How Startup Founders Improve their Hiring Strategies With AI-Driven Solutions

And one more thing also that this applies, this applies to every company really, but this is something that maybe whenever you start to expand your team at first is a big challenge, is planning and onboarding. The onboarding is the most crucial part of every new hire. It's not only stressing for the candidate because they're, you know, joining a new company that they don't know anyone and they need to really get up to speed fast. And they will be able to do that if you have a proper onboarding plan in place and you give them the time that they need to learn what they need to learn, to understand how the company works, and also to understand what they are expected from their day-to-day and what their goals are. So having a proper onboarding is really a game changer and can make a new hire succeed really fast or fail dramatically in the first weeks. I'm super happy and excited to be here. My name is Argentino Molinuevo. I'm General Manager at Athena. Athena is a global talent platform that basically helps companies hire top talent from all over the world using AI. Today I'm gonna walk you through a little bit of what we've been doing over the past years and how we are now implementing AI into our recruitment processes and a few tools and platforms that we've built not only for companies but also for candidates to help them land also jobs anywhere in the world. So Athena is fully— just to give you like a quick context about Athena, we've been running for over 6 years now. We are a fully remote company with Yeah, with employees over, I think, over the 5 continents, but pretty much all over the world. We are over 70 people right now, and we've recently launched a few AI tools that helps both companies and candidates. So I am going to be sharing my screen in a moment. Here we go. I hope everyone is seeing it, otherwise just jump in and let me know. Um, but yeah, today's session is about how startup founders can improve their hiring strategies with AI-driven solutions. So basically it all starts with an HR struggle. So over the past years there has been an increasingly difficult in, difficulty in finding technical talent, software engineers, and also niche roles. And this gets even worse if you are limited to hiring within a country or within a city, because obviously the talent is way limited if you are approaching that strategy. There's also a need for companies to cover different markets. This is whether for business development goals and different time zones, that this could be for working around the clock or for, for example, customer support. If you want to have extended hours of customer service or even 24/7, having your team distributed between different time zones is a game-changing strategy. There's also another struggle with recruitment processes by themselves, hiring has become really a very long and difficult process in every company. And this is even more if you don't have a dedicated team or a dedicated partner that is specialized in doing recruitment. And this, this is a big struggle that usually founders and early-stage startup have that they don't have the teams and they don't have the time to run job searches because they need to run their businesses, of course. So there's a huge problem in that and finding the right talent. And there is also budget and headcount limitations. Obviously, the past years have been quite of a slowdown in the economy in general, and that obviously brings budget being way limited and wallets being quite stretched. So the strategy of going abroad and to try to hire internationally brings a lot of solutions to address this problem. So basically the solution that we wanted to share here is building global teams, so going internationally, and hiring people anywhere in the world. This has plenty of benefits. The first one, and in my opinion, the most important one, is accessing to a vast global talent pool. So you are not limited to hiring a specific place. You can just go out anywhere in the world and find the right person that you need for that specific role with that, those specific skills and that specific background. The second one is that if you want to expand into different countries, you may need your team to be based where your customers are. And maybe if you wanna go to another continent to sell it, to sell your product or your service, you're gonna need someone to be based near your customers to be able to, yeah, to make sure that they are well attended. There's also another benefit in terms of enriching your company culture. You are, you would be onboarding people from a different culture with a different point of view, and that always brings like new points of views to companies and new ways of doing things, which is great. And the last one, which is also huge, is the economic benefits that this could bring if you also leverage countries where the cost of living is lower than where your headquarters are. And this doesn't mean paying low salaries. This actually means for companies saving lots of money, lots of, um, in annual salaries compared to hiring locally, but at the same time providing your talent pool with a very competitive, um, salary and overall a very competitive offer compared to what they could what they could access locally. So that's why Athene exists, basically to connect these two dots. We are also, as I said, we've been on, on the talent acquisition industry for over 6 years now. And now we are implementing AI technology into our process. So this makes that our process start to go way faster because we're using AI matching algorithms to make sure that We get all the data that we can from our talent pool. At the same time, we deeply understand what our client or what the companies are looking for based on a job description, and we make that match instead of in weeks or months, in just a few days. And at the same time, we