Cyber Range Recruiting aims to provide Experience, Education, & Stipend-Based Compensation
Yet — IndeedCompliance Says ‘No’ to Open-Source Academic Alliance Initiative…

Let me start by saying, 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. The goal of the Cyber Range project is to positively impact millions of users.
To gain momentum and visibility across the country, I decided to tap into the job market insight Indeed has. My intent was to identify & quantify a known problem — the gap between experience & knowledge.
Every great business leader knows how to identify a real-business problem, create measurable objective metrics, then quantify the impact of a solution across the market it serves.
I know someone is asking — What’s in it for Cappetta? I have 3 motives:
- First — the desire to fund formal education using Scholarship-In-Action.
- Second — the ability to positively impact others by sharing my knowledge, experiences, and life lessions
- Third — Passion / Personal Clout / Career Goals
Do you truly understand the size/scale & magnitude of the “City on the Cloud” Academic Alliance? Read more about it here
Indeed simply wants the $$$
Listen — I understand, Every Business needs to be profitable. Unfortunately, IndeedCompliance is not interested in supporting Academic Alliance Start-Up Initiative(s) to help us tap into the vast network of students, educators, and businesses across the US.
From the visual above, we can see only 12% (37) of the current recruits / users are related to a higher education institute. I personally believe all of the business related contacts came from my LinkedIn network &/or the promotion within the professional community — not from indeed.

The adverse decision to ban an Open-Source Project from recruiting indicates that the Indeed business model WILL NOT fit this Syracuse Surge initiative(s), nor does it provide the ‘Cuse Community w/ an empathetic business partner willing to provide immediate value. Perhaps in time Indeed will change its position.
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 Indeed platform to collaboratively create & expand business & tap into candidates to support emerging business needs.
Connecting talent to businesses, making projects enormously successful seems to be Indeed’s bread & butter — Yet as a Service-Oriented company, they are a bit more disconnected. 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.
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 & keep the $ within our local community.
I am pretty confident that we can strengthen these partnerships & establish win-win-win scenarios where all parties are successful together.
The Potential for World-Wide Impact
The SecDevOps@Cuse Cyber Range is an Open-Source Project with well noted academic value. The NIST 1 pager (visual below) clearly outlines a strong value add in a greatly under-served community.
Cappetta, project lead & author of these publications, released a notice that the Azure Cyber Range Project Planning 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. Unfortunately, Indeed has decided to not be one of the Innovative business 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 understanding of the open-source recruiting initiative. 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.

One of the early FormAssembly visuals provides an awesome view of target niche. I can see I am able to targeting my audience of candidates & partners perfectly.
Instead of forcing individuals into paid services, let allow open-source projects like CyberRange the ability to analyze Market Talent, engage their users, and evolve valuable Research Initiatives.
SU — R1 Rated Doctorate School
Did you realize Syracuse University is an R1 school? The ability to perform deep research, develop quick talent & results, using mentors w Top Talent is well-noted, often replicated, & the network comes together in times of need.
Seems Syracuse University, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, CenterState CEO, + other organizations will hopefully consider a slightly more strategic approach in training, developing, & recruiting top talent for the Syracuse Surge initiative(s).
Consider a more intimate relationship w/ one of the well-known recruiting agencies or support the startup’s in the the local business scene #SUTechCenter #HackUpstate #CareersInCode the thriving CoWorking / CoLiving Spaces & the #OCC / #LeMoyne community relations.
You know — those grass-root efforts to hit the streets, spread word of mouth, use local advertising, & train/develop the talent of tomorrow locally.
Personally — Indeed was providing me with reasonable ability to tap into critical insight by Crowd-Sourcing key under-served communities across the country.
Most applicants are passively engaging in the Project. Less than a handful have requested to halt contact, 99% have been gaining Monthly updates since August.
The Engagement Issue
In Tech — We know there’s an engagement problem, a growing skills gap, & the need to provide fresh eyes w/ a diversity body of students to solve the most challenging business & enterprise problems & hands-on leadership.
I believe we need to continue to focus on understanding the market looking to break into Tech while increasing the ability to engage & help the under-served populations. Maybe Indeed will Agree & revert their position…
Indeed was able to deliver a handful of potential student body (.edu) relationships. The business relationships I have are from my professional experiences, the LinkedIn Network, & Security Conferences I’ve networked at.
Looking at the Indeed engagement issue — A significant portion of initial respondents across the country failed to see the call-to-action in the Job posting and had to be reminded of the 3-question intake form.
Follow-up emails were sent through the Indeed messaging system. Mass communication is likely what flagged me as being “unacceptable for Indeed.”
Those follow-ups provided greater insight into the market of available resources. I was able to understand what skills they brought to the table & what skills they desired to focus on. Review the “Looking at the Candidates” Section for more info…
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…
The Technology Niche & Cyber Security Market has a strong need for well-developed talent placed everywhere throughout industry, both private and public functions.
Fresh eyes identify niches & trends; Syracuse Surge brings those fresh eyes. The Cyber Range is focused on developing core talent using proven tooling directly to the business systems. Ideally we’ll collaborate to transparently document, review, and create system updates/patching / maintenance plans.
Funny Story on Competition — Many moons ago I also used Amazon’s platform to compete in the college textbook space 2004 - 2007.
As a college student w/ children, I was working 2 internships & had a thriving online eBay business. I expanded into Amazon College Textbook niche as an earlier adopter in the “Dropship low-cost international edition College Textbooks” space.
At the beginning of a semester it I experienced a mad-rush of sales, profit margins were awesome & fully tracked. I managed the lowest price, best margin opportunities & drop-shipped everything possible. Manually shipped, tracked, and managed returns many times.
Years later - I believe in 2014 - Amazon approved selling international edition books, AbeBooks.com became a storefront (a main source of mine). I suspect it was the supreme court decision which changed things…
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’. #FACTS — I’ve never attempted to reactivate the seller account.

With Amazon coming into town, perhaps I’ll be have the opportunity to Demo the Cyber Range & ask Jeff for reactivation so I can dive into some F.B.A. drop-shipping.
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.
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.
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. In August, the Cyber Range Research Assistant initiative shifted into next gear — I posted the original article of relevant analysis here:
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 initial 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).
- A significant portion of the candidate we connected with are targeting the 3 domains this project will gain experience in.
- The other domains are closely related to the Mission Statement of the Cyber Range.
Candidate Skills

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 — this is exactly what the Academic Alliance initiative aims to do.

