As the Cyber Security industry expands, growing your team has become more difficult than ever. On Episode 36 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast we spoke with Julia Doronina, the Co-founder and CMO at G-71 Security, about the challenges she’s faced when it comes to scaling her team. Julia is also a passionate advocate and mentor for women in tech, giving her some valuable insights into diversifying the sector’s talent pool and making it more accessible. 

What are the key talent topics that need addressing the most?

I believe that it’s important to focus on employee development and to provide opportunities for career growth. With the rise of artificial intelligence, there are many new solutions and projects on the market, so companies and executive teams need to encourage their employees to learn new things and understand these new approaches because they can help optimise processes. The main thing is to support your employees and help them to grow themselves.

Do you struggle to hire based on talent shortages?

We’re a startup and we don’t have a big team right now. We were dealing with different outsourced people who can help us with different activities, like design, copywriting, analysis, and so on. I think that it’s very important when you’re talking with people who you want to attract to your company, to talk to them about the use cases for their skills, not just their CV, to understand how they think and how they can implement their skills into your business. Figure out how they can expand your current situation or activities. 

Early in my career, my skill set was straightforward. I knew the general and traditional channels, and I implemented them. Now I’m trying to use AI. I use Chat GPT, about 20, 30 or even 40 times per day for different tasks because it can help me optimise my processes. My worldview and approach to problem-solving are changing as the world evolves, and I think that we need to encourage people to develop themselves in the same way.

There’s a lack of diversity at a grassroots level, so what can we do to address this?

We need to create an inclusive culture in companies, even in startups. We need to include different inclusivity training and actively attract candidates from diverse demographic groups because they have a lot of insights and skills. It can be great to create programmes to support the development of underrepresented people. It’s important for companies to actively support these initiatives, mostly from the executive point of view, because they are the drivers of the company, so they need to support it.

To hear more from Julia, tune into Episode 36 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.