Manatal export: the columns that arrive empty

Before I pay for an applicant tracking system, I want to know what I can take out of it. So on 27 August 2026, five days into a fourteen-day Manatal (affiliate link) trial with nine days still to run, I exported everything in the account: seven candidates, every column the export offered.

The file has 52 columns. Seven rows. I have kept it, and I counted it again on 23 September: 30 of those 52 columns are empty on every single row.

That is not a scandal. It is the most useful thing a spreadsheet can tell you about a product, and it is the reason to export early rather than on your last day.

The short version

• 52 columns out, 22 with anything in them. The other 30 were blank for all seven candidates.
• Most of the blanks are recruitment-agency fields — placement, vendor, referrer, hired and left dates. A small employer hiring for itself will never fill them.
• Some of the blanks are not. Years of Experience, Candidate Industry and Candidate Description came out empty, and the first of those is a number the product displays on screen.
• GDPR Consent says Pending for every row, and GDPR Consent Date is empty. The field is filled with a state, not with information.
• Contact details arrived for fewer than half. Email for three of seven, phone for four.
• Breezy HR’s file is narrower and fuller: 29 columns, 15 with values.
• You can only do this while you still have a way in. Manatal has no free plan, and when my trial ended the export was gone with everything else.

What the 52 columns are

The header asks for a complete recruiting record: name, reference, contact details, current company and position, education, salary expectations, notice period, nationality, languages, GDPR consent, and a long tail of placement fields — Hired Date, Start Date, Probation End Date, Left Date, Employee Job, Placement Department, plus four Referrer fields and three Vendor fields.

Reading the header alone, you would conclude this is a product for an agency that places people and gets paid for it. That is an accurate conclusion, and it is worth having before you buy: it tells you whose workflow the database was designed around.

What actually came out

22 columns had a value on at least one row. The number in brackets is how many of the seven rows carried anything:

30 columns were empty on every row, including Gender, Birthdate, Skype, Other Contact, Employment Status, Hired Date, Start Date, Probation End Date, Left Date, Employee Job, Placement Department, all four Referrer fields, all three Vendor fields, Current Department, Candidate Industry, Years of Experience, Graduation Date, Current Salary, Current Benefits, Notice Period, Expected Salary, Expected Benefits, Candidate Reference Name, GDPR Consent Date and Candidate Description.

Which blanks matter

Most of them do not. If you are a ten-person company hiring for yourself, you have no vendors, no referrers and nobody placed, so those columns are empty because your process does not have those steps. A wide schema is not a defect.

Three are worth your attention.

Years of Experience is empty, and the product does not think it is. The candidate screen shows a figure in years for these same people. The number exists on the display and not in the file — I wrote up that gap, with the screens side by side, in the Manatal review. If you are exporting because you want to sort or filter your pipeline somewhere else, this is the column you will miss first.

Candidate Description is empty for all seven, which means whatever summary text sits against a candidate is not part of the export I took.

GDPR Consent is Pending on every row, and GDPR Consent Date is blank. The field is populated in the sense that a value is present. It carries no consent and no date — a state, not information. For anyone hiring in Europe, a column called consent that always reads Pending is worth understanding before it ends up in a spreadsheet that outlives the trial.

One limitation I cannot remove. These seven candidates arrived by résumé upload and by CSV migration — Detailed Source reads Sourced via Resume Upload for four and Self Data Migration for three. I exported on 27 August, two days before I first used the sourcing database. So I cannot tell you whether Birthdate stays empty for a sourced record; the sourced ones I later looked at carried a birth date whose month and day were invented, and that is a different file I never pulled.

The same test on Breezy HR

Breezy HR (affiliate link)’s export, taken on 22 August with every column switched on, is 29 columns and 17 rows — 15 columns with values, 14 empty. The proportion is better and the file is narrower, which is the same fact seen twice: Breezy is not trying to model a placement business.

Two details are worth carrying across. Breezy exports its AI output — the ai-score and ai-score-audit columns carried values for the four candidates I had run the AI on, and they survive a downgrade to the free plan. And the column plainly named score was empty on all seventeen rows, next to an ai-score column that was not. Two score columns, one of them decorative.

The part that decides whether any of this matters

An export is only available while you can still get in.

Manatal has no free plan. When my trial ended, the login page became a payment screen and the only three links on it were Pricing, Need help? and Logout. No export, no delete, no download. I wrote that up on the day. The 27 August file is the only reason I can write this article at all.

Breezy keeps the export on its free plan, which is genuinely better — but candidates older than thirty days come out of it as random strings that change on every page load. The file still has the right number of rows and the right columns. The contents are gone.

So the two products fail in opposite directions, and both failures are on a clock.

I have since run the same questions across four products — what each of them let me take out.

What I would do on day one of any trial

1. Export before you evaluate, not after. The file takes a minute and it is the only artefact you keep if you walk away.
2. Open it and count the empty columns. That is the fastest honest summary of what the product actually knows about your candidates.
3. Check the one number you rely on. If you sort by experience, or by score, or by source, look for that column in the file before you build a process on it.
4. Export again on the way out, and compare the two files. Same rows and same columns is not the same as same contents.

Counts above are from two files exported on 22 and 27 August 2026 and recounted on 23 September 2026. If either product has changed its export since, tell me and I will date the correction.

Disclosure: the Manatal and Breezy HR links in this post pay me a commission if you sign up through them, and each is marked where they appear above. It costs you nothing extra, it did not change a word of what this post says, and I do not accept payment in exchange for favourable coverage. Every other link here is an ordinary one.