As CEO of a growth-stage cybersecurity company, recruiting and retaining talent is my number one priority. In a competitive field like cybersecurity, that uses machine learning as a key technology, making sure we have the right people on the team is vital to our success. The best way to do that is to recruit globally.
Some context: Plurilock, builds cybersecurity software for the most security-conscious organizations on the planet. These organizations include governments, militaries, banks, power plants, and financial institutions to protect against insider threats.
The product, BioTracker, recognizes and authenticates people based on their behavior – literally the way a person types or moves their mouse is enough to identify them in real-time. This is done using machine learning that compares discreet slices of human behavior against a known profile and decides whether or not they represent a threat.
To say that we need smart, passionate individuals working to improve our technology is an understatement. Our talented and savvy tech team has well over 100+ journal articles in publications like IEEE, as well as multiple patents and PhDs within our ranks.
And as you can guess, experts in this field are hard to come by in the continuously evolving field of cybersecurity.
Our development office is located in Victoria BC, a 20-minute float plane ride (no security!) away from downtown Vancouver. Tech is the largest sector in the area and includes major names like Amazon, HP, Fujitsu, as well as a host of homegrown firms. We supplement the base of tech talent by recruiting the very best data scientists, many of who have completed their PhD and post-doctoral work in this field.
In the early days, 100% of our staff members were immigrants to Canada. That multiculturalism and strong influence from a variety of backgrounds has remained an important and powerful part of what makes our company so unique.
What I’ve learned during my tenure with Plurilock is that the best people can be from anywhere in the world. Despite being a data science company, none of our team hail from Waterloo or Stanford, the machine learning meccas. Instead, we’ve built our team from places as far as East Africa, Morocco, Mexico, and Brazil. As Plurilock continues to grow, we remain committed to keeping our boundaries open.
It’s a celebrated part of our cultural DNA, and we honor the diversity throughout our office with unique country or city-specific posters commemorating everyone’s heritage. It’s a small way in which we show our pride in being a multicultural company.
The key to having built such a diverse and knowledgeable company is with the help of experienced HR representatives. The fast start program has been extremely helpful in building our team, and folks like Ilya at VanHack have made it a simple and painless process.
Ian Paterson is CEO at Plurilock, a cybersecurity AI firm, and formerly founder @ Exapik, data monetization platform. He writes about cybersecurity, data and entrepreneurship at TalkData.io