Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Obvelum is a private talent marketplace built entirely as a job board where companies apply to you. Instead of candidates endlessly submitting resumes, hiring managers receive anonymous profiles that match their job offers, and pitch candidates directly with compensation ranges upfront.

Most professional networks are designed around public visibility: your profile is discoverable by colleagues, recruiters, and your current employer, job-seeking signals are visible to your network by default unless you trade away platform functionality for privacy, recruiters can contact candidates in bulk at minimal cost, and salary is almost never disclosed upfront.

Obvelum inverts all of that. Your profile is anonymous by default: companies see your skills, experience level, and preferences - not your name, photo, or current employer. Every interview request must include a binding salary range with a maximum 35% spread. Companies pay a credit for each outreach, refunded if you don't reply within 7 days, so there is a real cost to spam and ghosting. You reveal your identity only when you accept an interview.

No. Obvelum is a platform, not an agency. We don't represent you, negotiate on your behalf, or take a placement fee from anyone.

That said, recruitment agencies do use Obvelum alongside direct employers - they post job offers and contact candidates the same way any company does, under the same rules: anonymous profiles, binding salary ranges upfront, and credit-based outreach. If you'd prefer to only hear from direct employers, you can hide your profile from agencies entirely with a single toggle.

Yes. Your profile is anonymous by default. Companies see only your skills, experience level, location preferences, and salary expectations - never your name, contact details, photo, or current employer. You can also explicitly block any specific company from finding you at all, even while remaining visible to everyone else.

There is no profile directory on Obvelum - a company can only see your profile if it matches one of their active job offers. Before you accept an interview request, what they see is limited to: your skills and proficiency levels, your years of experience, anonymous environment tags (such as whether you have experience in Fintech, Big Tech, or Regulated sectors like finance/healthcare), your preferred work location and remote preferences, your minimum salary expectation, and your availability status.

Under our privacy-first model, the platform does not collect personal identifiers like your name, age, gender, or profile photo. The email you register with is strictly used for authentication and account notifications, and is never shared. We use your work history solely to generate aggregate statistics and to map your background to secure, generalized industry tags so companies know you have experience in their sector. Your specific employer names and employment details are never shared, keeping your professional identity fully protected.

Obvelum is completely free for candidates - no premium tiers, no paid boosts, no featured listings. You can browse matching job opportunities, signal interest in roles, and receive interview proposals without paying anything. The cost model is entirely on the company side.

Only verified hiring managers and recruiters from companies approved on the platform. Your profile is never publicly indexed by search engines or visible to general users. You can also set your profile to invisible at any time, or to "open to networking only" to reduce unsolicited outreach.

Yes. You can block any specific company from seeing your profile while remaining fully visible to everyone else. You can also choose to hide from recruitment agencies entirely - keeping yourself visible only to direct employers - and opt out of appearing in paid market research studies.

The company sends you an interview proposal that must include the role title, a binding salary range, and a breakdown of which skills drive which portion of the compensation. You review everything anonymously and choose to accept or decline. If you accept, the interview is scheduled and conducted on the Obvelum platform - where the real conversation and any follow-up questions happen.

For two reasons: a practical one and an increasingly legal one.

The practical reason: salary transparency eliminates the single biggest time-waster in hiring - both sides discovering mid-process that they are far apart on compensation. Every proposal on Obvelum includes a salary range with a maximum spread of 35%, so you know the floor and ceiling before you agree to talk. Companies must also map specific portions of the range to required versus nice-to-have skills, so you can see exactly what your compensation is based on - not a vague number to negotiate from scratch.

The legal reason: salary transparency is becoming mandatory by law. The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970/EU) requires all EU employers to disclose salary ranges before or during recruitment, with a transposition deadline of June 2026. In the United States, California, Colorado, New York, and Washington already require salary ranges in job postings, with more states following. Obvelum's model is designed to meet and exceed these requirements by default.

