About

The Hiring Stack reviews recruiting software from the seat of someone who uses it. Not from a feature grid, not from a vendor briefing — from a live pipeline with real candidates in it.

Who writes this

I run sourcing and hiring operations week in, week out: writing outreach, chasing replies, keeping a pipeline moving, and dealing with the software that is supposed to make all of that easier. Most of what gets published here started as a note to myself about a tool that either saved me an hour or cost me one.

That is the whole angle. I am not an analyst covering the category from above; I am a user who gets to find out which parts of these products fall apart on contact with real work.

How I review

A tool does not get a rating until I have run actual hiring work through it. That means at minimum: setting it up from scratch, posting or importing a real role, moving real candidates through the stages, and sending real messages from it.

• 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.
• Free trials, paid where needed. Where a trial does not reach the part worth judging, I pay for a month.

How this site makes money

Some outbound links to vendors are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you sign up through one. Those links are marked in the review that contains them.

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.

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.