Most professional networks were designed a decade ago and haven\'t really changed. We built Connecting Odds around the tools you use every day, calendar, messaging, calls, news, and a feed that respects your time.
Schedule an interview, a call, or a coffee chat right from a chat window. Attendees get a proper email with an ICS file that respects their device timezone and daylight saving time, no more "is that my time or yours?" back-and-forth.
If you're connected, the call button is right there in the message header. WebRTC under the hood, so it just works in your browser, no plugins, no meeting links to copy.
Typing indicators, read receipts, reactions, edits, attachments up to 5 MB, and a rich text composer. Mute a chat, disable reactions on one thread, or turn off email pings for a specific conversation.
We pull from trusted tech sources on the hour, dedupe automatically, and show each story with a clickable citation. It's the news tab you'll actually check.
Save a role search once. We'll surface matching jobs when they appear and email you only when there's something worth telling you about.
Companies claim their page through DNS-verified email. Multiple admins can co-manage a page, and ownership transfers cleanly when someone leaves.
Per-category toggles for in-app, browser, and email. Mute one conversation without silencing the rest. Get a 3-hour follow-up email only if you missed something important.
Chronological posts from people and companies you follow. No engagement-farm reshuffling, no mystery ranking. What you see is what your network is talking about right now.
Row-level security on every table. Resumes are private by default and only visible to recruiters you've applied to. Delete your account and every trace of it is gone.
Side-by-side breakdowns against every network people ask us about, LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and more.
Read the comparisonsA manifesto: the origin, the principles, the differences from the incumbents, and the commitments we are willing to sign for the life of the product.
The recruiting stack broke the same way most enterprise software breaks: gradually, then suddenly. LinkedIn Recruiter used to be a fast way to find candidates and was priced accordingly. Ten years later, it costs roughly $800 per seat per month, is heavily gated behind feature tiers, and delivers a candidate response rate that industry benchmarks put between 10% and 25%. The tool that was supposed to lower the friction of finding good people now adds friction at every step.
The other tools in the stack followed the same trajectory. Zoom was priced for a two-person garage startup and now bills a small hiring team $150 per month for the ability to talk. Calendly turned scheduling into a subscription. Every ATS on the market added a messaging layer, so the messaging happens across four accounts and the record of who said what lives in whichever tab was open last.
Meanwhile the underlying costs collapsed. Serverless infrastructure, cheap real-time layers, commoditised speech-to-text, and web-standard video call primitives put every capability the incumbents charge for within reach of a small team at fractional cost. Connecting Odds exists to pass that cost collapse on to the people who do the hiring, not to capture it as margin.
Free at the core. Every user, on every plan today, gets the full sourcing, messaging, calling, scheduling and pipeline experience at zero cost. Paid add-ons will exist for the largest teams, but they will be optional and small.
One product, not four. A hiring workflow that spans four tools produces four incomplete records and one worried recruiter. Connecting Odds keeps the resume, the conversation, the interview and the pipeline row in the same product so the record is complete by construction.
Chronological feed, no algorithm. Social platforms optimise for engagement because engagement is what advertisers pay for. We have no advertisers to please, so the feed shows what your network posted, in reverse chronological order, and stops.
Transparent matching. Match scores are useless if you can't see why. Connecting Odds shows the reasons for every match (industry, location, seniority, salary, skill overlap) so both sides can trust or reject the recommendation on its merits.
Data belongs to the user. Export, deletion and portability are two-click operations. Sub-processors are listed publicly. Every non-essential consent is opt-in and revocable.
LinkedIn built a professional identity graph and monetised access to it. We build a hiring workflow and give access away because access is not where the value is. The value is in the connections that get made and the interviews that get scheduled.
Zoom built a meeting product with a meeting product's feature set: webinars, breakout rooms, dial-in. We built the smaller, hiring-shaped subset of that (one-to-one, small panels, screen share, notes) and left the enterprise webinars to Zoom.
Greenhouse and its peers built an ATS with a strong opinion about interview kits and scorecards. We built a lightweight, opinion-free pipeline that covers the shared 80% of ATS work and integrates via webhooks with the specialised tools you may still need.
Calendly built scheduling as an independent product because at the time everything else was an independent product. We built scheduling inside the conversation because the conversation is where the meeting was going to happen anyway.
The pattern: unbundle the parts of each incumbent that hiring actually needs, and rebundle them under one login at zero cost.
Solo recruiters at growing companies save $400 to $500 per month by consolidating LinkedIn, Zoom, Calendly and a starter ATS into one Connecting Odds workspace. That is $5,000 per year, per recruiter, back on the balance sheet.