Obvelum is committed to helping entry-level talent launch their careers. To support this, we have a dedicated first-job matching pathway.

This is the only type of job offer on our platform where we do not require companies to specify a mandatory salary range upfront. We do this to maximize the number of opportunities available for junior candidates and apprentices, ensuring you can easily find that crucial first role to start building real-world experience without entry barriers.

If you accept a proposal and the company goes silent, the platform's reputation system flags it. Companies that ghost candidates lose standing on the platform, which affects their visibility and ability to reach future candidates.

On the other side: if a company sends you a proposal and you don't reply within 7 days, their credit is automatically refunded - so the system is fair in both directions. This built-in cost of ghosting is why Obvelum response rates are significantly higher than traditional job boards.

No - but being a little proactive pays off. You set an availability status that signals your intent without committing to anything, and inbound proposals arrive on your own timeline. That said, Obvelum also surfaces job opportunities that match your profile, and for each one you can see a detailed AI analysis of how well you fit the role before deciding whether to act. If a role genuinely interests you, you can send a Signal to that company - a lightweight expression of interest that costs you nothing and requires no cover letter or application. You can have up to 3 active signals at any time. When a company sees that a candidate has signalled interest in their role, they receive a credit discount to reach out - making it significantly more likely they will contact you first. It is the middle ground between passive and active: you are not applying, but you are telling the right companies that you are open, on your terms.

At least once every 30 days. This is by design: it ensures companies only spend credits reaching out to candidates who are genuinely reachable. If you go inactive, your profile is automatically hidden - not deleted - and becomes visible again as soon as you log back in.

Once you have at least 10 skills on your profile, you can unlock a short AI-generated assessment. The platform randomly selects skills from your profile and generates 2 technical questions per skill, calibrated to your declared proficiency level - Junior, Mid, Senior, Lead, or Expert. Based on your answers, the AI may suggest a different level if your responses point to a different tier.

Importantly, companies always see your declared proficiency level - not the AI suggestion. The assessment exists entirely for your benefit: when you browse matching job offers, Obvelum uses the AI analysis to generate honest insights about your fit, and may flag skills where the AI suggested a different level so you can make a more informed decision about whether to proceed.

If you disagree with the AI's suggested downgrade on a specific skill, you can take a second, non-negotiable assessment of 5 questions for that skill. This final result stands. Your answers are never stored or shared - only the outcome is used to power your personal job-match insights.

Yes. Obvelum provides candidates with full visibility into their alignment. For every matching opportunity surfaced on your dashboard, you can view a detailed AI analysis of your fit before taking any action.

Additionally, the platform calculates a Skill Rarity Score (Common, Uncommon, Rare, or Elite) using semantic clustering to show you exactly how your skill combination stacks up against the active talent pool.

The Skill Rarity Score measures how rare your specific combination of skills is across the active talent pool on Obvelum. It is not just a count of individual skills - it uses semantic clustering to evaluate the intersection of your skill set as a whole. Profiles are classified as Common, Uncommon, Rare (top 15%), or Elite (top 5%).

The rarer your combination, the more prominently you appear in searches for that cluster. The score is computed once the platform processes your completed profile and updates dynamically as the marketplace evolves.

Companies go through a verification process before they can access candidate profiles, including email domain confirmation, website validation, and manual review. Verified companies display a badge on their profile so you can immediately distinguish them from unverified accounts. This gatekeeping is part of what keeps the platform free of anonymous spam and ensures every interview proposal comes from a real, identifiable organisation.

The cost depends on who is paying and what model is involved. If you are a job seeker hiring a reverse recruiting agency to represent you - a person or firm who pitches you to companies and handles your search - these services typically charge candidates between €300 and €2,500 for a packaged service covering resume writing, active outreach, and interview coaching. Some charge monthly retainers of €150-500/month, and some take a success fee on placement.

