Demand and intake

Before someone can be matched to a coach or enrolled in a cohort, they first need to get into the pool for a program. That step is called intake (or “demand” — the two terms describe the same idea from two sides: the program’s demand for participants, and the intake process that fills it).

Intake is deliberately a separate step from matching and enrollment. Once someone is in a program’s pool, matching and the marketplace take over — intake’s job is only to answer the question “who is allowed in, and how did they get here.”

How people get in

There are a few ways a person can enter a program’s pool:

They apply themselves. The person browses available opportunities and submits an application.
They’re nominated. Typically a manager puts someone forward on their behalf.
A mix of both. Some programs accept both self-applications and nominations at the same time.
They’re added directly. For programs that don’t use self-service intake at all, an admin adds participants directly — there’s no open application step.

Intake modes

At a program level, intake is generally set to one of four modes:

Open enrollment — people can apply to join themselves.
Manager nomination — a manager puts a person forward.
Hybrid — both self-application and manager nomination are accepted.
Disabled — no self-service intake path; people are added to the program directly.

These modes are a plain-language reading of two underlying yes/no switches: whether self-application is turned on, and whether manager nomination is turned on. Both on means hybrid; both off means disabled; only one on gives the corresponding single mode.

What’s configurable

For a given program, the intake-related settings that shape the experience include:

Whether approval is required. A program can require that an application or nomination be approved by someone before the person is actually placed into the pool used for matching. Where an approval step is used, it can be a simple single approver or a short chain of approval steps.
The application/intake form. Programs can attach a form that applicants (or the nominating manager) fill out as part of getting in. The applicant-facing version of this is a real, working screen: a candidate opens an application, answers the configured questions (which can be prefilled from information already known about them), can save a draft and come back to it later, and then submits it as their formal application.
A request window, where supported — a defined period during which requests are accepted, as opposed to accepting them continuously.
Automatic follow-through, in some configurations — for example, automatically moving an approved applicant along toward cohort placement rather than requiring a manual step.

Because the deeper mechanics of intake configuration are set up mostly when a program is first created, day-to-day post-launch adjustment of these settings is limited in practice. Treat the above as the intended shape of the feature rather than a promise that every knob is freely editable at any time after a program has launched. Per-role marketplace behavior (for example, whether a specific role’s card uses plain self-application, a gated approval step, or a form-based path) is a separate, more granular concept that sits alongside the program-level intake settings described here.

Where this connects

Intake feeds the eligible pool for a program — the set of people who are allowed to be considered. From there:

The marketplace is where eligible people browse and act on open opportunities.
Matching is the process that pairs an accepted participant with a coach or program role, once they’re in the pool.

Those are both described in their own dedicated pages — this page only covers the “how do people get in” step that comes before them.