leverage specific countries, like I said, with like emerging economies that offer our clients massive savings in terms of salaries. So where is our talent located? Where we get— we can actually source anywhere, but we do source mostly on some specific regions. One is Latin America, not only South America but also Central America. Because it works really good with US time zones. You can get full overlap with Eastern hours and also with Pacific time as well, but also with most European countries. So you got at least 4, 5, 6 hours of overlap with both continents. We also source in Africa, obviously has full overlap with most countries in Europe, but also with some countries in I mean, with US business hours as well. And we also source in Southeast Asia, which also gives really good alignment to Australia, to New Zealand, and also provides for companies looking for, for example, 24/7 customer service. Instead of having your teams working during your nights, you can have just people based on the other side of the world working during their regular hours and being, yeah, super providing a really good customer service or any role that they could be working on. Why do we source in these countries? Not only because of the cost of living, but also because of the skills and the quality of the talents that we can find there. These countries not only have major corporations with local branches like Google, like Meta, like Salesforce, or Amazon, but they also have a very strong startup ecosystem with unicorns and with massive companies that were born in South America or in Africa or in Southeast Asia. And you got really talented people coming from those companies. Some examples are Rappi, that is a Latin American unicorn, Uber as well, WeWork, another Mercado Libre, which is the Latin American Amazon. So plenty of high-quality talent available in all these countries. So it makes really a win-win for companies and for candidates as well to explore opportunities outside of their, of the countries where they live. So what are Athena's main advantages? So the first one would be the access to all this talent pool. Obviously, you can always try to source on your own. But if you don't have the— first, if you don't have the dedicated team, and then if you don't have the expertise in hiring abroad, it's really hard to understand where to source, what are the best companies where you need to look for talent, what are the typical salaries, what is the typical benefits that companies offer locally. You really need to understand who you're talking to, and if you don't have someone that is an expert in doing this local sourcing is gonna be really challenging. We have local teams in most of these regions, so we really understand what the talent pool is looking for and we are able to do like a very strong approach and a strong communication with all our talent pool. We also are able to source for any type of role from technical, but also marketing, finance, product, operations. We got specific recruiters with deep expertise on their field, and we also know how to approach to each of these talents. They are not using the same channels, or it's not as easy to source for a paid ads marketer than an AI engineer. You need to use different channels and different, different ways of communicating. And we know really how to leverage all those channels. By using our new AI technology, we can really find— so we get a huge talent pool that we nurture every single day and every single week with new talent. And obviously doing this sourcing and going over hundreds or even thousands of CVs manually, it can take weeks or even months. By using our technology, we can really scrap and read all our talent pool skills and find the best shortlisted candidates for every specific role in a matter of days. And we also offer not only the sourcing and the, and the recruiting side, but a 360 service. So we cover up to the payroll stuff, up to the payroll end. So we make sure that candidates get paid through us and also provide our, our customers with dedicated customer success teams that will make sure that the talent is performing fine, their relationship is going well, and we do this to ensure long-term relationships with both customers and our talent pool. So as I said, we started in the talent acquisition industry for a few years now. And we understood that as recruiters, we have like two, two types of users or two types of customers. We got on one side, the companies that are looking for talent to hire, but we also have candidates that are looking for their new role, their new opportunity. And we need to help them both. We need to communicate with them both and try to find the best fit and the best match between companies and candidates. So obviously for candidates looking for a new role, it's a full-time job. And that means applying to lots of, and hundreds of roles, going through dozens of interviewing processes at the same time. And that obviously takes a lot of time. And since most of them already have an ongoing job, it's kind of challenging and When someone makes the decision of going out to the market and finding a new opportunity, it usually takes months, but we have developed a new tool here that helps them do this really efficiently and very effectively. It's called AVA. It's a Chrome extension for LinkedIn. So basically today AVA has 3 main solutions. The first thing is optimizing our candidates' LinkedIn profiles. So obviously LinkedIn has become the main network and the main social network to go out and look for your new role. But LinkedIn has become also challenging and has every week more requirements to make your profile stand out from the rest and to boost your visibility to recruiters. And one of those is having your LinkedIn profile optimized as much as you can. This means having a profile picture, of course, a banner, skills, endorsements from previous employers, KPIs within your, your past experiences. So