What you pay, what you see, who decides
A good recruiter knows people and closes gaps. The cost is the model: a fee tied to salary, paid by the business, which shapes which roles get worked and how fast.
A percentage of first-year salary, commonly around a fifth, on placement.
A subscription plus a flat fee per confirmed hire, never a percentage. No hire, no fee. Exact prices are published before anyone is charged; founding businesses are free in early access.
The recruiter. The candidate's details sit in the agency's database and move with the agency.
The member. Contact moves only when the member accepts an introduction, and a member can name the companies that may not find them. Recruiter and staffing accounts are not admitted.
A resume and the recruiter's summary.
Field notes in the person's own words, work samples that open, references sealed by the people who gave them, and availability confirmed within three weeks.
The recruiter's judgment, unstated.
By recency and evidence today. When employer access opens, a business may buy an ordered shortlist for one requisition, with every reason shown to the business and to the member, and no member able to pay to move.
A board is a list of postings and a pile of applications. The pile is the product: the business receives volume, the applicant receives silence.
Posted publicly. Analyses by Greenhouse and Glassdoor put roughly one in five listings as a ghost: filled, frozen, or never real.
There are no listings and never will be. When employer access opens, a business states a private requisition; it is matched, never posted, and it lapses unless the business confirms it is still hiring.
Hundreds of near-identical resumes into a void, screened by keyword, most unanswered.
There is no pile. A verified business reads evidence and requests an introduction; the member answers; an unanswered request expires on its own. Every matched member is told at the same moment.
Unknown. An open posting says nothing about who is actually free to start.
Stated by the member and confirmed within three weeks, or it steps down on its own. Availability is a fact, never a signal sold as data.
Free to apply, which is exactly why the pile exists.
Free to join. Building a record asks more of you than uploading a resume, on purpose. Paid tiers start at less than two coffees a month and add tools, never visibility.
LinkedIn is a feed you perform on, built on a profile of claims. It is where professional life is broadcast; it is not built for the quiet work of being found on evidence.
A claims-based profile: what you say about yourself, plus endorsements from anyone.
An evidence profile: field notes answering hard questions, work samples, at most three references sealed by their givers from their own inboxes. A living record the member owns, downloadable and revocable as an Evidence Passport.
A feed, ranked for engagement, with followers, reactions, and posts to keep up.
A directory, ordered by recency and evidence. No feed, no followers, no engagement games, nothing to perform. Quiet hours are the member's to set.
Paid tiers sold on standing out: more reach, more messages, a higher place in someone's results.
Tools only. Money never buys visibility on ALO ARK, on either side of the table, by standing rule and by the absence of any ranking column in the schema.
Anyone with a message product, including recruiters and strangers.
Verified businesses registered on their own domain, by introduction, with your yes. You can name who may not find you, and for them you do not exist.
What the others have that we do not
Scale. A recruiter can work your role this week; a board has thousands of postings today; LinkedIn has most of the working world on it. ALO ARK is a new room: the founding waitlist is open, members enter at the member beta later this fall, and businesses come in once there are enough members to make a search worth running. We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. What we offer in the meantime is a record you own, built in a place with rules, that gets more useful every lap.
Sources for the figures above are the same ones cited on the home page, where they are dated. See also: the words we use, defined · is ALO ARK legit? · for businesses