The market nobody wants to fix

Since we started Catena, Arthur and I have had a somewhat informal rule:

if we're going to make mistakes, let's at least try to make different ones.

We were never particularly interested in competing for exactly the same part of the recruitment market as everyone else.

Instead, we've always liked working around the edges.

We started by focusing mainly on SMEs: companies that often don't have a strong employer brand and won't receive hundreds of applications simply because they post a job.

Over the past few months, another part of the market has started to catch our attention: frontline and skilled-trade hiring.

Over the years, we've helped a few clients hire people in production, logistics, maintenance and other operational functions.

The results were quite promising.

So we started looking into the problem more intentionally, speaking with companies and HR professionals in Brazil and across Europe.

And the same problem keeps coming up: hiring good people for these roles is really hard.

If you need a software engineer, there are dozens of platforms, tools and sourcing channels built to help you find one.

But what if you need 30 production workers in a particular city?

Maintenance technicians?

Construction professionals?

Staff for a new retail operation?

Many of these people aren't on LinkedIn. They may not have an updated CV. They're in WhatsApp and Facebook groups, local communities, referrals, trade networks or simply working for another company.

At the same time, some employers need to hire dozens or even hundreds of them.

There's another reason why we find this market particularly interesting.

At a time when so much attention is focused on which jobs AI will transform or replace, many of these roles still depend on physical work, technical expertise and being present in the real world.

They appear relatively less exposed to AI substitution and, somewhat paradoxically, have received far less technology to help employers actually hire them.

So we've started asking ourselves a question: is there a big opportunity in solving this part of the labour market better?

It's too early to know.

But we've already seen some promising results, and now we want to understand whether they can be replicated consistently.

Our hypothesis is fairly simple: find people where they actually are, run an initial qualification process, and give employers candidates who genuinely have the experience, interest and availability for the job.

If your company, or someone you know, needs to hire dozens or hundreds of people for production, maintenance, construction, retail or other frontline roles, and hiring them is currently a major pain, get in touch.

That's exactly the kind of company we're looking to learn from right now.

Maybe there's a big opportunity here.

Maybe there isn't.

But it feels like a pretty good place to try, once again, to make a different mistake.