How Casca made 7 critical hires with Paraform
John Kim
•
Co-founder @ Paraform
September 25, 2025
September 25, 2025
Casca is building AGI for the finance industry. They help FDIC-insured banks process 10x more business loans by automating almost 90% of the loan origination process. They’re backed by Y Combinator, Peterson Ventures, and Clocktower Technology Ventures - and already serve large industry players like Bankwell Bank, Live Oak Bank, and Huntington National Bank.
When Casca first came to Paraform, they were a small team trying to scale hiring. Manually filtering inbound applicants and performing cold-outbound to candidates was too time consuming. Working with recruiting agencies produced too much noise and no results. They had to find an answer fast.
In late 2024, Casca was a mere four people - CEO Lukas Haffer and CTO Isaiah Williams were relying on cold outreach via Bookface (YC’s internal job board) and fielding inbound on LinkedIn via Luka’s profile.
No ATS, no job board, and 15–20 screens a day on the CEO’s calendar. Hiring had become a full-time job on top of everything else. Scaling the team was a top priority - but the current state was unsustainable, inefficient, and impossible to scale.
Adlon Adams (COO @ Casca) joined as their 5th employee and immediately started owning end-to-end recruiting for the entire company.
“I came on to do sales, but we were so small and had signed so many customers that I couldn’t sign any more until we hired more.”
After joining, Adlon set up an ATS system, posted jobs online, and started looking for external resources to help with recruiting.
“We were just very reactive in recruiting and had no time for outreach. That’s why we needed external partners.”
Before using Paraform, Casca had tried traditional agencies but they weren’t able to deliver quality candidates and deploy the resourcing that Casca needed.
“We worked with three agencies, but changes and communication were slow. Their reach was limited.”
A referral led them to Paraform, their CEO Lukas set a demo, and they haven’t looked back since.
From the beginning, Paraform felt different. It was tech-first, easy to navigate, and thoughtfully designed for teams like Casca. It allowed them to adjust pitches, provide calibrations, and communicate with recruiters in real time - not weekly syncs.
“You need to coach recruiters on how to pitch your company, and Paraform makes that easy. I can tweak messaging, update scorecards, and make announcements.”
Where agencies relied on outdated and inefficient communication, Paraform integrated directly with Casca’s ATS and Slack - making feedback fast and seamless.
“The Slack integration is great - we can message recruiters without friction”
“Even with our ATS, Paraform was easy to use. The onboarding was seamless.”
The most critical hire Casca needed was a Founding Security Engineer. Someone who had done both product security DevOps, but could work autonomously in a lean startup environment.
“We were looking for someone who could talk to CISOs at banks, who could code, understand security deeply, and explain it to enterprise buyers. That’s a unicorn.”
Compared to previous searches, Paraform enabled Casca to access groups of ultra-specialized recruiters that delivered significant volume without sacrificing expertise and quality.
“With Paraform we had an entire team of recruiters on the security engineer role. One had 10 years in cybersecurity recruiting and our top 5 candidates came from him.”
After a few calibrations and reshaping the requirements, they hired their person. What was once frustratingly elusive suddenly felt like magic.
“Without Paraform we wouldn’t have found them.”
In just the first couple weeks on the job, Blake (now Head of Security), hit the ground running.
“He got on a customer call in his first week and knocked out all their asks. Then renewed our SOC2 in under two. He’s been phenomenal.”
Shortly after hiring their first Security Engineer with Paraform, the wins kept on compiling. They hired a business operations analyst (Payaal) to handle budgeting, recruiting, culture, conferences, and more.
Paraform’s allowed Casca to think less about getting quality candidates in the door and more strategically about recruiting. It’s enabled them to shift focus to higher-order talent initiatives: new grad hiring, headcount planning, revamping technical assessments.
“Before, we just looked for YC experience, founder, and fintech experience. Now, we can think more strategically: University recruiting, training new grads, writing a headcount plan, what questions we ask, and if we’re hiring for the right need.”
Especially for early stage companies, recruiting is everything. It’s the difference between life and death. Winning and losing. At Casca, recruiting isn’t just a box to check - it’s core to company-building.
“Recruiters are integral to a company’s success. When you’re small and growing, building a world-class team is the top priority. Recruiting is specialized - it takes resilience, creativity, sales skills, and great discovery.”
Recruiting is about building a narrative and setting the tone early - not just filling roles.
“Now I see recruiting is about connecting dots and telling the right story. First impressions matter. Recruiters set the tone.”
In Casca’s eyes, recruiting isn’t support work or just filling roles - it’s a strategic edge. One that helps them win.
A major hire that Casca made through Paraform, aptly enough, was their first technical recruiter, Dalena. Most companies treat internal recruiting hires as the end of external TA partnerships. Casca took the opposite approach. They doubled down and used Paraform as a growth level to scale hiring to the next level.
In just a few months, Dalena’s opened four Full Stack Engineering roles on Paraform. Filling all four of them through the platform, all within the same month.
“There's a stigma that external recruiters struggle with delivering top talent. But Paraform consistently does.” - Dalena Nguyen, Technical Recruiter, Casca
"Paraform was the only one we actually hired with. We see Paraform as a long-term partner.”
Paraform didn’t just help Casca build their team. It became how they keep building.
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