From picking your skills to meeting the right person — here's how Piaar works in plain language, and what you control at every step.
The first thing Piaar asks isn't your job title. It's your skills — specifically, three to ten you can teach or help with, and three to ten you'd love to learn or hire for. These are the two sides of every profile.
Skills are pulled from a curated catalog that's growing with the user base. If yours isn't there, you can propose it — a small flag marks it as "custom" while we review it. Custom skills don't count toward matching until they're promoted into the catalog, usually within a week.
Almost every other platform asks you what you do. Piaar asks what you have AND what you need. That second question is what makes a real fit possible — your matches are scored on how well their offered skills cover the skills you’re looking for, so when the score is high, the conversation actually happens.
When your profile is set, the matching service runs one query: the skills you're looking for against everyone else's offered skills. It measures how well each person's offers cover what you asked for. When someone else opens the app, the same thing runs from their side — so what you see is always framed by what you're looking for.
The match is semantic, not keyword. "Machine Learning" finds people who offer "Deep Learning", "AI Engineering", or "Neural Networks". You wouldn't treat those as unrelated, and neither does the engine.
The engine understands skills by meaning: an exact skill counts most, a close neighbour counts a little less, and an unrelated skill barely counts at all. The exact scoring model is proprietary — but for any match we show you, we can tell you which of your looking-for skills it came from, on request. That's the EU AI Act commitment, not a feature flag.
Every match comes with a score from 0 to 100. The score reflects one thing: how well a person's offered skills cover the skills you're looking for. Nothing else feeds the number — not distance, not how recently someone was active, not how many followers they have.
Scores below 40 are filtered out before they reach you. You won't see "12 match" cards. If there isn't a real skills reason to surface someone, we don't.
80+ · their offers cover almost everything you asked for
60–79 · solid overlap on most of your skills
40–59 · partial overlap, still worth a look
The exact scoring model is part of what makes Piaar work, so we keep it proprietary. What we commit to instead: distance decides whether someone appears (they must be inside your radius), never how high they score; no one can pay to rank higher; and you can request a plain-language explanation of any score on your profile, any time.
Home, Discover-list, and Discover-map are three different ways of looking at the same underlying match results. They don't run separate queries. Change the radius in Discover, the Home digest refreshes on next return.
Piaar deliberately isn't a "match" or "swipe" product. The connection model is a ladder:
Message is the lighter ask. Connect is the bigger one. The product makes the hierarchy clear so you don't accidentally do the wrong one.
Three controls are live now, all reachable from Account settings or directly from a profile or chat.
When off, you don't appear in any other user's match results, list, or map. You can still browse others. This is enforced at the query layer — not the UI layer — so a non-discoverable user is never accidentally rendered to anyone else.
When off, your location is obfuscated to a ~200 m grid square for map display. The matching service still uses your real location for radius math (otherwise distance wouldn't make sense), but pins snap to grid centers, and the profile shows "around 3 km" instead of "2.7 km".
Blocking someone hides you both from each other everywhere — search, list, map, and matches — and deactivates any conversation between you, on both sides. The other person is never told they were blocked. You can also report a user directly from a chat or profile, and manage your blocked list in Account settings.
Anyone can create a meetup and invite people by skill. Conference and trade-show organizers get an organizer plan with more: branded event pages, resources attendees open in-app (flyer, schedule, floor plan), skills-matching between guests, and a post-event report.
After the event, the organizer sees how many new connections and skill-matches it created, invitations sent, and the top skills in the room — the networking outcome most events can never measure. Organizer plans are for businesses and invoiced directly; individual use stays free.
Once two people have agreed to meet, Piaar helps with the last few metres. After both sides accept, a short-range Bluetooth handshake gives a simple reading of whether you're getting closer to each other — useful in a busy venue.
This never sends your GPS location to the other person. It uses only Bluetooth signal strength, runs only while you're actively looking, and asks for the Bluetooth permission in the moment — nothing runs in the background.
Set up takes under three minutes. Matches arrive the same day.