As of this moment just over 50% of all intro requests made to candidates on Pallet have been accepted. People are often curious how we're able to make this happen. The following blog post gives a breakdown behind Pallet's high acceptance rates, and why it'll supercharge your pipeline as a business.
Every candidate you'll see on Pallet has been invited into our network by a community leader they follow. We don't own the process of acquiring candidates, we leave that to our community partners.
Here's how: we'll identify a newsletter writer on substack who mainly discusses product management (or any other professionally oriented topic), and approach them by highlighting the benefits running a Pallet could add to their newsletter audience (curated job posts, referring audience members to jobs). If they accept, we become partners, and provide them with our software to host a job board and an online talent directory.
They then use their channels, whether that be a newsletter (in this case) or a youtube channel, slack group, twitter account (wherever they're community is hosted) to invite members of their audience to view the job board, or join the talent directory (we call the talent directory a "collective").
From the perspective of the candidate, they receive their regular newsletter(s) they follow, and inside it, there'll be a CTA to join a curated job-search, curated by the writer themselves. If you subscribe to Gergely Orosz' Substack Pragmatic Engineer, you would've seen this:
And if you follow Lenny Rachitsky on Twitter, you would've come across this:
And if you're subscribed to Every's newsletter...
You get the point. As a candidate you join Pallet through content and online community you already participate in, most of the time in a professional context to begin with.
After a year of Talent Collective's live we know one thing: really experienced people consume professionally oriented content and participate in professionally oriented spaces. And with the promise of a curated experience provided by the industry leaders they choose to subscribe to, they will actively signal their open to new opportunities, even if they haven't done so on any other online platform. In a small survey conducted with 400 candidates across various Collectives, these were the results when asked the willingness to take a call through Pallet:
So we've established that through the mechanism of online community (in mediums that range from newsletter audiences to slack groups), great people are willing to sign up for job-search experienced curated by their community leaders. And by signing up this way, they trust the opportunities significantly more than your run-of-the-mill LinkedIn DM. But that's not quite enough. It doesn't totally explain why acceptance rates are so high.
From the perspective of the community leader, our partners, they have the job of engaging their community. Sometimes they will also engage their already existing network of businesses. If they don't have the latter, we'll help drive demand from Pallet's proprietary network of businesses. Specifically filtering ones that fit a community's "ethos". For example, if we partner with a Fintech-focused community, we'll drive demand from Fintech businesses.
When speaking to their communities, leaders always emphasize this curation. That way, candidates who sign up understand very clearly that they're not going to be spammed by random recruiters, but rather reached out to by companies that have been vetted and approved.
By emphasizing three key elements, community leaders are able to attract top people:
So what have we gone over at this point:
But there is one more piece to the puzzle.
The final key element behind our high acceptance rates is the method of communication between businesses and candidates. When you request an intro to a candidate on the Pallet network, the candidate receives an email from the community leader who invited them onto the platform, not Pallet — but the person who made the commitment to provide a curated, noise-free experience. Through a simple check-in, asking if the candidate wants to be connected and providing a bit of context on the business, we're able to create what is effectively a warm lead. The candidate has the feeling of "knowing" the community leader, and the community leader has vetted the business to participate in the Collective.
Beyond the look and feel of an intimate referral, and the reinforcement that this experience is a curated service driven by a person who is an expert in their space, the candidate will also accept because they're confident in the results. As much as all of these product details and strategies can help drive conversations between candidates and businesses, no high acceptance rate is sustainable over time if candidates are not receiving results. Even if you deify the newsletter writers you follow, and join their Talent Collectives the moment the newsletter hits your inbox, you won't be satisfied with a service that doesn't work for you. Especially when the stakes are high— finding a good job is not an area people like wasting their time.
And yet, we do. We fight through the frustration of wasted time and effort because there's not supposed to be anything better. That goes for candidates and businesses.
When Talent Collectives went live a year ago acceptance rates were instantly over 50% and they've never dipped below. We're confident that above all the reason is because the product works.
**If you'd like to sign up to be a part of a Talent Collective, you can do so here.
**If you'd like to hire from Collectives, sign up here.