AVA analyzes your whole LinkedIn profile and suggests you with improvement, improvement items so that you can make sure that your profile will always be the ones with most visibility to recruiters and the ones that stand out from the rest. The second thing that Ava does is basically tailoring your resume to the specific role that you are applying for. So right now it's really kind of impossible to use your same CV to apply for hundreds of different roles because they're not going to be exactly the same role, although they might be within the same department, but the skills needed for different roles in different companies will not be the same. And again, in order to stand out from the rest of the candidates, you need to make your CV tailored to that company and to that specific job. Obviously, doing that once or twice, it's fine, but if you want to do this 100 times, it's going to take lots of hours and weeks and even months. So Ava does this in a few seconds and makes you tailor every application that you do specific to that, to that opening. And the last one is it offers you an AI job matching score. So whenever you want to apply to a role on LinkedIn, it scraps the job description. It also reads your LinkedIn profile and it tells you how close or far away you are in terms of what the role requires and what you are offering in terms of your skills and your background, and shows you where the improvements can be done. That's on the candidate side. Then there's the other side that is for companies. So basically, we can, by doing this, we obviously grow our talent pool a lot because Thousands of hundreds, yeah, thousands of candidates are using this on a daily basis. And this is also a sign for us when candidates are looking for a change, which at the same time, they will not be available forever. They will be available for a few months until they find whatever role they're looking for. And then they are out of the market for ideally a few years if everything works well. So you need to be really fast. And we built the client-facing site. Right now, it's a tool that we are using ourselves to source the best matching talent based first on the job description that every client shares with us. We understand the skills that they are looking for, the background, the time zone that this person needs to be working on, the English level that this person needs, and then we match this with all our base of candidates that have been nurturing our pool over the past months and our past year, our past years. By doing this, we can find a shortlist of 4, 5, 6 candidates that we can quickly reach out to them because we know they're active. We do them an interview ourselves, and if we find a good fit there, we automatically endorse this to Our Italian, usually our time to endorse is 5 days. So you can get a sense of the speed of the, of how this technology is working right now. And we've also built our own platform. So basically, whenever a company starts to search for a candidate, we meet with them, we understand exactly what they're looking for, then we go out to to our pools and do this sourcing using AI. And whenever we find a good match, we use our own platform to endorse the shortlisted candidates and to share all the information and all the skills that we've vetted over our process with our clients. So we get from English tests to coding tests to how they behave during an interview. We will share everything within the same platform, and this obviously is super easy for companies and for clients to go through the CVs and afterwards move to their interviews as well. So basically, we cover both the candidate needs whenever they are looking for a job and what our clients are looking for and do the matching in a few days to make sure that we are finding high-quality talent in, in, in countries where at the same time the cost of living is really cost-effective. So as I said, that this would be an example of what it would look like to hire, as an example, a senior frontend engineer in the US. So an annual salary would start at least in $110K, if not more. And then there are plenty of other employer costs that you need to consider. If we go out, for example, for the US, South America works really, really well, like I said, in terms of time zones. So you would be working with someone 8 hours a day in the same time zone as, as you are. And typically what the annual cost would look like it's around $50,000-$55,000. So you get over 50% of savings there. Another example would be a video editor. In the US, typical annual salaries are around $70,000. You can get someone for half of that cost in South America. And the same for accountants. Typical accountant salaries in the US are around $70,000. $80K, $90K, you can get someone for less than $40K through Athena hiring in the US. And at the same time, like I said, these are seasoned professionals with, for example, with accountants, we can source from major corporations that are accountants super used to working with US GAAP laws and GAAP knowledge. Same for frontend engineers, any technology we're able to source and to provide technical tests before meeting our clients to make sure that they have the coding skills that they require. And as I said, this would— this is a— going globally right now is a competitive advantage, and companies that started to understand this are really seeing the benefits. We work with from early-stage startups to Fortune 100 companies, and whenever companies start working with us, they quickly start growing their teams because they see the value immediately. And that's why I wanted to bring this to you guys. I don't know if you are already working with this, with remote teams, or maybe you're remote but you are based in a specific country. So Thank you for listening. Any questions, any comments, any doubts regarding global hiring, I'm here and I would love to address any questions that the audience may have.

