Recruiting email has a shape that most shared inbox tools were not designed around. Every search produces two streams at once: the client who has the role and the candidates who might fill it. Submissions, feedback requests, interview logistics, offers and counteroffers all move through the same desk, and the failures that lose business are rarely rude emails. They are a candidate who waited four days for feedback the client never sent, a client who went quiet halfway through a search, and a recruiter who left with the relationships in their head.
With that in mind, this article judges five common candidates against what a recruiting desk actually needs. One of them is ours; we build Sektra, and we have tried to be as plain about its limits as about anyone else's.
What does a recruiting agency need from a shared inbox?
- Two-sided context. A conversation belongs to a search, and a search has a client and several candidates. The tool should let a recruiter see both sides without hunting.
- Next-move tracking. Who owes the reply right now: the client with feedback, the candidate with availability, or you with the shortlist? Volume hides this, and it is where searches stall.
- WhatsApp next to email. Candidates increasingly reply on WhatsApp. A desk that keeps that on someone's phone loses the thread.
- Survivable handoffs. Recruiters move on. The desk's relationships should not.
- Low adoption cost. Desks run on a mix of full-timers, contractors and researchers who will not learn a heavy system.
- The basics: assignment, internal notes, and no two recruiters replying to the same client.
Hiver: a shared inbox inside Gmail for the desk that runs on it
Hiver adds assignment, statuses, notes and SLAs inside the Gmail interface, with a free plan and paid tiers from about $25 per user on annual billing. For a desk whose client communication behaves like a request queue, and whose recruiters will not leave Gmail, it manages that queue without a rollout. Its model is the ticket: a conversation opens and closes. The long arc of a client relationship across many searches, and the candidate who applied twice in three years, are not what it tracks. WhatsApp sits in Hiver's separate omnichannel product rather than the Gmail add-on.
Gmelius: Gmail collaboration with sequences and boards
Gmelius suits desks that run outbound as a large part of the job. Sequences for candidate outreach, boards that show each search as a pipeline, and shared inboxes, all inside Gmail, from $19 per user with shared inboxes and boards from the $25 tier. The board view maps naturally to search stages. What it does not carry is the relationship memory across searches, and like Hiver it lives in Gmail, so an Outlook desk should look elsewhere.
Front: operations weight for large agencies
Front is the choice for larger staffing operations where inbound routes across teams, SLAs are contractual, and channels beyond email need one queue. Professional at $65 per seat brings omnichannel and the workflow engine; Starter at $25 is single-channel and caps at 10 seats. The whole desk moves into Front, which for a large, stable team is fine and for a rotating one is a recurring cost. Its unit is still the conversation, not the candidate or the client.
Missive: everything in one app for a small desk
Missive combines email, SMS, WhatsApp and social messaging with team chat and tasks, from $14 to $36 per user on annual billing. For a small desk that wants candidate WhatsApp and client email in one window, it covers both channels at the entry tier. The condition is that everyone moves in, and desks with contractors and researchers who stay in Gmail tend to find the shared context leaking.
Sektra: both sides of the desk, remembered
Sektra runs one shared inbox per desk or per recruiter over Gmail, Outlook and WhatsApp, so candidate messages sit next to client email with the same ownership and notes. It tracks who owes the next move on every thread, so a search stalled on client feedback is visible before the candidate walks, and it keeps a record for each client and each candidate: what was promised and when, what is still unanswered, and each relationship's normal rhythm, so a client that used to send two roles a month and has sent none in six weeks is flagged. When a recruiter leaves, the memory stays with the desk, and the person who inherits the book can ask the assistant what was promised instead of reading a year of threads. Every AI feature is in the plan price, $29 per seat on Standard and $59 on Pro annually. Sektra does not connect two-way to an ATS today; Zapier carries events across, and deeper integrations are on the roadmap. The recruiting page has the specifics, and Sektra vs Hiver the row-by-row view.
The verdict for recruiting agencies
- A Gmail desk running a request queue: Hiver.
- A Gmail desk that lives on outbound sequences and pipeline boards: Gmelius.
- A large staffing operation with routing and contractual SLAs: Front.
- A small desk that wants email, WhatsApp and chat in one app, and will fully adopt it: Missive.
- A desk on Gmail or Outlook whose risk is stalled searches, quiet clients and recruiter turnover: Sektra.
Whatever the shortlist, run the trial against a live search, including the week a client goes quiet on feedback. That week is where a recruiting inbox either earns its keep or quietly loses a placement. Because the mail stays in Gmail or Outlook under all five tools, the two-week parallel run costs nothing but attention.
