November 19, 2023

How Atomus consistently hires the best sales talent with Paraform

Joel Joseph

Co-founder @ Atomus

In this blog

Before Paraform, what were some of the hiring problems you were facing?What was the most important reason why you decided to use Paraform?What were some of the features that were most valuable?How was it working with the Paraform team?

Atomus is a cybersecurity startup working in building cybrsecurity infrastructure specifically targeting the Aerospace and Defense vertical.

Founded in 2020, the company has major customers such as the US Air Force, Space Force, Defense Innovation Unit, among dozens of commercial aerospace and defense companies.


The company is funded by Human Capital, CRV, and Base Case.

Joel is the co-founder of Atomus - he used Paraform to hire some of the best sales talent for his startup.

We found candidates that we were really happy with on Paraform. One of the candidates we hired was a top performer, wasn't even looking for a job, and a recruiter on Paraform reached out to him based on his personal network. These are the types of candidates that are really hard to hire without that relationship.

Before Paraform, what were some of the hiring problems you were facing?

I think it was very manual. We posted on LinkedIn and AngelList and then sourced some candidates ourselves.

Biggest thing was essentially time. When you're the founder and you're doing sales, engineering, and all these other things, going out there and finding really good candidates is just very challenging.


You just don't run the recruiting process the best it can be.

What was the most important reason why you decided to use Paraform?

Well, I think at first it was just kind of another way to just increase the number of people that were coming our way and then we could review without us having to go to linkedin to source people.

But after using it, the biggest advantage of Paraform actually was the fact that everyone in the exact network of people we were targeting just suddenly knew that we were hiring and this generated interest.

There wasn't an SDR in San Francisco that didn’t hear about Atomus after we posted on Paraform. To this day we even hear from our friends in San Francisco that they heard about this search.


As an early stage startup, we had a very, very specific niche of sales folks we're looking for, so the breadth (and also depth) of Paraform’s reach and network was incredibly useful.

What were some of the features that were most valuable?

Firstly, very easy to schedule things. We've used other recruiters in the past, and there are a lot of repetitive back and forth between the recruiter and the candidate just to get something on the calendar.

I also like that there is a lot of transparency in the types of people recruiters on Paraform are sourcing and where they are in the process.

The fact that you're working with multiple recruiters, you can find the ones that are really good and find the right type of talent and then you can essentially double down giving them specific feedback.

Working with multiple recruiters is really helpful especially as a startup founder because you might not have an established relationship with a recruiter you can really trust.

A lot of recruiters who wanted to work with us in the past wanted an exclusive contract but there are a few issues with that.

We need to move fast, and I need to hire in the next 30 or 60 days. I need someone ASAP and if you try out two or three different recruiting firms and you do it on exclusive terms it can cost you ~6 months worst case scenario

With Paraform you can start the search with multiple recruiters and quickly find out who are the best ones, so that was really valuable.

How was it working with the Paraform team?

Really responsive, quick support, and a lot of times I remember they actively recommended action items to optimize our search even more!

We had a really good experience overall and we’ll be putting our next hires on Paraform!