Inside Acceler8 Talent: Mat Ferdenzi On The Boston Tech Recruitment Scene

As part of our Inside Acceler8 Talent blog series, we sit down with the people that make the recruitment consultancy magic happen in our Boston office. First up is COO Mat Ferdenzi, who tells us about taking a business stateside and Acceler8 Talent’s laser focus on being the tech recruiter of choice in emerging tech markets.

“I’m passionate about being part of the kind of rapid escalation of the technological landscape,” explains Mat Ferdenzi, COO of Acceler8 Talent.

Working as an actor in a past life coupled with software engineering running in the family, set a path for Mat into machine learning and tech recruitment at Understanding Recruitment’s UK office and now, Boston.

“As I got older, I had a better understanding of life and where I wanted to go with my career and it’s led me here and building this amazing Acceler8 Talent team.”

Based on buzzy Portland Street, the Boston recruitment scene was an easy choice when it came to Understanding Recruitment Inc. taking its machine learning staffing expertise to the USA in 2019, with Mat at the helm.

“This is the biggest kind of tech market in the world, and there’s so much innovation happening in every area,” explains Mat. “It’s also a really cool, diverse city to live in.

We focus a lot on the Bay area, but also have clients in New York, and work across the states as there are candidates based all over, people often relocate, and remote working opens up everything.”

Why machine learning and emerging tech?

Now, one major rebrand, six additional team members and a bigger office at Acceler8 Talent’s WeWork headquarters two years later, the boutique consultancy is ideally positioned to build on its clientele of household name tech companies and lead on the Boston recruiter scene.

“From the start, we wanted to be different and not just have one person that’s focused in one area but be a team of specialists working within an area and be leaders in the space as a small, boutique, fast-growing firm.”

“We’ve worked hard to be specialists in one area, rather than generalists in a lot of them,” says Mat, on the Acceler8 Talent offering.

“We work with smaller companies, but there are also tonnes that are becoming unicorns and being acquired. We’re focused on building and scaling high-performance teams and being specialists in next generation technology.”

With business booming, the Acceler8 Talent team is carving out its niche in specific emerging technology markets, including hardware acceleration, quantum computing and silicon photonics, with a strong focus on tech in the realm of machine learning.

“From the start, we wanted to be different and not just have one person that’s focused in one area but be a team of specialists working within an area and be leaders in the space as a small, boutique, fast-growing firm.”

The company’s partnerships with startups and large companies working at the forefront of these technologies drove a rebrand in 2021, which saw Acceler8 Talent be born.

“Our partners are all about trying to make things quicker – whether that's machine learning algorithm much quicker or in a data centre, run lightweight as possible and use minimal computing power. We wanted to encapsulate this with our rebranding.”Helping change the face of technologyAcceler8 Talent is backed by decades of industry expertise and experience as part of the Understanding Recruitment group, employing over 60 people worldwide and working with companies leading the way in tech, whether Google or smaller setups breaking new ground in the tech industry.

“Probably around half of our client base is companies that are less than 100 people, but the other half of that is mid-range to pretty large in their market and have thousands of staff,” comments Mat. “We work with small companies that may just be about to announce Series A or Series B funding that are building brand new chip technology and the software stacks that go along with that. We also work with parts of crews related to hardware acceleration, as well as larger companies.”“We work with small companies that may just be about to announce Series A or Series B funding that are building brand new chip technology and the software stacks that go along with that.

"Mat affirms the end goal is always supporting companies to achieve their true potential and build a partnership beyond typical recruitment; “We always aim to have a real connection with our clients and ‘get’ their vision and milestones that need to be hit in terms of products and what our clients are building.”

“It’s really competitive and many companies are racing towards building the best hardware (or similar) in the market, and the only way to compete is by getting great people on board.” He adds: “We’re experienced working with professors from MIT (and Oxford & Cambridge, from my side) and know the quality needed for these teams. We have had companies say we helped them build a team capable of securing their Series B funding and hit their target, which we’re really proud of.”

“I know it’s very hard for small companies to attract the right talent because there's so much noise out there, but we can help.”

Is hybrid work the future? Looking ahead to the future of workplace culture, Mat says he sees some of the flexibility introduced by the pandemic staying. “I think things will change in the next couple of years. A lot of companies we work with offer hybrid working (i.e. 2/3 days a week in office), and a lot of them are even more flexible for the right person as well.”

Mat says he sees employers becoming more accustomed to remote, as companies that weren’t open previously are now introducing hybrid working environments, especially as people are leaving roles because it’s not offered. “I know people who are one year out of school and want 100% remote working which we can make work, but this is definitely new.”

He concludes: “For us, the market is really busy, and I don’t see that slowing down in the next couple of years at all. We’ll continue working hard to make an impact at companies who are changing the future of the world we live in through tech.”