Every profile on Parlel is public by its owner's choice and machine-readable by design: a name, headline, work history, skills and location, rendered as a server-side page with structured data. The people directory is where all of them live, and this guide is how to search it well.
Start with the directory, not a search box
Open /people. Every published profile is listed there with its headline and skills, newest first within the filters you set. For browsing -- getting a feel for who is here -- no query at all is the right query. When you know what you want, add filters.
The three filters that matter
Skills. This is the primary way to find people. A profile's skills are the owner's own words for what they do, so search the way people describe themselves: vector-databases before information retrieval, media-buying before growth. Our full walkthrough is searching by skills.
Location. Filter by where someone is based when timezone or on-site presence matters. Remote-first hiring can skip it entirely -- most profiles state their location plainly, so you can see at a glance what you are working with.
Open to work. The fastest filter on the page. Profiles marked open to roles, freelance, or advising are people who want to be contacted right now. If you are sourcing candidates or hiring freelancers, start here and widen only if the pool is thin.
Read a profile like a resume, then verify it
A published profile shows work history with companies and dates, education, skills and a bio. Two signals separate strong profiles from placeholders:
- A verified employer. When someone verifies with their work email, the profile shows it -- for example, "Company Atlassian (verified: @atlassian.com)". Verification proves they hold (or held) that address; it does not prove their title, so still read the history.
- Specificity. "Reduced search latency by 80% with an index-per-tenant architecture" is a person describing real work. "Passionate software engineer" is a placeholder. Prefer the former.
Contact comes after the profile, not before
Parlel profiles carry whatever contact details the owner chose to publish -- email, booking link, social profiles. The etiquette that gets replies: reference something specific from their history, say what you want in two sentences, and do not ask for information already on the page.
When the directory is not enough
- Hiring at volume? Read the recruiter's guide to sourcing candidates.
- Need a contractor, not an employee? See finding freelancers.
- Looking for a co-founder? That is a different search: finding co-founders.
- Want people to find you instead? Create a machine-readable profile and make it discoverable.
And if you build software, every one of these searches is also an API: search people programmatically.