Because Palantir’s recruiting efforts are prolific, they spam engineers with emails and inmail, they spend tons of resources recruiting from college campuses with internships and swag. It’s hard to agree that anyone really has to seem out Palantir because I’m sure they’ve already been in contact.

Imagine you just got laid off. You apply for unemployment, update your resume, load up Indeed, type your biggest skill into the search bar, and apply to every company in your area that you even remotely think you may be qualified for.

Palantir bites. In fact, Palantir is the first one to bite. You make it through the interview process and get an honest-to-goodness offer, few other companies are talking to you, and of those few, they're just now doing their initial phone screen. What do you do: take the offer or see if one of those phone screens pans out? Oh, and in most states if you decline a job offer, you lose your unemployment. If you decide to gamble and wait, you're gambling that you'll get an offer from someone else before rent comes due. Are you really willing to take that risk?

Now let's throw in another twist: you've got a family. And let's even be generous here and say you've got a few other leads at or very close to the offer stage, so it's not like you're going to end up on the streets for nonpayment of rent. But all of your other leads pay so much less that your children's lives will be noticeably affected. You may not like what Palantir does... but are you willing to tell your kids that Christmas is cancelled and you have to move to a much smaller house in a different part of town thus ripping them away from all their friends at school?

Because they pay a lot of money and offer absurd perks. Three meals a day, onsite laundry and haircuts, etc. People like money and free stuff.