Why the fix wasn't "more candidates"
The default response to a hard-to-fill role is to widen the funnel: post the job in more places, run more ads, get more applicants into the pipeline. Hireload's CEO, Vira Novalnieva, argues that this approach actively works against companies like Attekmi, because of who's actually in that funnel:
If your hiring strategy depends on people applying, you’re only reaching candidates who are actively unhappy in their current roles or between jobs. The best programmatic talent rarely applies to job postings. — Vira Novalnieva, CEO of Hireload
The people who genuinely understand programmatic well enough to be useful to Attekmi in week one are, by definition, usually employed and busy doing that job somewhere else. They're not writing cover letters. So for all 20+ roles, Hireload started from a different point entirely: a network that was already built, and already screened, before Attekmi ever opened a requisition.
What "prequalified" means in practice
This is the part that actually did the work. Hireload maintains a standing database of 30,000+ professionals across AdTech, MarTech, SaaS, and adjacent digital infrastructure: people who've already been evaluated for whether they can operate fluently inside the ecosystem, independent of any specific open role. When a company like Attekmi comes to Hireload with a vacancy, the search doesn't start at zero. It starts by filtering a pool that's already been through the first, hardest cut.
Finding a candidate is challenging on its own, but finding someone with even a basic understanding of the AdTech ecosystem who is ready to dive deep into programmatic is even harder. — Roman Vrublivskyi, CEO of Attekmi
Two things happen for every candidate in that pool before they're ever matched to a role:
A judgment check, before a skills check. Roman's own interview process reflects the same order Hireload uses when building the shortlist in the first place: "Skills and experience obviously matter, but the way a person thinks, communicates, and approaches issues and challenges also plays a critical role. That's what we evaluate first and foremost. Then we learn more about the candidate's technical expertise." A person can be technically strong and still be the wrong hire if they can't reason through a problem they haven't seen before and programmatic produces new problems constantly.
An ecosystem-fluency check, not a resume check. Vira is specific about what disqualifies people who look qualified on paper: "Hiring the resume, not the role. A big DSP name means nothing if the person was one of 500 people touching a tiny piece of it." The screen isn't "did this person work at a company with a recognizable name," it's whether they can actually explain how a bid request moves through a supply chain, or why privacy and consent handling has changed what a "good" targeting setup looks like in 2026.
Layered on top of that human screening, Hireload uses AI-assisted sourcing to do the pattern-matching and adjacency work - surfacing, for example, a candidate whose experience is in adjacent SaaS infrastructure but maps cleanly onto what a specific Attekmi role needs. That combination is what let Hireload get a first shortlist to Attekmi in roughly 5 days per role, drawn directly from people who were already qualified for the ecosystem before the search began.
