Syracuse Surge — The Path to Gigantic Success starts w/ ‘Yes’ to StartUps…
But IndeedCompliance Says ‘No’ to Academic Alliance Initiative…

I truly believe Indeed provides an awesome talent recruiting platform & an ability to reach millions of users rapidly. That is exactly why I tapped into the platform.
Unfortunately, IndeedCompliance is not allowing this Open-Source Academic Alliance Start-Up Initiative to tap into their vast network of students, educators, and businesses. This clearly indicates their business model does not fit this SyracuseSurge initiative, nor does it provide the ‘Cuse Community w/ an empathetic business partner willing to provide immediate value.
Our local recruiting and talent agencies, like Modus, CRFletcher Associates, Robert-Half technologies, & TekSystems will likely cost a bit more yet provide a more personalized touch. I am pretty confident that we can also create strong partnerships and establish win-win-win scenarios where all parties are successful together.
Back to Indeed — I genuinely feel their platform is a new-age infrastructure component providing — a connected pipeline of resource across the world seeking opportunities to collaborate on massive success.
People from academic institutions, students, small/medium/enterprise businesses, & consultants across the world use the platform to collaboratively create & expand business sectors, respond to emerging resource needs, and tap into the social network of candidates Indeed is well-known for.
One would think, Collaboration between the business & the recruiting agency would be transparent and empathetic… but its not.
I do know we have quite a few local competitors who would embrace these attributes & help fuel innovative growth with a more personalized touch.
The Potential for World-Wide Impact
The SecDevOps@Cuse Cyber Range is an Open-Source Project with well noted academic value.
The project lead, also author of this publication, just released a notice that the Azure Cyber Range Project is moving forward.
The Syracuse Surge initiative is gaining momentum, there are many conversations, follow-ups, and alliances to create over the next couple years. There will be many brands to partner, promote, and highlight as sponsors.

The Cyber Range initiative is a massive movement aimed at improving the lives millions of people by identifying, crowdsourcing, and solving the most in-demand talent needs across every industry, vector, domain, and space with a virtual workforce of world-wide talent.
I promote the best experiences & tools across the industry, share knowledge openly, and seek to grow future generations of highly motivated & skilled talent.
Talent is key to automation & optimization of critical infrastructure services, business processes, and policy compliance in both public & private industries. It would only seem natural for Indeed to view Syracuse Surge as a huge opportunity.
I’m going to focus on creating a collaborative partnership with Indeed. I’ll likely reference this post & seek their feedback using LinkedIn. So let me share some transparent constructive feedback…
Indeed, initial reaction — a soft sales pitch…
The first recruiting campaign started right before Blackhat 2019, the beginning of August. I was able to collect data & create a market niche, identify the solution & execute the plan. I recall the account mgr & a sales pitch around Aug. 3 — I posted a positive outcome of recruiting capabilities, interaction, and results as a outcome of my effort.
I thought there was a reasonable agreement & understanding of the open-source project recruiting campaign. Yet 2 months later, IndeedCompliance is blocking the collaborative relationship with a generic “Unsuitable for Indeed” message.
Create the best experience, before seeking profit
Seriously — Microsoft is investing in the Syracuse, Amazon has job posting open hiring factory workers in Liverool, NY. Syracuse Metropolitan area is ranged #3 in innovation & places to live. The Indeed Job postings w/ paid sponorship will come in time yet the ‘cold no’ highlights a lack of partnership.
Help us get to #1 before seeking a profit. We have a highly innovative foundation of minds in this City/County/Region w/ talent in key locations throughout the private & public sectors.
There’s a huge opportunity to collaborate across Enterprise, Academia, and Public/Private Sectors of small, medium, and large businesses. True motives become clear when you eliminate $, the lack of support for Open-Source is something I’ll connect w/ the director of open-source about. Perhaps we just need a stronger voice internally!
Looking the Actual Results
The Cyber Range project is unique & it benefits anyone across the world. What concerns me the most, Indeed simply wants $ now w/o being able to guarantee results.
My creative use of their job boards was targeting the immediate community I wanted to serve. It could have provided a way to carve a niche, tap into the market, & identify the talent required to make the business operational.

