If you've ever had your inbox carpet-bombed by recruiters within ten minutes of updating a LinkedIn headline, you already understand the problem we're trying not to recreate.
The standard model in tech hiring goes something like this:
- You build a profile.
- That profile becomes searchable to anyone with a recruiter seat.
- You receive a sustained, low-quality contact stream from people you've never met about roles you didn't ask about.
This is sold as discovery. Get found by your next opportunity. The reality is worse — for both sides.
It punishes the careful
The candidates with the most options are the ones who get spammed hardest. So they hide. They turn off "open to work." They strip detail from their public profile. They become unreachable in the exact moment a serious hiring team would have wanted to talk to them.
Discovery, as a model, optimises for the loudest recruiters and the noisiest candidates. The middle, where most actually-great hires sit, gets crushed.
It punishes the curious
On the other side of the table, hiring managers wade through a pool of profiles where 70% of people aren't really looking, 20% are passively curious, and the remaining 10% are actively interviewing somewhere else and won't reply for a week. The signal-to-noise ratio is brutal.
So we end up with two groups talking past each other through a third group (recruiters) whose incentives are misaligned with both.
What we did instead
Dealt inverts it. Candidates verify their credentials once. Then they apply to specific roles they choose to pursue. Companies see verified applicants — not a searchable pool of strangers.
That means:
- You're never on a list. No company can browse Dealt and find you. No one can DM you through us.
- You apply when you're ready. Verification persists between applications, so the work compounds — but the act of applying is always your call.
- The companies you apply to see real proof. Verified employment history, GitHub-evidenced work, references from actual colleagues. They don't need to chase. You don't need to convince.
What this costs us
Honestly, it costs us a lot of growth-hacks. The "swipe through 10,000 candidates" experience is a powerful demo. We don't have one.
What we have instead is candidates who trust us with their data because we don't sell access to it, and companies who trust the applications they receive because we screened them at the source.
That's the deal we want to be on the right side of. Hence the name.
— The Dealt team