Ten Recruiting Tools on the List—I Ended Up Using WorkBuddy to Build That Comparison Table

Last Friday afternoon, at my desk, I read the unite.ai article on the top ten AI recruiting software for October 2026 from start to finish. Workday Talent Acquisition, Eightfold AI, Recruit CRM, HireVue, iCIMS, Greenhouse — all English names, each with a paragraph of feature description. I also checked the Curriculo and EasyHire lists. In the Curriculo one, Manatal was pitched as budget-friendly, and SeekOut was said to be good at sourcing hard-to-reach talent. The three lists' rankings didn't match; in the same category, everyone claims to have reviewed forty-plus platforms.

After reading, I closed all three pages. The reason is simple: I mostly know what these tools do, but I can't compare them. Custom quotes, per-user pricing, demo required to see the back end — as an HR person at a small team, after reading I still didn't know who to pick.

So I changed approach. I opened WorkBuddy, started a new conversation, and pasted in the platform names, positioning, pricing models, and suitable scale from the three lists one by one, and asked it to organize them into a comparison table. This wasn't my first time doing this — two months ago I organized the resume screening process the same way, only this time the object of organization was the tools themselves.

Let me describe the specific path, so first-timers can follow along. WorkBuddy is an AI office tool that handles documents, spreadsheets, email, PPT, and so on; the entry point is a chat box plus a task panel. After opening it, the left side is the conversation list, and on the upper right there's a New Task — click in and first choose a type. For organizing lists, choose Spreadsheet Processing. After choosing, an upload area pops up in the middle; you can drag files or directly choose Paste Text. I pasted the body text of the three lists into three text boxes, and manually labeled each box above it, writing "List A" "List B" "List C" — don't skip this step, otherwise it can't tell which info came from which source.

Then the most critical step. Below the upload area there's Output Requirements, which is empty by default. I wrote four things clearly in it: which columns I want (platform name, parent company, target customer scale, pricing method, list ranking, notes), how to sort (group by pricing method, free ones first), how to handle missing information (write "not mentioned", don't fill it in yourself), and add a statistics row at the end (how many platforms total, how many are custom quotes). I revised this paragraph twice. The first version only said "organize into a table", and the output had messy column names and even hallucinated funding situations for two companies. The second version with the four points above written in was normal.

The result was better than I expected. Of the dozen-plus platforms, six are custom quotes or require contacting sales; the only ones that actually list prices are things like Manatal at a dozen-plus dollars per user per month. I didn't catch this conclusion myself when reading the lists, because the information was scattered across three pages.

But one pitfall to mention. When organizing rankings, it put the first place from the Curriculo list and the first place from the unite.ai list side by side in one row, looking like the same company. They're not. I later added a line to Output Requirements: "rankings from different lists in separate columns, don't merge", and reran it to get it right. Cross-source field merging — this kind of tool is most prone to being too clever here.

After the table came out, I didn't send it straight to my boss. In the upper right of WorkBuddy's spreadsheet results there's Export, which can export to Excel or directly generate an online spreadsheet link. I exported to Excel and added a column myself, "fit for our team", scoring manually. I insist on filling this in by hand — the tool can't judge our team's budget and role structure.

For collaboration, the exported table goes on the shared drive, with edit permission only for the two people on the recruiting team, and a read-only link for everyone else. I created a folder on the shared drive called "Tool Research", organized by month, with the date in the file name. That way, next time someone asks "did you look at that list", I just send the link. I've been burned on permissions before — earlier I gave everyone edit access to a candidate evaluation table, and someone accidentally deleted two columns. Since then, any table with judgments in it, I don't give everyone write access.

For routine maintenance, just one thing. I go through this kind of research table at the end of every month to see if any platform changed its pricing model. If changed, update it; if not, write a note in the remarks saying "verified as of month X". Without that note, three months later even I wouldn't be sure the table is still accurate.

My situation is a small team, tight budget, no dedicated procurement process, so this approach suits me. Big companies with a procurement department doing unified price comparison may not need to organize this table themselves. But if you're like me and still confused after reading the lists, it's probably because nobody helped you put the same category of information scattered across three pages onto one table.

I kept that table in the end, didn't delete it. Next time someone sends me a "Top Ten XX Tools" link, I'll probably still open WorkBuddy first.