Stringent companies advised to improve recruitment process

An expert said tapping into underrepresented talent pools and improving in-house training is essential in company development.

The evolving technology landscape calls for companies to adapt and improve their recruitment process, however, many businesses have been ‘too stringent’ in their approach to recruitment, which could be limiting their potential.

Dave Gerry, Chief Executive Officer of Bugcrowd, said that there is a lot of work to be done in terms of how companies recruit which comes down to giving people the opportunity to prove themselves.

“I think for a long time, companies have been a bit too stringent about how they think about access to talent, right? We've always thought about, you have to recruit from the best universities, you have to get people with technical backgrounds,” he said, “The reality is that there's a lot of talent that is readily available from underrepresented groups.”

Gerry said that companies have to make sure that applicants goes through an in-house training to help them be efficient on the job.

“Putting them through kind of an in-house university program, helping them get access to certification information, right, whatever else exists. And I think that, for me, the most important thing is, make sure that people are given the chance and that you kind of coach them and empower them along the way,” Gerry said.

On the topic of integration and collaboration within the tech industry, Gerry discussed the challenge of breaking down silos that exist across businesses as organisations often bring in new tools without considering their wider impact on the business.

“Security is the responsibility of everybody in the organisation. So you really have to start out with educating your internal teams on why security is important, what ultimately you're trying to do around protecting the data, and ultimately, protecting your customers that you're serving,” he explained.

The CEO said that Bugcrowd can function as an extension of customer security teams by leveraging the skills and creativity within the hacker community, which results in providing a unique advantage that would be difficult for companies to replicate in-house.

“We're giving them access to a single unified platform where they can see pentesting results, they can see bug bounty results, they can interact with the hacker community, they can see how are they doing against their peers in the industry, they can get reporting and analytics and again, all of that comes down to how can we make sure that we're providing as much value to our paying customers and then to the enterprise community or the the hacker community as well,” he added.