Loading page
Where it came from
A company of forty people typically runs an applicant tracking system for permanent roles and a freelance marketplace for everything else. Neither knows the other exists.
The consequences are mundane and constant. A designer who contracted brilliantly for six weeks applies for the staff role and arrives as a stranger, because the two records live in different products. Finance reconciles subscription invoices against marketplace payouts by hand. A recruiter cannot answer “who have we already worked with?” without opening two tabs and trusting their memory.
On the other side of the same transaction, a person maintains two profiles that describe one career. The employment one hides the freelance work in case it reads as unfocused; the freelance one hides the staff job in case it reads as unavailable. Both are incomplete on purpose, and the incompleteness costs them work.
The decision
Discover, express interest, evaluate, commit. That sequence describes a permanent hire as accurately as it describes a fortnight of design work — the artefacts change name, the shape does not. Once you accept that, the second system stops being justifiable.
01
A job and a project are both listings. They share the search index, the alerts, the saved views and the categories, so a person who is open to either sees both in one place.
19 live now
02
An application and a proposal are the same gesture with different attachments. Both carry the profile, the portfolio and the answers to whatever the poster asked.
28 awaiting a reply
03
One pipeline runs both. Stages, screening, interviews and scorecards do not care whether the outcome is a salary or a statement of work.
How we build it
Written down because they are the ones that get expensive to keep.
Every application shows the employer's real pipeline and the stage it is on, to the candidate as well as the recruiter. A rejection names its reason. Silence is a design failure, not a policy.
Applying to a job is free forever, because a CV in an inbox costs nobody anything. Sending a freelance proposal costs credits, because an unread inbox is what kills a marketplace. The only percentage we take is on money that has already been approved.
Search, messaging, notifications, saved items, files, reviews and billing are one implementation each. A feature added for the employment side arrives on the freelance side the same day, because there is no second side.
Released milestones, role changes, moderation decisions and account suspensions are written to an audit log. A closed account cannot erase a contract someone else is party to.
How it pays for itself
A marketplace's incentives are set entirely by where its revenue comes from, so it is worth being blunt about ours.
Organizations pay a subscription or buy listings one at a time. Featured placement is a one-off upsell that changes ranking and is labelled as such. Talent Pro at $12 a month and the credit packs beside it are the only things a person can ever pay for, and both are optional — applying to a job is free and unlimited without them.
The fifth line is the 10% we retain when a freelance milestone is released. It is charged at the moment a client approves delivered work, never when the money is funded and never when a proposal is sent. If the work is disputed and returned, no fee is taken. That timing is the whole point: we are paid when the marketplace worked, not when someone merely tried to use it.
There is no fee on a salary, no revenue from advertising, no analytics script on this site and nothing for sale that was collected from an application.
What we will not do
Each of these would make money. Each would also change what the product optimises for, which is the reason it is on this list instead of in the roadmap.
Placement fees are why job boards optimise for churn. Hireek charges for the listing or the plan and takes nothing from the hire itself, so the incentive to keep a role open forever does not exist.
Featured placement moves a listing up a results page and is labelled where it appears. It never rewrites what a search considers a match.
An application belongs to the organization it was sent to and nobody else. There is no aggregate candidate database for sale, and no employer can see where else you applied.
A subscription cancels from the same screen it started on and runs to the end of the period already paid for. There is no retention call and no hidden downgrade path.
Try the argument
Open a profile and send an application this afternoon, or open a workspace and post a brief. The same account does both, and switching costs nothing.
Hireek is a demonstration product running on seeded data. Every figure on this page — including the 76 applications and $7,800 released from escrow — is queried from Postgres as the page renders, and none of it is rounded up.
44 in evaluation
04
The step that costs money. An offer becomes a hire; a proposal becomes a contract that funds its first milestone into escrow before work starts.
6 committed
Most of the platform sits at evaluate at this moment — 44 records across both lanes. That is not a metaphor for the two lanes converging; it is one query counting rows in one table per step.