On Obvelum, candidates pay nothing. The platform's costs fall entirely on the companies that initiate contact. You build a skill profile, the matching engine surfaces relevant job posts with salary ranges, and companies reach out when your skills match their requirements. No agency fee, no retainer, no success fee, no subscription - ever.

Most job boards require you to search by job title, which misses a large portion of roles you are actually qualified for. The same skill set - Python, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure - can qualify you for roles titled Data Engineer, Backend Engineer, ML Platform Engineer, and Site Reliability Engineer depending on the company.

On Obvelum, you do not search at all. You build a skill profile by listing your skills and proficiency levels. The matching engine continuously compares your profile against every active job post and surfaces matches as a percentage score. Companies whose requirements align with your skills can then initiate contact. You see a ranked list of matching opportunities without running a single keyword search - sorted by how well each role aligns with what you actually know.

The most underutilised career insight is the full range of roles your existing skills qualify you for. Most people focus on familiar job titles and miss adjacent opportunities where 70-80% of their skills transfer directly.

Obvelum's Matching Jobs section shows every active job post whose required skills overlap with your profile, scored by coverage. Green means strong alignment - you cover most must-have skills. Amber means you are qualified but have a few gaps. Red means significant gaps. This is a live map of your current market value, updated in real time as new job posts appear. You can also send a Signal to specific roles - a lightweight, anonymous indicator to the company that you would welcome contact.

Standard keyword job search treats "Python" as text that appears somewhere in a job description, matching both "must have 5 years Python at senior level" and "familiarity with Python a bonus" equally. This produces noisy, misleading results.

On Obvelum, skills are canonical, deduplicated entities with defined proficiency levels from junior to expert. Every job post requires specific skills at specific levels. The matching engine checks both presence and level: if your profile lists Python at Senior level, you match roles requiring Senior Python and are correctly ranked lower for roles requiring only Junior Python. Proficiency level is a first-class signal, not a keyword. Build an accurate skill profile and the relevant opportunities surface automatically based on what you actually know and at what level.

Obvelum is designed specifically for this scenario. Your profile is anonymous by default: companies see your skills, experience level, anonymised industry background, and preferences - never your name, photo, current employer, or contact details. There is no public profile directory. A company can only see your profile if their active job post matches your skills, and even then only the anonymised version.

You can also explicitly block your current employer (or any specific company) from finding you entirely - a single toggle that makes you invisible to that company while remaining fully visible to everyone else. Your identity is only revealed at the point you choose to accept an interview request. Until then, your job search is completely invisible to your current employer.

Most job search platforms are built around public or semi-public profiles: your resume is discoverable, applying requires submitting your personal details to the hiring company upfront, and signalling job-seeking intent is often visible to your professional network including your current employer.

Obvelum is built around anonymity as a core principle, not an optional toggle. Your profile is anonymous by default - companies see only skills, experience level, and preferences. There is no public directory. Contact is always company-initiated: they reach out only when their job matches your profile, and they only learn your identity if you accept the interview request. You can block specific companies, including your current employer. Your name, email, and current employer are never visible at any stage of the discovery process.

On Obvelum, you do not apply at all - and your name never appears until you choose to reveal it. The model is inverted: companies contact you based on your anonymous skill profile, not the other way around.

There is one proactive move available to you: you can Signal interest in a specific job post without revealing your identity. When you do, the company sees a Signal badge on your match card and receives a credit discount to contact you. They also know you are a warm candidate - already interested and likely to respond quickly. It is the closest thing to applying that exists on Obvelum, and it costs you nothing.

Before you accept any contact request, the company only sees your skills, years of experience, anonymised industry background (e.g. "worked in Fintech" - employer names are never revealed), salary expectations, location preferences, and availability. You accept or decline each approach anonymously. Your name and identity only become visible at the point you accept an interview and join a video call. You can also block specific companies entirely, preventing them from ever finding your profile in the first place.

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