deal with massive data from candidates. For example, the Humanly AI-powered tool helps automate screening conversations and schedule subsequent routines for recruiters.

Referrals. This feature allows recruiters to receive information on talented people that employees can recommend. With the app, you can provide recruiters with data on referrals. Recruiters can save the data and use it later if they need it.

Best match automation. With this tool, recruiters can find the best candidates quickly. With this tool, recruiters can find the best candidates quickly. The software processes data on many candidates and finds the best fit for an opening. For example, Zoho Recruit offers Zia to match candidates’ qualifications against job requirements and simplify candidate search for recruiters.

Responsive customer support. If you want to make your recruitment app customer-friendly, try adding this feature to your app. For example, the Trakstar Hire app supports its customers in resolving technical issues. Thus, customers can get answers to their exceptional questions by using the recruitment app.

Data security. Candidates provide recruiters with much information, including sensitive data. Your app must be reliable enough to protect such data against breaches and hacks. Follow the best standards, such as the GDPR and CCPA standards for processing personal information, and use the services of servers with the relevant security certification. Recent updates in responsible AI use, such as the EU AI Act, the Colorado AI Act, and regional laws and guidelines, must also be considered when building a recruitment app.

Check for job accessibility. We should be able to apply for a job without bias to our gender, age, beliefs, or abilities. So, adding a relevant feature will ensure that the employer follows the standards of diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. With this feature, Trakstar Hire allows recruiters to send questionnaires to candidates to check their experience with employers. The questionnaires are anonymous.

Overview of the recruitment platform by Codica

Our team has extensive experience in creating custom solutions. Thanks to them, our clients reach their business goals and delight their target audiences. A recruitment platform is such a project. First, it started as a PWA (progressive web app) that we created to help our client’s business thrive.

Progressive web app development services are an option when you look for flexible recruitment software. Specialists in the field consider PWA as a cost-effective and user-friendly solution for business needs with the mobile-first approach in mind. Progressive web apps provide users with an identical to mobile native apps' feel and functionality.

Got an idea for a recruitment app?

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RecruitEverywhere background and features

Intelligence Group, a firm in the Netherlands, has been specializing in labor market research for more than 15 years. They decided to launch their own recruitment app product. Together, we managed to develop a recruitment app, RecruitEverywhere. It is an automated recruiting platform that allows hiring talent globally.

Watch a short video below about how this app looked in its first version as a PWA.

When creating the app, we thought of its convenience for users. The interface should be easy to use, and the backend part should be reliable and stable. During the recruitment app development, we included functionality for companies and HR specialists that post vacancies. Thus, HR professionals can indicate the necessary aspects for a job posting, view stats, order translations, and manage profile via the user interface.

RecruitAgent.ai: New version, new features

As technologies evolve, our client decided to fully rebuild the solution from a PWA to a SaaS-based and AI-powered platform. It has gained new features that boost the solution’s performance and candidate coverage. Known as RecruitAgent.ai now, it uses the capabilities of AI and enhanced semantic search to help recruiters create compliant job posts in a few clicks. The recruiter pastes the requirements, and the AI chatbot with the OpenAI integration compiles the job post.

For this, the solution uses a comprehensive chat where recruiters can specify all the necessary information. The assistant asks you vacancy-related questions and provides options or waits for your descriptions and explanations. So, you can name the job title, qualifications, job tasks, company’s benefits, and more. Below, you can see the final look at the job posting you get.

The platform also provides comprehensive support for translations, tone-of-voice selection for listings, and white-label features. So, a company using the platform can choose their writing and color styles, add their logo and other representations of their brand and generate the relevant PDF document with the job ad.

What’s more, the platform allows you to reach out to candidates on prominent job boards. Once you click publish, the system will automatically send the job posting to integrated vacancy platforms. The relevant APIs help recruiters get the best options among the job boards based on job title, region, and sector.

The tool also helps recruiters understand if finding a candidate for a particular opening is difficult. The platform analyzes recruitment feasibility and scarcity for the job and shows the results in a colored table. The darker the color, the harder it is to find the right candidate.

Thanks to comprehensive, powerful integrations, this solution provides recruiters with all-in-one support for job ad creation. It reduces their work from hours to minutes, making the process easy and pleasant. To ensure this, our specialists worked on the solution, introducing a well-thought-out design, both for desktop and mobile versions.

Starting from prototypes, we considered all possible use cases for recruiters, from job ad creation to its publishing. The design encompasses the Media Advice and Checkout flows, so recruiters can see the media and discounts available to them. In colors, violet hues dominate to highlight the modern and creative sense of innovation of the platform.

How to build a recruitment app

When creating solutions for our clients, we follow the practices proven by time. That is why we rely on the lean startup methodology. It suggests that you should start a solution as a minimum viable product and test it with users. With MVP app development services, you can enhance your product based on the feedback you received from early adopters.

When building a recruitment app, following the right approach in software development is also crucial. This defines the end result. Several steps help deliver the solution that users will enjoy. These steps are as follows.

