While building the Atlanta cybersecurity startup Curricula, founder and CEO Nick Santora kept running into one big problem: It’s really hard to find specialized engineering talent.
Curricula had reached an inflection point. The fast-growing SaaS startup needed to hire more people, but the search for that talent was becoming burdensome. Santora was scraping forums, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, and looking through his personal networks to find people.
“Naturally, at this stage we were introduced to a recruiter and talked to several others that were essentially going to be taking a $30,000 commission if they “introduced us” to the candidate we hired,” he told Hypepotamus. “Along the way of our search, our team was getting sent resumes from essentially anyone that just “fit the text search criteria” and this was causing our CTO and our entire team a lot of frustration. We felt (and knew) we were being treated as an afterthought and being told over and over again that we are ‘too picky.’”
Santora said he found a “niche job board” online that had the exact type of talent Curricula needed . The team ended up hiring three engineers from that specific job board for a total of $1,200. Ultimately, the team stopped using recruiters for more specialized engineering roles they needed to fill.
Fixing What’s Broken
“This is a classic story that SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses) continue to face today,” he added. “Now I don’t want this to sound like I am anti-recruiter, I actually think they are very useful in certain candidates for certain types of companies at certain times. We just have to face the facts that hiring processes have changed dramatically in the last few years and that trend will continue as we move into the AI Age.”
Last summer, Curricula was acquired for $22 million by Huntress, a Maryland-based SMB-focused managed security platform. Now Santora is using his hiring and recruiting experience as fuel for launching his next venture, aijobs.com.
Santora said this platform is crucial because just about every company is going to be hiring for AI roles in the near future.“I’m not just looking at the near term hiring problems of today, I’m looking at the millions of new jobs that don’t even exist today. Those will be coming faster than we all think.”
“Right now the world is just focused on hiring AI and machine learning engineers. But that is going to change very quickly over the next several years as each job today will require AI to be a part of it tomorrow. That means product managers, cybersecurity, sales, marketing, accounting, operations, executives, and virtually any job a human does today, will have some type of assistance from AI,” Santora said. “This is exciting, but also we are completely unprepared. With new tools coming out every day, those that are ignoring this AI wave are going to face a very hard reality in their careers over the coming years. I want to help create a bridge with aijobs.com to get the right pipeline built and accessible for every SMB over the next few years.”
Scaling In Our AI World
Santora has a knack for making a seemingly “boring industry” interesting. Curricula took cybersecurity awareness training videos — the ones employees have to sit through and almost always glaze over — and turned them into engaging and custom content.
He wants to do something similar with aijobs.com by making the talent hiring process “inspiring and exciting for everyone involved.”
The platform is set to go live this fall, with Santora adding that the platform will be “completely self-service” so teams can start using the platform without the traditional sales demo process.
“I believe the more we can share about personalized hiring processes and guidance, we can help move hiring processes from being clumsy and inefficient into a more streamlined process. It all starts with better candidates being recruited in this niche category of AI and focusing on having better conversations, better interviews, and better visibility around jobs themselves,” Santora added.
Santora said the platform is specifically focused on SMBs and high-growth SaaS teams, though the platform can also help larger organizations find the right AI talent.
Potential candidates and organizations can sign up and keep up to date with pre-launch announcements. When the platform fully launches this fall, organizations will be able to post a single job for a month or subscribe to post multiple jobs related to the AI space.
Santora said he is also looking to partner with institutes of higher education, engineering bootcamps, and non-profits so that students can find the internships and part-time jobs they need to start their careers in AI.
