After 18 years in technical recruitment and hundreds of placements into defense programs, Sam Harrison built the verification engine the industry was missing.
18 years in technical recruitment. London to New York to Miami — from boutique agencies to building and scaling teams as Managing Director at Sourcechain.
People often ask me what the secret sauce of recruiting is. After nearly two decades, I realised it's an innate human skill — built up from thousands of micro-decisions, gut reactions, and pattern recognition. At its core, it's a chemical reaction: is this person telling me the real story?
I was deliberating with a CTO friend about why we always seemed to be on the same page about the right hires. We'd both developed this instinct independently — him from the engineering side, me from the recruiting side. We just knew. But we couldn't explain it, and we certainly couldn't scale it.
That conversation became something I couldn't stop thinking about. What if you didn't need 15 years of interviewing experience and some indescribable sixth sense to spot the real candidates?
There's something in my family that probably shaped how I think about this. My uncle served as a Squadron Leader commanding Tornado jets. My late cousin, John Egging, was a fighter pilot who went on to fly with the Red Arrows — one of the most demanding selections in aviation, where performance has to be proven, not promised. In those worlds, there's no such thing as a strong resume. You either have the hours, the record, and the verified capability — or you don't make the cut. Selection is earned, not written.
That standard never left me.
What if you could verify what someone says about themselves against their actual digital footprint — before you ever pick up the phone? Not "does this resume have the right keywords." But: has this person actually done what they claim? Is their GitHub real? Are their certifications active? Do their employers exist? Is the story they're telling on paper backed up by independently verifiable evidence — or did they write this resume specifically to get past your filters?
That's where Alloy was born. 100+ deterministic checks across public registries, professional platforms, and government databases. No AI opinions. No keyword matching. Every point in the score traces to a verifiable fact. The incentive is to be transparent, not to perform.
We didn't set out to replace recruiters. We set out to give every recruiter — regardless of experience — the same instinct that takes years to develop. Except this version is evidence-based, and it works on the first day.
Every week I set aside 30 minutes to speak with a veteran or active service member looking to break into AI or tech. No pitch, no agenda — just honest advice from someone who has spent two decades on the hiring side of this industry.
The window of opportunity right now is the best it has ever been. You don't need a computer science degree. The discipline, systems thinking, and mission focus that military service builds are exactly what this industry is looking for — and AI has lowered the barrier to entry in ways that weren't possible even two years ago. If you've served and you're trying to figure out where to start, reach out. I'll be straight with you about what the path actually looks like.