The FormAssembly visual of the latest recruiting campaign responses provides an awesome view of the data. While I’m still receiving / processing results, I can see I am able to targeting my audience of candidates & partners perfectly.
Instead of forcing individuals to use paid services, why not let open-source projects like this the ability to evolve with strategically information?
Seems Syracuse University, JPMorgan, Microsoft, CenterState CEO, + other local bootcamp organizations can use a slightly more well-known brand to recruit talent for the Syracuse Surge initiative using the brands they’ve established, the associated business networks, word of mouth, and local advertising agencies.
Personally — Indeed was providing me with reasonable value Crowd-Sourcing key partners & interested academic organizations across the country on the open-source recruiting effort. Yet I would not fund a paid campaign with the results I’ve seen so far.
Most applicants are completely unengaged yet we know there’s an engagement / diversity issue in the tech space to focus on so understanding the lack of engagement in an underserved population is critical. Agree?
Indeed was able to deliver a handful of potential student body (.edu) relationships. Then again, they tool the campaigns down relatively quickly.
Looking at the Indeed engagement issue — More than 80% of initial respondents across the country failed to see the call-to-action of the 3-question intake skills assessment.
Follow-up emails were sent through the Indeed messaging system. Mass communication of the project intake is likely what flagged me as being “unacceptable for Indeed” — Again, very little interaction from the candidates through the indeed messaging system.
Obtaining NSF funding is not an overnight accomplishment. The candidates need to be vetted on capabilities, experience, and accomplishments. Having a few steps in the interviewing process is critical. Paying a high-cost recruiting for a low-quality set of candidates is a poor investment.
In this situation, there are strong audit requires for gov’t related grants. Failure to follow 2 instructions could jeopardize an entire academic technology analyst program so this is a very reasonable approach to administrative skill assessment in technical lead roles…
Attention to detail & cross-US collaboration across multiple agencies will be a key competitive advantage in the NSF proposal seeking funding to obtain project support via scholarship-in-action for research stipends across the 3 most in-demand & competitive domains: Cyber, Cloud, & Sec|DevOps.
To be candid, out of the 240+ individuals, only a handful signed up to gain access to the actual project located on Github.
Collaboration not Competition…
I use to compete with Amazon back between 2004 & 2007. As a college student, I had a thriving online eBay business, expanded into Amazon as an earlier adopter in the “Dropship low-cost international edition College Textbooks” on Amazon niche.
At the beginning of a semester it I experienced a mad-rush of sales, profit margins were awesome & fully tracked. I was drop-shipping everything and providing tracking.
Yet with everything documented — Amazon banned me based on my ability to rapidly compete & dropship.
Eventually Amazon supported & approved selling international edition books. I still have a restricted account under the name of “reality_book_seller” — With Amazon coming into town, I suspect I’ll be able to clear out some ‘technical debt’.
A pace of early adoption & rapid evolution that I’ve maintained for 17+yrs. Perhaps I can help innovate Indeed’s business model too! Frankly, it seems they need it.
How important is Open-Source Project Recruiting ?
To fuel the an awesome workforce culture you need to understand what the workforce is capable of as well as what motivates the workforce. This requires formal & informal skill assessments, multiple rounds of engagement, and the ability to interact and be personable with candidates in a virtual workforce.
You would think Indeed would support this concept, yet I started using Indeed job postings to obtain key information about recruits in hopes creating job opportunities backed by Academic Alliances.
Looking at the Candidates…
Let’s look at the simple bits of data that I was able to collect before they shut the account down.

Understanding what motivates you…
In August, the Cyber Range Research Assistant initiative shifted into next gear.
Using Indeed & Form Assembly, I was able to obtain insight directly from job seekers. By referencing an externally hosted form, I was able to obtain basic information from individuals I have the initial interest of helping.
The initial form outlines the initiative and simply requests individuals who are interested in a grant-sponsored research assistant role to provide a quick contact email & a quick insight into their capabilities / desires.
The information I received was quite interesting. It reinforces a few hypothesis and I wanted to publish some of the data.
Interpreting Results
The form had 2 simple questions: 1) what do you bring to the table, known as current skills & 2) what do you want to learn, known as desires.
Out of the roughly 200 respondents who signed up to support the grant/project initiative, 67% of them indicated a desire to learn DevOps, Cloud Computing, and/or Cyber Security (Penetration Testing, Engineering, Vuln). The 3 domains this project targets makes up 67% of the respondents desires, the other domains are closely related to the Mission Statement of the Cyber Range. (Metrics Reference the Desired Skills Picture above)

