Several years ago at my last cybersecurity startup, Curricula, we were experiencing a (great) problem of growth with our very small team. We had hundreds of inbound leads pouring inbound each month. Customers and their needs were growing by the minute. We needed to hire more specialized engineering talent to meet the demand.
As founder and CEO, I was constantly jumping from problem to problem, project to project, and meeting to meeting. I also had the privilege to source talent and recruit for our entire team. Sound familiar to any other startup founders out there?
Naturally I called upon my personal network asking around what everyone else was doing. I got all kinds of different feedback from hiring international contractors for cheap (hard to do in a cybersecurity business) to using recruiters. I would spend nights and weekends searching Linkedin, startup websites, forums, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, you name it. I was constantly on the hunt trying to find people to fill our roles. It was exhausting.
I was told that hiring recruiters can cut down time significantly for hiring. So I did what everyone else advised, hired recruiters to go find talent for us. Seemed simple right?
Niche Job Board vs Recruiter
The recruiters we selected to work with were highly recommended. They even boasted how they have the biggest talent network, in which they would easily be able to fill these positions. Maybe they were accurate on this statement for certain sales positions, but wow they could not have been further off the mark with us. My excitement soon turned into frustration.
Our team felt that their time was being wasted with the quality of candidates they kept sending. When we explained to the recruiters why we couldn’t accept the candidates they kept sending, we were told they were being “too picky.” This blew my mind. I quickly realized their incentives weren't aligned to ours.
Here is where the story gets interesting. In addition to hiring recruiters, we signed up for a niche job board website that specialized in posting jobs for the specific industry talent we were looking for. No fluff, no fancy matching system, no awkward sales rep trying to convince us to sign long term contracts. The platform simply posted our job advertisement on their website which was then seen by many people who had the type of expertise we were looking for.
So I posted our jobs to the niche job board website.
Hiring results
Fast forward and within a couple months, we hired ALL of our engineers specifically from this niche inbound focused job advertisement website. This wasn’t “luck” or great timing. This was what happens when a pure connection is made inside a marketplace that makes sense.
3 job postings cost us $400 each. No fancy questionnaires, no fancy matchmaking, no awkward recruiter calls.
Instead of paying $40,000 in commission fees for EACH candidate we hired, we paid a grand total of around $1,200 to hire 3 top candidates. $1,200 vs $120,000 it would have cost using recruiters.
This was a game changer because as a bootstrapped startup we didn't have the mega VC funding that all of our peers did to quickly toss away $120,000 in the garbage as our only option. Instead every dollar counted for us, just as it does for many businesses across the globe. I believe that message will hit harder and become more relevant as startups and other organizations work through this next decade.
This was my light bulb moment that kept me wondering how I can solve a problem like this for the upcoming AI wave that is coming.
Why create an AI jobs marketplace now?
Millions of jobs will disappear over the next decade. Maybe more. But I strongly believe, along with many others, that millions of new jobs will be created because of AI. Jobs that require a human to be working with AI to be successful, regardless of industry or role.
This new category of jobs are known as: AI Jobs.
While most of the early AI jobs we are seeing today are mostly in product and engineering, that will change over the coming years. Cybersecurity, accounting, marketing, finance, sales, research, support, and almost every other industry will see a change in their workforce.
Humans interacting and working with AI will be the future of work. I am bringing the best minds, companies, and technologies in this world together to help solve some of the most difficult work that lies ahead of us.
I am building a community of leading employers that are hiring for their AI jobs. In addition, we are creating a private AI Talent Network that will be seeking these jobs. Our AI job marketplace will attract a community of AI experts that are serving society through their work, research, insights, and expertise.
The top of funnel AI talent problem no one sees, yet.
Here is the problem we see. When an employer posts their job on their own website, they expect targeted candidate traffic to come pouring in. What ends up happening is a small trickle of unqualified traffic comes in, wasting time and resources. This problem is damaging to the entire recruitment process within an organization.
The current resources to advertise AI jobs are the typical leaning on Linkedin. While LinkedIn is a great platform, great AI talent is leaving because of the constant barrage of recruiters and sales reps cold calling and messaging. The social media giant is generally trying to be everything to everyone. AI needs a focused niche marketplace designed to attract AI talent and AI employers, researchers, students, consultants, and organizations all in one place.
aijobs.com will be that community and marketplace.
We also understand that employers whom rely strictly on cold calling and emailing candidates through an outbound process for AI talent doesn't work either. Sourcing high quality, targeted AI talent is and will continue to be a challenge for organizations and it will never stop.
So the problem most employers have is that hundreds of unqualified candidates are applying to their AI jobs. Their top of funnel fills up with hundreds of useless resumes to have to pick through within their ATS.
I thought there had to be a better way to guide employers on focusing their AI job advertisements to target the right audience of AI candidates at the right time.
What is aijobs.com?
When I set out to build aijobs.com, I was determined to create a worldwide megaphone for showcasing the best AI jobs on the Internet. I wanted to create a marketplace that allows great companies to advertise their AI jobs to an expansive community of top AI industry experts.
What makes aijobs.com different is that we are not a social media platform. We are not human recruiters or a recruiting agency. We’re an AI job advertising platform that helps employers discover, attract, and hire AI talent for their AI jobs. Our mission is to help employers with a simple and less costly way to attract AI talent for their AI jobs.
Our platform utilizes a series of SEO and data structuring techniques to help our members run more effective AI job advertisements that get discovered on our talent network across the Internet. In addition, our private AI talent network continues to grow every day, which provides direct matchmaking capabilities to find top AI talent amongst the AI workforce. Our platform then sends candidates directly to your application page or ATS to apply.
That means as soon as you post your AI job advertisements to our platform, you’ll start gaining global exposure in our AI job marketplace.
For AI talent, your information is kept private. We don’t allow recruiters or organizations to see your profile. As we continue on our mission, we will continue to release new tools that will make finding your next AI career a reality.
I invite you to join our AI job community and support our mission to create a better future together working with AI.
-Nick Santora
CEO aijobs.com