Small teams of five to ten recruiters save $50,000 to $80,000 per year on tool subscriptions alone, before counting the time saved by not switching between four tabs.
Enterprise recruiting functions save $400,000 to $1M+ per year on tool subscriptions and unlock a cleaner audit trail through single-tool provenance.
Candidates save the $30 per month they would otherwise spend on LinkedIn Premium, the $150 to $600 on resume-review services, and the $200 per session on interview coaching platforms. During the exact period of life when income is uncertain, every dollar not spent on a subscription stays in the household budget.
Companies with a strong employer brand save on paid promotion because their careers page can embed Connecting Odds' public API for job listings at no cost and full fidelity.
Every professional network before us discovered, eventually, that engagement metrics were easier to grow than actual hiring outcomes. The result is a feed dominated by hot takes, motivational posts and 'I'm excited to announce' updates, with jobs relegated to a separate tab that gets less product investment each year.
Connecting Odds refuses that trade. The feed exists, but hiring is not a subplot. Jobs are the front page. Matches are the primary notification. Messaging is a full real-time layer. The social layer serves the hiring layer, not the other way around.
This is a deliberate constraint. It means the product is less viral than a pure social network and grows slower on some vanity metrics. It also means every user who is here is here for a real reason, and every session translates into progress on the thing they came to do.
Trust is not asserted; it is compounded through small honest moves over long periods. Publishing every sub-processor by name, every incident post-mortem publicly, every roadmap discussion in the open group, every pricing change with months of notice. Answering security emails in one business day, not five. Refunding the paid add-ons of tomorrow when the promised feature slips.
We commit to the same visible, boring, reliable behaviour on every one of those axes for the life of the product.
Year one (2026, current) is about product completeness: sourcing, messaging, voice and video, scheduling, pipelines, applications, company pages, mobile PWA, and the trust foundation of privacy controls, MFA, data export and deletion. That is complete.
Year two (2027) is about depth: async video answers on applications, native live-caption and post-call summary for every call, richer analytics for both candidates and recruiters, referral programs, SCIM provisioning and native connectors for Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby.
Year three (2028) is about scale: expanded international coverage across languages, currency and payroll-jurisdiction awareness, and dedicated verticals (healthcare, education, government) with domain-specific compliance frameworks (HIPAA, FERPA, FedRAMP).
Years four and five (2029-2030) are about ecosystem: an open API for third-party workflow tools to build on top of Connecting Odds, a marketplace of vetted service providers (background checks, skills tests, salary benchmarks) integrated at the pipeline layer, and continued investment in the core commitment that hiring-shaped features stay free.
The core hiring features (matching, messaging, voice, video, scheduling, pipelines, applications, company pages) will remain free for the life of the product. If we ever change that, we will announce the change at least 12 months in advance and grandfather existing usage indefinitely.
Your data will never be sold to a third party for advertising, training, or any other purpose.
Sub-processors will always be listed publicly, updated within one week of any change.
Security incidents will be disclosed to affected users within statutory deadlines (72 hours for GDPR-triggering events), and a full post-mortem will be published within 30 days.
Account deletion will always be a two-click operation and will always result in complete removal of your data after the stated grace window.
Sign up in under a minute at /auth. Upload your resume, mark yourself open to work (or open to hiring), and let the matching engine surface the roles or the candidates that match. If you are running a hiring team today on the LinkedIn plus Zoom plus Calendly plus ATS stack, spin up a company workspace in parallel and compare the workflow for a fortnight. Every incumbent contract has a renewal date; when yours arrives, you will already have the alternative in hand.
Every incumbent recruiting product carries the DNA of the era it was born in. LinkedIn came out of the mid-2000s enterprise-sales playbook: contract-first, feature-tiered, upsell-driven. Zoom came out of the video-conferencing category that expected annual per-seat billing to be inevitable. The ATS category still models hiring as a linear pipeline because that was the mainframe-era abstraction the first ATS was written on top of.
None of those shapes match the reality of modern hiring. Modern hiring is small, iterative, cross-functional, and driven by conversations more than by structured artifacts. It happens in Slack and DMs and 30-minute video calls, not in scorecards and dashboards. The products that dominate today were designed for an audience that no longer exists at scale.
Rebuilding around the current shape of hiring is not a feature that the incumbents can ship. It would invalidate the entire pricing thesis, the entire sales motion, and the entire enterprise-heavy account-management culture. That is the opening.
New product categories are proven by the smallest, most nimble teams. A ten-person startup can adopt Connecting Odds in an afternoon; a thousand-person enterprise cannot. So we optimise for the ten-person team first, and let usage grow organically into the larger organisation.