Thank you, Argentino, for the amazing presentation. It was very insightful. We have a couple of questions here from the audience. Let's take them. Just a second.

Absolutely.

So let's start with Emilia's question. And she's asking, do you do co-founder matching on Athena?

Oh, that's a, that's a very niche one. But yeah, we can definitely go out and source, I would say, people with that have been co-founders in the past. Like I said, for example, South America has a really strong startup ecosystem. There are plenty of VC-backed startups. And like most startups, a lot of those fail, but you get really interesting talent that has experience in the past and that have this entrepreneurial spirit. This is very common in, in Argentina. So if you're looking for a co-founder, I would say this would be a first one for us. But there's definitely talent in South America for, with like co-founding experience or even with co-founding spirit because it's not just a matter of finding that background, but it being a co-founder. I'm not a co-founder, but I know what founding a company requires. You need like to have a very strong mindset and very strong resilience. And that's something that we can definitely do in Athena.

Yeah, definitely. That would be really a great feature you can add on Athena. So we have another question here from KS. How detailed is the match report of the fit between a job description and a resume?

Yes. So in our platform, you will see a specific score that is going to be based not only on the job description and the, on what the talent's CV and background looks like, but also has input from our own interviewing notes. So we always do an initial vetting of all our candidates to make sure that after we deeply understand what our client is looking for, we make sure that they are the best. Obviously, we present a shortlist of 3, 4, or 5 candidates. But we do this matching both using AI, but also using this human touch that is also super important when doing any talent acquisition process.

Interesting. Thanks, Argentino. So we have a question here from Dan. And he's told you, thanks for the presentation. Could you describe how Athena differs from Top Talent and Upwork?

Yeah. So typically Toptal and both Toptal and Upwork, although they're very different in terms of pricing, uh, but they mostly focused on project-based or consultancy, uh, roles, like for a few hours doing a specific project. We could do that, but we mostly focused on full-time roles, full-time and long-term roles. So whenever someone wants to hire a software engineer or a digital marketer or a finance manager, these are positions to be covered full-time and long-term. So that's our main difference, which usually Toptal and Upwork don't really do. Good.

Thank you. Another question from Emilia here. She's asking, what's the difference between your approach, AI, and LinkedIn job search algorithm?

So LinkedIn Jobs, we try it quite a lot, the job search. The difference here is that we don't bring yet best results for candidates. We let the candidates use the LinkedIn algorithm to find job searches But then we tell them how to optimize their LinkedIn profile to make sure that they are standing out from the rest. So a job role that receives 100 or even 200 or 300 applications, the recruiter is never going to go over through all of those applications. They're gonna pick the ones that for some reason LinkedIn tells you that they are the best performing ones. So they are gonna be limited to 10 or 20 or maybe 30. By using Ava, our candidates will make sure that they will be scored high whenever the hiring manager looks for those applications because they, the, we will be suggesting small changes using keywords, using vocabulary that the job search uses to make sure that they are a really good fit between both of them. And that your CV stands out from the rest and you can at least nail your first interview. Then obviously it's up to each candidate and it's up to the hiring manager and everything. But the first step is always nailing that first interview and we help job seekers to do that.

Mm-hmm.

Good.

Great. So we have another question here from Halilovic. Please guys, write your questions in the Q&A section. Just not in the chat. This way it's easier to put them on screen. So, um, asking, hello, I'm funding an AI-based startup trying to raise funds. What is your best advice for attracting the right team members when you are in the initial phases?

