It does not predict
Screening scores rank evidence against a role. M&A scores rank evidence of a transaction. Neither is a calibrated probability, and neither is described as one anywhere in the product.
About
Built by a recruiter, for the seat he already pays for.
Slate is built by a recruiter who needed a two-person shop to run at a team's volume without risking the account it runs on, and it is written the way it is built: every decision carries its reason.
Where it came from
Slate started as one person's answer to a spreadsheet. A life-sciences recruiter with a LinkedIn Recruiter Lite seat, a partner reviewing candidates, and a day that ran out before the search results did. The bottleneck was never finding people. It was reading three hundred profiles carefully enough to say which twelve were worth a call, and doing it again next week for a different role.
So the first thing built was not a sourcing tool. It was screening: a seniority ladder read from verbatim titles, scored against the role rather than against a keyword list, with the reasoning kept next to the verdict so a client could be shown why someone was cut. The collector came second, because a shortlist is only useful if there is something to shortlist, and because a recruiting account is not replaceable and a tool that risks it is worse than no tool at all.
How it is built
- Evidence over inference. Every sourcing and screening decision is traceable and correctable. Spend is priced, freshness is dated, and a missing end date never becomes an assumed “still there.”
- Two people, no team. The product keeps a small shop operating at a volume a team would normally need, without adding process a small shop does not need.
- Protect the account. Pacing, the daily budget and the canary are first-class constraints, never traded for speed.
- Merge, never destroy. A candidate's stage and data only gain information across re-imports. Nothing regresses and nothing is silently overwritten.
- Rigor is the brand. The reasoning behind a decision is part of the product, not a comment somebody deletes later.
Limits, stated
What Slate does not do.
It does not run your account for you
You sign in to LinkedIn yourself, on your own machine. Slate has no LinkedIn accounts and never will. It does not bypass a login, a checkpoint or a second factor, and it stops when it meets one.
It does not send outreach you did not approve
Drafts are drafts. Nothing leaves the product without a person approving that specific message, and every address carries a suppression list that outranks any campaign.
Where this is going
The durable version of this product runs on approved integrations and licensed data rather than on a browser session. We intend to pursue approved LinkedIn Talent Solutions integrations and licensed data sources as they become available to a company of this size. That is a direction, not a present-tense claim: today the Collector runs on your machine, on your seat, under your own agreement with LinkedIn.
The company directory behind Slate M&A is already the other half of that strategy: licensed, non-LinkedIn data, with every signal carrying the URL it came from.
Onboarding is by hand. There is no self-serve signup yet. Every workspace is set up personally, which is slower for us and better for you while the product is this young. The form takes a minute.