The trickle-up pattern is well-documented in enterprise SaaS. Slack, Figma, Notion and Linear all started with individuals and small teams inside larger organisations and grew from there. Connecting Odds is following the same playbook: recruiters at growing startups adopt because the value is obvious; hiring managers at those startups become advocates when they get their next job at a bigger company; the enterprise conversation follows naturally.
Every year a dozen well-funded startups launch as 'the LinkedIn alternative'. Almost all of them fail. The reason is that a professional identity graph is not a defensible product surface - LinkedIn already has it and it is very expensive to catch up.
Connecting Odds does not compete on the identity graph. We compete on the workflow that uses the graph. Our product surface is the pipeline, the conversation, the interview and the match, not the profile page. Users still build a profile, but the profile exists in service of the hiring outcome, not as an end in itself.
The framing 'workflow product with a lightweight identity layer' is fundamentally different from 'social network with a hiring tab', and it produces different design choices at every level of the stack.
Networks compound. Every candidate who joins Connecting Odds and marks themselves open makes the platform more valuable to every recruiter looking. Every recruiter who posts a job makes the platform more valuable to every candidate. The value grows non-linearly with the size of the graph.
The math on catch-up is favourable. LinkedIn adds candidates at a rate proportional to its existing user base times an engagement multiplier. Connecting Odds adds candidates at a rate proportional to word-of-mouth from newly-hired users times its zero-cost adoption barrier. Over a five- to ten-year horizon, the growth curves cross.
We are not there yet. We are honest about that. But every quarter, the gap narrows in a measurable way.
Boring reliability beats flashy launches. A product that quietly works every day is more valuable than a product that announces something new every week.
Every default should be the safe default. Notifications default to reasonable; visibility defaults to less-public rather than more-public; opt-in beats opt-out for every marketing channel.
Every feature should compose with every other feature. Voice, video, scheduling, messaging and pipelines are one product, not five glued together.
Latency is a feature. A page that loads in 300 ms is measurably more useful than a page that loads in 3000 ms, and we invest in the difference.
Honesty about limitations builds trust. When something does not work yet, we say so. When something is a trade-off, we explain the trade-off.
Small team, high accountability. Every engineer owns their surface end-to-end: code, deploy, monitor, respond to incidents, write the docs. This produces different design decisions than the alternative model where a specification team hands designs to an implementation team.
Weekly ship cadence. Every Friday, whatever is ready ships to production. Continuous integration runs every commit; canaries catch regressions before they reach 100% of traffic.
Feedback loops of hours, not weeks. We answer every support email within a business day. Feature requests that show up more than three times a month get triaged into the roadmap.
Public roadmap. Every quarter's plan is posted to the guides section and discussed openly with users. No promises we cannot keep, no roadmap-driven marketing, no vaporware.
Connecting Odds is currently funded by a modest seed round from investors who understand that patient network-effects businesses take time to compound. We do not have a growth-at-all-costs mandate and we do not have a mandate to squeeze current users for margin.
The path to sustainability is optional enterprise add-ons (SSO, SCIM, advanced audit) sold at a fraction of the incumbent alternatives, and a small labelled promoted-employer tier on the /jobs board. Neither will ever gate the core workflow, both are optional, and we will announce the pricing when they ship.
Every product decision starts with a story. Some stories arrive as support tickets, some as feedback posts, some as chance conversations at industry meetups. The pattern that repeats most often is a hiring manager who spent an hour composing a candidate outreach message inside LinkedIn, watched it disappear into an unread InMail box, and asked why the professional-network product they pay four figures a year for is so much worse at matching than a well-tuned dating app.
The dating-app framing is more useful than it sounds. Both categories match two-sided preferences. Both suffer if one side spams the other. Both work better when the underlying willingness to engage is disclosed. Connecting Odds' opt-in openness signals borrow the pattern deliberately, and the response-rate improvement is the same order of magnitude.
Another story that comes up often: a candidate who never opens LinkedIn messages because 90 percent of the inbound is off-topic, gets a Connecting Odds match with a company they actually recognise, replies within an hour, books a call the next day, and lands a first interview by the end of the week. That end-to-end timeline is what the product optimises for.
Craft is what makes the difference between a product you use because you have to and one you use because you want to. Connecting Odds invests in the boring details that compound: the ring tone when a call comes in, the animation when a candidate crosses a pipeline stage, the exact wording of the empty state when your inbox has nothing new, the fallback UI when your camera permission is denied, the microcopy on the resume upload button.
