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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

For those of you who love sport, I salute you. Today, NBA fans around the world witnessed what might have been the second- or third-best basketball game of my lifetime. The championship-starved New York Knicks came back from an NBA Finals record deficit of 29 points on this tip you see below by O.G. Anunoby with 1.2 seconds left.

Sport is wonderful because it doesn’t matter if you are black or white, a man or a woman, tall or short, dumb, deaf, or blind; if you support a team together, you are together. Everything else falls by the wayside. Why we started playing sport is strange, but it is truly one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Oh, and by the way, today’s piece is an interview with one of my team members at Athyna. For the sake of the piece, I don’t make any real allusion to that. But thought it good to clear it up here. It’s a great one, with one of the most talented people I know. Enjoy!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Sof Faiman, Recruitment Manager at Athyna

Sofia Faiman is the Recruitment Manager at Athyna, the AI-powered global talent platform that connects companies with world-class remote professionals across engineering, product, design, GTM, and finance, while also just launching a post-training arm, Athyna Intelligence. Based in Buenos Aires, Sofia leads a fully remote team across multiple regions, overseeing strategy, tooling, candidate experience, and the team's transition to Athyna's proprietary AI-powered matching platform. She has been building the recruitment function at Athyna since early in the company's growth.

Sof manages recruitment the way she thinks it should be done: with empathy at the center, and AI as the accelerant rather than the replacement. She came up through an industry that often treats candidates as interchangeable, and she's spent her career building against that. At Athyna, she's been responsible for moving the team from spreadsheets to an AI-driven ATS, improving match quality and time-to-place, all while keeping a remote team performing at a high level across time zones.

What problem is Athyna trying to solve today?

At its core, Athyna is solving a very specific talent access problem. We have always served the market with top-quality developers, product folks, and GTM, and we continue to do that well, but the big opportunity and problem to solve for us today is in AI. As AI models get more complex, the companies building them need highly specialized researchers fast, and traditional hiring markets just can't keep up with that demand.

All with vetted PhD and Master 's-level researchers, in US-aligned time zones, and at significantly lower cost than US or European equivalents. On top of that, we also built an AI-powered job board so candidates can find roles faster and more directly. It's another way we're making access to this talent pool easier and more seamless for the companies that need it most. In summary, we are building the talent infrastructure that AI development actually needs right now.

What does it look like to recruit PhDs and Masters compared to developers and engineers?

Most people assume recruiting is recruiting, but these two profiles couldn't be more different. With engineers, the playbook is pretty structured. Well-known platforms for sourcing, solid tools for technical screens and take-homes that make the evaluation process consistent and scalable, and clear benchmarks.

With research profiles, the whole dynamic shifts. Top research profiles are often not actively looking, and the pool is specialized by nature. The right fit depends heavily on the specific domain you're hiring for, so the search is more niche, more investigative. You're reading into someone's academic background, their publications, their area of focus, and your outreach has to reflect that depth because a generic message just won't land. But the AI side makes this really exciting. PhDs and Masters with quantitative or research backgrounds are genuinely drawn to these opportunities. They get to contribute to innovative AI projects, apply their expertise in a real-world context, and do it flexibly alongside their existing work or research. That combination of intellectual challenge, flexibility, and AI relevance is honestly a strong sell. You just have to know how to find them and speak their language.

What does your team look like? And what about a typical day?

I have two direct reports who are Team Leads, and they each have their own teams. That's six recruiters who I'm not directly managing day-to-day, but who are part of my team and whose performance I'm responsible for. Eight in total.

As for my day, it varies a lot. I find this question pretty hard to answer, honestly. It changes depending on which projects we're in and which stage of the period we're at. If we're in OKR planning or making strategic decisions, that gets a lot of my focus. Still, most of the time it's one-on-ones with the team to stay close to them, handling communications across different departments, improving processes, and talking to some key clients. I work really closely with product because they help us develop new features for our internal platform. I'm also in regular communication with our different vendors to make sure everything is running smoothly, and I take in feedback from the team and make sure we can actually act on it. Those are the core things. Everything else changes week to week.

How has your role changed from Lead TA Manager to running the whole recruitment team?

Sales, recruitment, and CS all work together as part of the same commercial lifecycle, so improving how those teams collaborate and making sure that cycle runs smoothly became something I was directly responsible for.

And then there's the AI shift, which honestly was one of the biggest things I had to navigate. The rules of recruitment were changing in real time. New tools, new client needs, entirely new ways of working. That created a lot of uncertainty for the team, and my job was to make sure nobody felt left behind. We started running AI literacy sessions and workshops so everyone felt equipped and confident, not threatened. And out of that process we actually built something new, Athyna Intelligence, a whole business unit connecting AI companies with PhD and Masters-level researchers from Latin America. So AI didn't just change how we work; it opened up an entirely new direction for the business.

How do you set goals at Athyna? And how do you build a high-performing remote team?

We run on six-month OKR cycles. At the start of each cycle, senior leadership comes together to evaluate the previous cycle's results, discuss priorities and upcoming projects, and exchange perspectives. From that session, we define company-level goals, which then flow down into departmental goals.

