What draws communities to Pallet?
The most common tying theme is the concept of adding even more value to a specific audience or membership. And make no mistake, it's certainly true that Pallet lets you share life-changing opportunities with your people. But it's not the whole story. When we hop on a call with potential partners, most don't recognize how badly business crave— not to mention how much they'll pay to access— the tools that communities have the capacity to provide. If you run a community, or are a part of one, you're twice as special then you realize.
Recruitment presents many challenges for businesses, one of which is establishing strong funnels for candidates. Regardless of whether a company is in the business of media itself, making hardware, selling a bagel without carbs, or anything in between, they are constantly looking for clever ways to stay top-of-mind for talent. The problem? Outside of direct media, businesses don't have many options— and the ones they do— sponsored ads, cold DMS— tend to feel transactional and inauthentic.
Most online job search platforms, where businesses go to reach candidates, don't facilitate true engagement. At this point, if you're familiar with LinkedIn, you're likely equally familiar with the critique of what content performs well on their platform. Fundamentally, this is because LinkedIn is a purely transactional marketplace; you're there to get a job, or you're there to hire someone. Once you receive the output, you can tune back out.
Alternatively, online communities exist because they've fostered true engagement. People love what they've created, whether that be content, atmosphere, a place for discourse or learning, and they come back for it again and again. Communities have that rare element that recruiters covet: passionate, sustained interest.
When a job post shows up on a Pallet board, it gets redirected to those pockets of interest. Whether that be a community, or content stream, it's not destined to die in the depths of an inbox. It's front and center for thousands of already-interested eyes.
Whether it be through a job board, or talent collective, all activity that occurs on a given Pallet goes through a completely unique filter — the leader of a specific community (leaders of communities are usually admins of their respective Pallets). Unlike infinite scrolls of postings you find on large scale search platforms (results deteriorate pretty quickly) community leaders are not obligated to post any jobs, or include any members into their collectives, that they don't find exciting or up to whatever standard they hold themselves to.
This manifests in different ways. Some communities are now so successful that they also act as investment vehicles, and will only post jobs or facilitate candidate sourcing to portfolio companies. Others have a professional reputation to look after, and deliberately seek to highlight opportunities that will showcase their industry expertise. On top of that, we give Pallet runners the ability to style guidelines, providing qualitative comments about job posts that you simply won't find in a standard description.
Especially when a business is primed for growth, having a trusted, professionally-oriented voice promote a business' listings to an engaged community is very alluring— and often times doesn't come cheap.
Even more powerful is having a trusted, professionally-oriented community to tap into, should a business want to meet candidates directly. Through the mechanism of talent collectives— employing a curated search experience where members of communities intentionally opt-in to receive introduction requests directly from businesses, those same businesses no longer have to expend so much energy consistently forcing themselves to remind talent of their existence. The talent is right there for them.
Pallet is a new, disruptive force in the world of recruiting. And while some communities come to us with robust business relationships in hand, this isn't true of everyone we partner with. To this point, it's our job, not the communities, to convert businesses to our school of wisdom, showing them the value that communities provide.
When a partner signs up, we connect them with businesses that are ready to take that leap (although there's not much faith involved). This ensures that our community partners can continue to focus on what they do best, engaging their people, and making Pallet a low-touch, high-impact extension of what they've already built.
If running a Pallet sounds interesting to you, feel free to apply here.
