About
The Hiring Stack reviews recruiting software by signing up for it and using it. Not from a feature grid, not from a vendor briefing — from an account I set up myself, with the screenshots kept.
Who writes this
My name is Teruaki K. — every article here is written and tested by me, and my name is on each one. You can reach me atteruaki@thehiringstack.com.
I am not an analyst covering the category from above. I sign up for each product, use it, and write down where it breaks — an AI summary describing events that never happened, an export the same product cannot read back in. Every claim comes with the date I saw it and, where it matters, a screenshot.
How I review
A tool does not get a rating until I have used it myself. That means at minimum: signing up from scratch, creating a job, importing candidates, moving them through the stages, and pulling the data back out. The candidates are test records I made up — never real people's data — and each article says so.
- Every review is dated. Each one states when the hands-on testing happened, and everything in it — pricing, limits, screenshots — describes the product as it stood on that date. Software changes; a review that hides its age is worthless.
- Ratings are for small teams. A tool is scored on how well it serves a small business, not on how long its feature list is. Enterprise depth that a five-person company will never touch does not earn points.
- The bad parts get named. Every review has a "what doesn't work" section, and it is never empty. A review with no drawbacks is an advertisement.
- Limits are stated, not guessed. Where a free trial or test data cannot reach the part worth judging, the article says what it could not test.
How this site makes money
As of 6 September 2026, it has not earned anything. There is no advertising on this site, and every product covered so far was paid for or trialled with my own account.
That changed on 6 September 2026, when I joined the Breezy HR and Manatal affiliate programmes. Nothing has been paid yet. Nine of the articles here now carry a link that earns a commission if you sign up through it — every one of them reads(affiliate link) right next to the link, and every article that has one says so again at the end. Every other link on this site is an ordinary one.
Where a commission is possible today:
- Breezy HR — joined 6 September 2026, through PartnerStack. Its commission rate is not stated anywhere in that programme's portal, so I cannot tell you what it is.
- Manatal — joined 6 September 2026, through Rewardful. 20% of what a referred customer pays, for as long as they keep paying.
Both partnerships started after every article about those two products was already published. Nothing was rewritten, re-rated or re-ordered when they began. The Breezy HR review still scores it 3 out of 5, two articles here are about limits of its free plan that I ran into myself, and the Manatal review still scores 3.5 and still says its parser writes values a CV never contained.
Two things that follow from that, and that I will not bend on:
- A commission never changes a rating, a ranking, or what a review says. Several tools with no affiliate programme at all are reviewed here, and some of them beat ones that pay.
- Reviews are not for sale. No vendor gets to read, approve, or edit a review before it goes up, and no amount of money buys a mention.
Contact
teruaki@thehiringstack.com. Vendors, readers and anyone who thinks a review is wrong all reach me at the same address. I read everything sent there.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — a price that moved, a feature that shipped, a limitation that has since been fixed — tell me and I will correct it and note the update date on the review. That applies to vendors too: I would rather be accurate than right.