That's a great question. Um, the first thing that I would say it's very important for companies to do is to really understand what are they looking for. What is specifically the role that they're looking for? What are the skills that you're looking for? Because especially when you're early stage, um, companies tend to fall into generalistic roles or a jack of all trades that knows a little bit of marketing and maybe a little bit of sales and a little bit of project management. And those are the cases where you cannot find a person with all that relevant experience at the same level in all those fields. And it's very important to be precise in your job description. All right, I'm going to be focusing on— if this is an AI, um, and you're looking for an AI engineer, all right, really understand if this is going to be a full-time job, really understand what, what are the backgrounds that you need for this person to make sure that you are being matched with the most close fits for that role and you are not being vague in your, in your requirements and being matched with maybe candidates that are not necessarily the best fit for that. So being precise, I would say, is the number one thing that companies need to do when they start doing their first hires.

Makes sense.

And one more thing also that this applies, this applies to every company really, but this is something that maybe Whenever you start to expand your team at first is a big challenge, is planning and onboarding. The onboarding is the most crucial part of every new hire. It's not only stressing for the candidate because they're, you know, joining a new company that they don't know anyone and they need to really get up to speed fast. And they will be able to do that if you have a proper onboarding plan. In place and you give them the time that they need to learn what they need to learn, to understand how the company works, and also to understand what they are expected from their day-to-day and what their goals are. So having a proper onboarding is really a game changer and can make a new hire succeed really fast or fail dramatically in the first week.

Makes sense. Yeah. So a question from Varshan was asking, thanks, Argentino, for the great presentation. Does Athena offer hiring for data scientists and machine learning engineers? And what trends, if any, are you seeing globally in data scientists and machine learning roles?

Perfect. First question, yes, we, we offer hiring for data scientists. Scientists and machine learning engineers, there's the biggest trend that we're seeing now is the massive growth in the demand that these type of roles are having, obviously, because AI is growing really, really fast. AI startups are growing really, really, really fast. And since this is a new technology, there's not enough talent with this experience. So the first trend that we're seeing is that companies are really starting to look all over the world to find this talent. They don't even care where they are based. They don't even care if they're at the other side of the world and they can just overlap 1 or 2 hours a day because the talent pool for those niche roles is really limited. And it's gonna be a major advantage if you start going— if I understood, this person was based in the US. So if you start considering hiring abroad, it's going to be a major advantage.

Yeah, thank you. Okay, so we have a question from Dan asking, what services does Athena provide to the candidates? Growth, knowledge, health insurance, etc., or did I miss the candidate is directly hired by the employing company?

So we can do both, really. We can do the company hiring directly the the talent, but with most of our clients, we work with us as the employers. So basically, we work together with the client. We want to make sure that the relationship goes on for, uh, on a long term. So we want to make sure that the talent is really engaged and not only performs well but is taken care of. So our customer success team is really in constant communication, not only with our, with the client, but also with the talent to make sure that performance is met, onboarding is doing fine, and the relationship runs smoothly. But we always want to work together with the client to see what do you provide to your, let's say, on-site team or your local team from Israel in this case. All right, why don't we offer just the same benefits to this talent and we can just you know, pass the benefits in full to them to make sure that they feel part of your company because they really are. They will be working with you every day, every single week. So we just, our goal there is to make sure that the talent is very engaged and stays together for a long time.

Thank you, Argentino. We have like a couple of questions here about the visa and the relocation. So I guess there's confusion here. So let's take this question, uh, first from Yesenia. It's asking, can Athena help you find jobs for professionals that want to move to the US?

Yeah, at the moment we don't really do that. Uh, I think there are some companies that— this is kind of super niche because you, you need the company to provide some sort of visa sponsorship and all that that, yeah, that stuff we, so we, for now we don't really do that. And it's not on our roadmap as well, just to, for full transparency.

Yeah, because there are also questions about do you offer visa sponsorship and so on.

No, we don't.

Okay, cool.

Not our game.

Yeah. So let's take a question here. KS again is asking how many candidates does your database currently have?

So right now we have over 100,000 talents and we obviously do lots of marketing efforts and recruitment efforts to keep this base growing. So yeah, it's right now it's at 100,000 and it's growing every single month.