What I love about how we run the departmental phase is that it's not top-down. Each department then runs the same structured process internally. The whole team gets together, we share the company goals, and collectively figure out how our specific department can best contribute to them. From that conversation, we build out our own objectives and key results.

That process creates real ownership. When people have a voice in shaping the goals, they're far more engaged in actually pursuing them. And OKRs as a framework really support all of that. They make objectives clear, specific, and time-bound. They demand owners, so there's always someone accountable for execution. And they're easily trackable, so at any point you know exactly where you stand. It's a system that keeps everyone aligned and moving in the same direction. Performance-wise, I really, really believe it starts with culture. Our senior management has done a great job there: a lot of time was invested early on in building an open and trustworthy culture.

That's a big part of it, but it's not enough on its own. What I try to do is make sure the team has the tools they need to do their work properly, and I give them the autonomy and trust to do their jobs independently. They're accountable for their work, and I have their backs all the time. I think those things are what drives performance, because they create a good experience for all the people working at Athyna.

What is broken about recruitment today?

There's definitely this tendency to treat people as interchangeable in hiring processes, which I think is what breaks candidate experience. Treating people like resources rather than actual people. Behind every application, there's someone making a real-life decision, one that affects their income, their future, maybe their family's future. When a hiring process lacks empathy or even basic communication, the candidate ends up feeling disposable and, ultimately, that damages the brand too.

To make sure that doesn't happen, I do my best to always be transparent and consistent in my communication, even when things aren't moving as expected or are slower than planned. Staying close to talent, setting expectations clearly, making sure people know they're being treated as people and that their needs are being considered. That's my go-to strategy, and honestly, what everyone should be doing.

What has changed moving from pre-AI recruitment to how recruitment functions today?

Our team was so scared when we made that switch to leveraging AI, but over time it made us so much sharper and faster. We improved our time-to-match a lot as well as the quality of the matches themselves. AI is helping us identify better talent, apply better filters, and that accuracy in matching means we're more successful when placing people, which directly impacts our client satisfaction. It brought a lot of positive changes. We used to write every job description manually, take interview notes by hand, write every briefing, every communication piece, and run language assessments as a separate process on top of everything else. That was our reality not too long ago. It worked, but it was slow, and every decision, every assessment, every output lived or died on the knowledge and instinct of the person behind it.

Today that looks completely different. We started integrating external tools, automating processes, and eventually building our own AI solutions with the support of a global product team. We built Athyna AI, which first brought AI-powered talent matching based on client briefs. This alone changed our speed dramatically, improving endorsement times by 50%. It also brought AI note-taking, evaluations, and language scoring. But the piece I'm most proud of is our AI-led interview. The system generates questions directly based on the role requirements; it's fully self-served, takes candidates around 8 minutes to complete, and gives us a full assessment of their spoken ability, relevant skills, strengths, risks, and language proficiency. No human intervention needed at that stage.

💡 Note: If you're looking for the best post-training talent to train your models, check out Athyna Intelligence.

Where is AI taking the recruiter's job in the coming years?

There's this dramatic view that AI could potentially replace recruitment entirely. I don't think that's going to happen, because there's always a human element involved, even if AI is running interviews or whatever comes next. What AI will do is make processes much, much faster: sourcing, searching, matching, all of it. Less manual work across the board. But it will not replace a recruiter when it comes to building relationships, reading people, or managing the emotional side of a career change. A lot goes into reading a person that you can't put on a CV. I think the recruitment role will probably shift a little, but it will remain just as important as it is now.

What's your philosophy around leadership?

I guide myself on three core concepts. The first is empowerment. That word is really close to how I work: making sure the team can do their best work, tailoring the way I work with each person based on their skills and what they need, empowering people to do what they're best at. Because everyone has different strengths.

The second is trust and communication. I've mentioned both a lot on this call, but I really do believe they're the key. The third is just making sure the team has everything they need—the knowledge, the tools, the context—and that I'm there to back them up if needed, but that they can do a great job themselves. I genuinely care about everyone's growth and becoming a better professional. Building career paths is something I believe in. Making sure everyone has a next step they're excited about and is motivated to be their best.

And the last thing I always remind myself: it's not about me, it's about them. Not my ego, nothing like that. Just the team, and doing the best work we can together.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I always try to learn new things. That keeps me going. I've made it a personal mission to learn something new every year, whether it's work-related or not. This year I studied oratory, and I also did a postgraduate two years ago. Last year was my year of learning something for myself, so I studied architecture and interior design, which was totally different. But those things keep me really connected on a personal level.

I also have pretty high standards for myself, which keeps me grounded professionally. And I believe in leading by example, which means I need to stay sharp so I can actually demonstrate that. Remote work has really helped me build a work-life balance that works for me, making sure my social life and hobbies are covered. This year I'm enrolled in calisthenics, which is really challenging and exciting. I try to stay active and keep exploring. I love exploring new things.

Extra reading

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

• We Raised $2.5M To Build Athyna AI - May, 2024

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 20925

And that’s it! You can follow Sof on LinkedIn or check out Athyna to keep up with what we’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Granola*—an AI-powered notepad that takes, summarizes, and organizes meeting notes without using intrusive recording bots.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

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