None of these details show up in a competitor feature-comparison spreadsheet. All of them show up in daily use. Users who switch from an incumbent stack routinely mention 'it just feels nicer to use' as one of the top reasons they keep the workspace open all day rather than only when they have to.
A free product is only credible if the business model behind it can persist for decades. The specific plan is a small enterprise add-on tier that adds features large teams need without changing the value proposition for everyone else. The unit economics work at the current scale, work better with growth, and align our incentives with our users: we succeed when our users succeed at hiring.
We have deliberately structured funding, team compensation and hiring around a decade-long horizon. There is no growth-at-all-costs mandate, no exit pressure that would force a business-model pivot, no VC clock ticking towards a monetisation flip.
This is not the fastest way to build a company. It is the way to build one that outlasts the incumbents it competes with.
'You are not LinkedIn.' Correct. LinkedIn has 900 million profiles; Connecting Odds does not. The bet is that focused workflow beats maximum-scale identity graph over a ten-year horizon, especially as the incumbents' pricing model erodes trust with cost-conscious teams.
'Free products get bought and gutted.' The concern is legitimate; every major SaaS category has an example. We defend against this with a governance structure that includes a founder super-majority on decisions that would change the free-forever commitment, and with public statements that would be publicly embarrassing to reverse.
'You cannot ship on this cadence forever.' We can, and we do, because the engineering culture is set up for it: high accountability per engineer, weekly ship cadence, continuous integration, no big-bang releases. Small commits, deployed often, with a rollback plan for every change.
'Your matching engine is early.' True. Matching quality improves with data volume; we are earlier in that curve than the incumbents. Every user who joins compounds the quality faster.
This page is a set of commitments. Screenshot it, save the URL, and revisit it whenever a product update lands or a pricing change happens. If we ever break one of these commitments without a clear public explanation, hold us to it. Publicly. Loudly. On whichever platform you prefer.
Accountability is what makes a product trustworthy over years. We would rather be held to a high standard by attentive users than allowed to drift into the same bundle-and-upsell habits the incumbents have.
Connecting Odds is a modern professional network and hiring workspace that gives every user the sourcing, messaging, calling, scheduling and pipeline features the incumbents charge $1,200 to $2,000 per month for, for free, in one product. It exists because the incumbent stack broke: LinkedIn Recruiter got expensive and slow, Zoom got billed to teams that only need a hiring interview, Calendly turned scheduling into a subscription and every ATS added a messaging layer that made the record of a candidate's conversation live across four accounts. We rebuilt the workflow from the shape hiring actually takes, not the shape a mainframe-era product taxonomy suggests. The result is a single-login workspace where a role goes from posted to hired without ever leaving the tab, with a candidate experience where the resume, the message, the interview and the offer conversation all live in one place with one URL and one audit trail.
For candidates, it is a professional network that respects your time: reverse-chronological feed, no ads, no promoted content, no InMail paywall, and real matching that opens conversations with recruiters who actually want to talk to you. For recruiters, it is a workflow product that replaces four subscriptions with none, cuts cost-per-hire by 60 to 80 percent, and shortens time-to-first-interview by days. For enterprises, it is a defensible strategic decision: free at scale, with optional add-ons for SSO and advanced audit, no contract lock-in, and data portability guarantees in writing.
The commitment to free-at-the-core is the load-bearing part of the product philosophy. Everything else in this document - how we build, how we fund, how we handle security, how we escalate support - flows from the underlying stance that a hiring workflow should not be gated behind five-figure annual contracts, and that the modern infrastructure that makes free possible should be passed on to the users who benefit from it.
The recruiting-tool category began in the late 1990s with Monster and CareerBuilder - job-board businesses that charged employers to post and candidates to search. LinkedIn launched in 2003 and reinvented sourcing by making it about the professional-identity graph. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) evolved in parallel, initially as compliance-driven databases for large employers and later, in the SaaS era, as pipeline-management products.
Between 2010 and 2020, the category consolidated. LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft. Greenhouse, Lever and Workday-adjacent products absorbed most enterprise attention. Video-conferencing became a required layer, dominated by Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Scheduling emerged as its own category (Calendly, x.ai, Doodle). Nobody consolidated the workflow; each vendor made its own product better and left the integration problem to the customer.
The result is what we have today: a four-tool stack that costs $1,200 to $2,000 per month per recruiter, produces incomplete records because the data lives in four places, and locks in customers with multi-year enterprise contracts. Connecting Odds is the answer to what the category would look like if you rebuilt it in 2026 with modern infrastructure and no legacy pricing model to defend.