When I review the skills individuals brought to the table, the 3 technical domains make up 30% of the Candidate pool actual skills. This 70% gap is what others call the “Cyber Shortage” / “Skills gap.”
Cyber Range initiatives across the industry aim to identify undeveloped talent, provide training & mentoring, then translate that knowledge into business value across enormous technical domains.
This simply requires an approach which fuels someone’s passion to succeed through adversity and failure over a lifetime. Then the technical learning becomes part of the individual “habits and rituals”.
Most are proprietary closed source for-profit, yet this open-source Cyber Range initiative is different.
A goal of the open-source project is to inspire a community of passionate technical contributors & learners. I believe we can highlighting growth opportunities, track personal development, and establishing risk-taking milestones to fuel failure/success evolution. That is what creates real business value.
Clearly there is a gap to close, so now the question is how?
Using a Training Matrix to maximize growth opportunities
In previous roles, I’ve leveraged skills / knowledge matrices to help document knowledge, identify strengths, and evolve fragmented departments into cost-saving globally resilient operations teams. This project aims to inspire the evolution of a skilled remote informally learning workforce so a similar skill assessment allows me focus on the individual’s desire across the program’s goals.
I decided to mesh the desired & current skill(s) inputs together to understand demand & identify potential training tracks.
Here’s what I see…

- Individuals who bring “DevOps” skills to the table have a strong desire to stay within DevOps and move into Penetration Testing. DevOps is the most imporant in-demand skill across a wide variety of technical domains.
- Penetration Testing, Cyber Security Engineering, and Vulnerability Replication are best grouped together yet make up just a small portion of overall responses. While one of the most technically challenging domains for this candidate base, Penetration Testing is the 2nd most in-demand set of skills.
- Individuals who bring “Sales, Marketing, Media” skills to the table are interested in 3 core areas: a)DevOps b) understanding & articulating business problems into engineering requirements [business analyst], & c) Sales, Marketing, & Media.
I believe these results suggest that the current Cyber Range applicants could benefit greatly from an informal learning initiative that provided real projected-related experience.
Now, let’s talk motivation…
You’ve read this far. Why stop now?
As an advocate for formal, informal, and hands-on learning — I’m one for embracing the process, the people, and the product — just like Marcus Lemonis says on “The Profit.”
I watch, listen, and replay YouTube, Twitter, & Instagram content often from my favorite motivational speakers, instrumental music tracks, and music playlists. It helps me recharge and focus.
As someone whose seen more failures than success in life. I’ve embraced spectacular failure and learned how to “transform bullshit into diamonds.”
To this day, I embrace the “Try Harder” & “Never Quit” mentality. I believe there are times when mental / physical training results in greatest performance peaks. I also understand the importance of rest/relaxation.
The point is — when you put our mind to it, you can establish a process, follow a ritual, & force new habits. In terms of a career, those habits are life-altering skills. My current goal is fuel a passion & to provide guidance to those who desire to put in hardwork to learn a new skill.
The difference between me and others — I’m here to challenge, not teach. That said, 90+ of applicants failed to submit the Alpha Sign-up Form nested in the Getting Started Guide of the GitHub project.
The subtle suggestion is obtain an AWS account, fill-out the sign-up form, clone the github project, and launch the Cyber Range. Don’t forget to destroy it!
About Cappetta…
I published the open-source AWS-based SecDevOps-Cuse/CyberRange project to github Feb 2019. I was blessed to have a project presentation / proposal acceptance at BSides London in June 2019. My employer, Tenable, sponsored my trip & helped secure a YouTube Recording of the Cyber Range Presentation.
My goal with the project is to clearly outlined on the github & reinforced on the Research Assistant Sign-Up form. TL;DR summary is this Open-Source project initiative will result in the submission of an NSF grant proposal to the Advancing Informal STEM Learning opportunity.
My goal is to give back to the community with an Open-Source Project and fuel the interest in the next generation of engineers and scientists.
Connect w/ Cappetta on LinkedIn
