Over my 25 years in the technology and cybersecurity industries, I have found success generally comes down to one thing: having a great team.
Having the right people on your team can be the difference between enjoying your work or dreading it. It can also be the determining factor in a landing a strategic partnership or missing out on it to competitor who has more effective resources. In addition, having a diverse, creative and resourceful set of colleagues helps you think outside the box and build a rich company culture.
These are just a few examples of the importance of having the right leadership and individual contributors in place. However, hiring a team filled with incredible talent and best-in-industry expertise does not just happen at the snap of your fingers. Especially in the cybersecurity industry, which is growing at record speed and faces an overall talent shortage.
When I speak with NightDragon’s portfolio company CEOs and executive leadership, they agree that having the right talent is a critical element to their future success. However, like any company in this industry today, one of their most significant growth challenges is identifying, hiring and retaining the best individuals amidst arguably the most competitive talent landscape in history.
At NightDragon our goal is to identify, advise and help scale high-growth companies that can achieve our mission to secure the digital future across cybersecurity, safety, security and privacy. We know much of that success will come down to ensuring the right teams are in place across every facet of the organization — from engineering, to sales, to finance, to HR and more — for long-term growth.
That’s why we’ve launched an initiative we call ND Talent, a unique NightDragon Network initiative designed to deliver value and benefits exclusive to portfolio companies and address high priority areas such as talent hiring and retention. These benefits will be exclusive to portfolio companies and NightDragon plans to add further resources as needs evolve.
We have already announced multiple partnerships with leading talent recruitment and verification companies to achieve this goal. NightDragon has partnered with Crosschq to deliver portfolio companies access to innovative technology to help them better source, screen and onboard talent. Crosschq’s crowd empowered 360-degree reference checks fulfill a critical role in the hiring and employee retention process, ensuring companies can more quickly and holistically verify candidate backgrounds and credentials.
We also announced master agreement and referral arrangements with leading industry recruiting firms Pinpoint Search Group and Hitch Partners to assist with talent identification, placement and market insights for portfolio companies. These new partnerships were pre-vetted by NightDragon and are designed to support portfolio company hiring efforts with market-leading expertise and to streamline the selection, onboarding and contracting processes.
In addition to the partnerships, NightDragon is launching a carefully curated talent database for portfolio companies to tap into its extensive network and support executive-level hiring. This will help our portfolio companies tap directly into the more than 100,000 potential employees in the NightDragon Network. NightDragon will further support these talent efforts with a dedicated job board to promote portfolio company open positions at all levels.
We view these efforts as the foundation of a larger set of partnerships and master agreements to support our portfolio company needs as they accelerate their success. We look forward to continuing to support them and working hand in hand to reach new levels of growth.
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