Project discovery

This is a preliminary stage before the app development. The product discovery phase helps to define the project scope and requirements. This is a crucial step as it facilitates planning resources. Project discovery helps foresee the project risks before the development process starts.

At Codica, we help our clients collect the product discovery deliverables, such as scope, timeline, and costs. We also outline the necessary functionality in the prototypes. So, you will have a draft of how your app will look and work at this preliminary stage.

Thanks to project discovery, you can validate your idea, estimate risks, and monitor competitors. So, you verify the business potential of your project at the earliest stage.

Check the video below on which documents you will receive after project discovery sessions at Codica.

UI/UX design

At Codica, the UI/UX design services start during product discovery. Designers research and create wireframes to give a preliminary draft of the future solution. Based on these drafts and discussions with the client, designers create clickable prototypes and agree on them with the client and the team.

After that, we improve the agreed prototypes. We refine user roles and flows, which is how users with different roles move through the app. Designers align the prototypes with technical requirements to ensure that there will be no bugs in the final solution.

Finally, designers enrich prototypes by adding visuals. So, the app gets an appealing look thanks to colors, fonts, icons, and fields. The final design also gets approval from the client.

Related reading: Minimum Viable Product Design: How to Build a Successful MVP

Development

After the preparatory work is done, your development team can move to custom software development. The app development team should follow best practices when building a product. These include using proven technologies, test-driven development, and the right team collaboration approach. So, project managers, designers, and app developers work together to deliver the best result.

At Codica, we follow an Agile approach and test the solutions at the earliest stages. Moving in sprints, we discuss our progress within the team and with the client every 1-2 weeks or as needed. Thus, app developers help clients avoid costly mistakes and ensure an optimized development process.

You may also like: Agile vs Waterfall Methodology: What Is the Best for Your Project

Technologies used at Codica for recruitment app development

When it comes to choosing technologies for a project, we select those that help us deliver the best user experience. Thanks to the technologies selected, the RecruitEverywhere recruiting software is intuitive and easy to use. It helps recruiters and companies to reach a wide pool of candidates. Let’s see what tools to select when you decide on how to build a recruitment app.

Technologies and infrastructure

React. This JavaScript library is a helpful tool for creating user interfaces.

Next.js. The framework helps create static website pages that rank higher with search engines.

Ruby on Rails. We use this framework to create the app backend part. With the application programming interface, the app communicates with external resources.

PostgreSQL. It is an open-source data store to keep the app data.

AWS. This cloud platform provides a safe environment for deploying an app.

Integrations

Mollie API. It helps integrate a wide range of payment gateways into your website or app.

Translate.com API. It is a translation platform that generates machine and human translations for business.

IG API (Instagram Graph API). This tool helps connect a website or app to the Instagram platform. So, the information published on your platform will also be visible on Instagram.

Google Maps API. It allows access to Google Maps data and functionality for a website or app.

Further reading: Work From Home Trends: Future of Remote Working

Testing

Testing is necessary to ensure the high quality of mobile application development service. Eliminating bugs and errors from your app is a guarantee that users will be delighted with it.

We recommend that you test your app in small steps using test-driven development. Thus, you can exclude bugs and errors as soon as possible.

At Codica, we rely on specifications for each project. They become the foundation for acceptance criteria that allow stating that the app meets the client’s requirements. We also create test cases and checklists with possible scenarios of app use. So, developers can make the needed amendments.

When developers correct the faults, we conduct regression tests to make sure that new features will not break the app. So, our team can thoroughly test each solution for usability, performance, and security. Thus, we ensure that the process fulfills the project's technical and business requirements from the client.

Deployment and maintenance

After your app has been deployed, you need to maintain it to ensure that it works properly. Make sure that the app development team that has worked on your project provides relevant services.

By the way, we have also created a step-by-step guide on mobile app development for you to analyze each stage of development in even more detail.

Seeking an expert team for your project?

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How much does it cost to build a recruitment app?

If you have a ready recruitment app idea, you definitely will be interested to know how much resources it will take for recruitment software development.

Below, you will find a table with features your future recruitment app should have and how many resources each of them will need. The information is kindly provided by the team and is calculated at a rate of $50 per hour. The data is based on the current market and previous experience working on recruitment app projects.

It is worth noting that the features in the table are standard. For each project, we customize functionality according to the client’s requirements and business needs.

The table holds information on the essential features of recruitment app development. The costs and timeline provided by the team members are relevant as of the article date post. If you're interested in the cost of your specific project, contact us and receive a free estimate of it.

Conclusion

Digital recruitment has become a better alternative to hiring via traditional ways. It facilitates the hiring process at a much faster and more effective pace. That is why creating a recruitment app is a profitable business idea. By including the right features, you will build a recruitment app that users enjoy.

At Codica, we apply the proven practices that help us deliver excellent recruitment apps. Check our completed projects to discover more information. Feel free to contact us if you want to build a recruitment app with a reliable team of developers.