Palto: what if recruitment was just a bit more honest about what’s actually happening?

Applying for a job is a strange process when you stop and think about it.

You’re expected to put a fair amount of effort in, tailoring your CV, writing a covering letter, answering questions, explaining why you want the role and, in many cases, spending hours preparing for an interview. Then, quite often, nothing happens. No reply, no acknowledgement and no real sense of where you are in the process or whether anyone has looked at your application at all.

I don’t think this is simply a case of blaming recruiters or employers. Recruitment is genuinely difficult on both sides. Companies can receive hundreds of applications, recruiters are juggling competing priorities and applicants are often pursuing several roles at once. But the end result is still a system with very little visibility and, perhaps unsurprisingly, very little trust.

That was where the idea for Palto began.

The question worth asking

The idea was to explore whether recruitment journeys could be made more transparent by collecting useful information about what actually happens during the process.

How long did it take to receive a response? 

Was there a response at all? 

How many stages were involved? 

Were expectations clear from the outset? 

Did the role simply disappear without explanation?

The obvious version of the product would have been to build another large recruitment platform with CV writing tools, covering letter services, job search features, employer reviews and everything else that already exists elsewhere.

We deliberately didn’t do that, partly because it would have buried the useful idea under too many bells and whistles, but also because we didn’t want Palto to become another public complaints board where applicants could accuse recruiters and companies of bad behaviour without much nuance or context.

What seemed more useful was finding something in the middle.

Could people keep a clearer record of their own recruitment journeys while contributing, over time, to a wider picture of how recruitment actually works? 

Could the platform surface genuine insight without turning every difficult experience into a public review? 

Could better information help applicants understand whether what they’re going through is unusual, while also helping recruiters and employers see where the process is quietly breaking down?

That, for me, is the more interesting part of Palto.

A problem of visibility, not just frustration

This isn’t really about adding another recruitment platform to an already crowded market. It’s about looking at a system that most people accept as frustrating and asking whether part of the problem is simply that nobody has much visibility of what’s actually happening. Not applicants, not recruiters and often not employers either.

That’s also what the Made Grand product experiments are for.

The idea is to take a recognised problem, question the obvious solution, strip away the features that don’t need to be there and build something small enough to test properly. Sometimes the most important product decision isn’t what to add, but what to leave out.

Palto is still an experiment, but it’s a working one, and I’d be genuinely interested to hear whether the idea makes sense to people who’ve experienced recruitment from either side.

Try the demo: https://palto-demo.madegrand.co.uk

And if the idea interests you, you can also sign up on the main Palto site: https://palto.co.uk/