That's impressive.

Cool. Because at the same time, it's important to keep your base nurturing all the time because as I mentioned earlier, candidates are available for a short period of time. So maybe you have, I don't know, 50,000 in your base, but none of them are available because they are happily working for other companies or they start doing a job search and they are available for a few weeks or a few months, but then they, again, they go out of market. So it's really important to keep growing your base consistently.

Yeah, correct. Okay, so we have a question from Muhammad, uh, and he's asking, can we hire for part-time roles? And for salary matters, are you a mediator?

So it's a good question. Uh, we used to do part-time. We are not really doing that anymore because it's not what our talent pool is looking for. We mostly focus on talents that are looking for full-time opportunities and to do like a full move from their current employer to a new one. And that means they are usually not interested in part-time opportunities. We may have some flexibility with software engineering positions because we know that the demand could be a little bit different, but for most of the roles we We just go with full-time. And sorry, the second one was, second question.

The salary, he's asking, are you a mediator in terms of salary?

Yeah, so we typically have, we understand what typically the market is looking for. So whenever we start a search and we get together with a client, we typically say, all right, the bandwidth based on what you are looking for, the experience, the skills, and the background, typically candidates are around this bandwidth. We validate that with the client and then we go out to the market. We always try to be flexible as we can, but yeah, there's some, we kind of pre-agree this beforehand.

Okay. There's a question that keeps repeating here. I'm gonna, it's about sourcing. How do you source, how do you source talents? How do you recruit? Do you look for universities, LinkedIn, other? So this question is repeating a lot. So can you answer it?

Good one. So we have different channels really. LinkedIn is really strong for us. We got a pretty strong employer brand and lots of followers in our, in our social media on LinkedIn. So we got plenty every time that we post a new role, that is every day really. We got plenty of applicants coming to us, but we also do active sourcing for some roles that could be trickier to find. So obviously some roles require to do like some sort of headhunting or going after the candidates and not just waiting for them to apply. For that, we use LinkedIn. Mostly, but we also use other social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We also have a massive network of ongoing talents that refer other colleagues to us. So yeah, it's a mix of different channels, but it's a little bit of everything.

Cool. So I have a question here from Dan about your business model. Just to remind you guys, you can ask any question about hiring strategies, not just Athena. He's a, he's an expert and that's how he can help you out since you are building your teams. So, um, Dan is asking, do you operate as a two-way marketplace or who do you consider as your client, the employer or the employee?

Good one. Now the client for us is the employer. So the company looking to hire, we're not really a a marketplace, at least not right now. Um, basically what we do is we work with our client, understand what they look for, set a specific average rate for that, and then go after the talent. We don't really charge absolutely anything to any of the talents that we source or any of the talents that we place.

Okay, cool. So I guess the other questions are pretty technical. I don't want to add pretty niche as well. So if you want to ask, ask Argentino more questions, we have the networking lounge just after this session. I'm just going to finish up with one last question from me. And I want to, I would like to ask you for startups since like the audience here are mostly early stage startups. So for those who like looking to scale globally using remote teams, what would be your top What is your top advice for managing recruitment and maintaining operational efficiency for the remote teams?

Great one. I think you really need to have solid communication channels, whatever they are, that they work for every company. In our case, that we are fully remote and fully async, we use obviously Gmail, obviously Zoom and Meet, but we really use Slack for day-to-day communications, for project management. And there's another key tool that in our case is Notion, but any tool that allows you to have documentation. Documentation in any remote company, and even more if you are async, is absolutely crucial for the day-to-day of your teams. Your team needs to access any information about a process, about a policy, about any question that they have at any point. It doesn't matter if it's day, night, or whatever. Everything needs to be documented somewhere. In our case, it's Notion. Uh, we put a lot of effort and a lot of hours into having our Notion well updated with absolutely everything that we need to have there. So, um, that would be like my main recommendation. Have really strong communication channels for your day-to-day and at the same time, like, for, you know, sync communication, but have also channels for remote and async communication and have everything documented in one place.