How Pallet uses ParaAI to hire high-bar engineering talent

Pallet builds an AI logistics workforce that eliminates the manual back-office workflows still running global supply chains.

Logistics workflows are still fragmented across spreadsheets, email, and PDFs. Pallet unifies these data streams into a single platform where AI agents take over execution, reducing manual work and saving customers millions.

Pallet recently raised a $27M Series B led by General Catalyst and rapidly scaling the team to meet demand.

The Challenge: An extremely high talent bar and a customer backlog

Scaling quickly became the number one priority for Pallet. They knew the demand was there but hiring quickly became a bottleneck. Customers were in the backlog and every day they delayed so did the revenue attached to them.

Grace Turner, Head of Talent, was the only recruiter at the time meaning all the pressure fell on her. She had to get creative with options - a $100K referral bonus, exploring aquihiring YC companies, scraping Luma events for AI engineers, leaning on personal networks. Every tactic was labor-intensive and hard to sustain alone. When Grace ran the numbers, she found it took 95 intro calls to produce a single hire.

The top of funnel wasn't just thin - it just didn’t hit the bar.

Many team members were former founders or came from companies like Google and DoorDash. Technical interviews were intentionally rigorous.

“In the AI space, the bar has to be really high, especially we're working with logistics operations. So if our product breaks, then our customers don't get the delivery on time, and that could be a huge revenue loss for them.”

Grace needed a more scalable, sustainable solution and fast.

The Solution: Paraform’s ParaAI matching agents learned exactly what she was looking for

Paraform gave Grace two things she couldn't get from traditional agencies: ease of use and precision.

Paraform's marketplace was a one-stop shop, where everything lived in one place, integrated directly with her ATS and fit naturally into her existing workflows.

Paraform’s network of specialized recruiters generating 50–60% more candidate volume.

But the bigger unlock was ParaAI, Paraform's AI candidate matching system. Each day, ParaAI analyzes every open role on the platform - the job description, the intake call transcript, who the hiring manager has interviewed, who they have passed on and why - and surfaces the strongest candidate profiles directly to Grace.

Before ParaAI, Grace was receiving three to six candidate applications per week. With ParaAI, Grace was checking her matches every morning - she even added a daily calendar reminder to make sure she didn't miss them. The profiles were more precisely calibrated than anything coming through traditional channels: ex-founders, founding engineers from well-backed startups, exactly the profile she needed for Pallet's hardest-to-fill roles. The more the hiring team interacted with the matches, the sharper the recommendations became.

“We were able to find these hidden gems through Paraform that we wouldn't have found otherwise.”

The Results: 4 hires - half from ParaAI matches.

Pallet made four hires through Paraform - three Product Engineers, one Senior/Staff Platform Engineer. Two of those four came directly through ParaAI Matches.

"Every hire that we make lessens the burden on our current team, but also helps us elevate and scale our product. Having that person there even three months earlier is a complete game changer.”

In Pallet's model, headcount and revenue are tightly coupled - each new hire directly expands their ability to bring customers live and deliver on the product.

Paraform has allowed Grace to keep the recruiting team lean - absorbing the sourcing function without adding headcount. Pallet has since designated Paraform as their agency of choice for all roles going forward, with the full recruiting team now on the platform and the Paraform team embedded in their Slack as an extension of the talent function.

“Having Paraform at that time was like super crucial for the business but also for my sanity.”