Leaving the trade
5per 5 roles
Retirement, redundancy, injury or burnout
Our mission
The world is short of the people who build it.
We fix who gets found, and how fast.
Capital is not the constraint on the AI build-out. Skilled labour is. The trades that energise data halls, switchyards, battery plants and cooling loops are retiring faster than they are being replaced, and every new gigawatt of compute competes for the same finite pool of hands. Poachd exists to make that pool visible, verifiable and reachable in minutes instead of months.
The maths
Five out. Two in. That gap is the whole story.
Coming in behind them
2per 5 roles
Qualified and site-ready replacements
5:2
Exit-to-entry ratio
For every five electricians retiring, made redundant or no longer physically able to do the work, only two are replacing them.
400k
US shortfall
The US alone needs roughly 400,000 more electricians to deliver its announced infrastructure and data centre pipeline.
1st
Claim on scarce labour
AI infrastructure is overtaking other verticals for the same crews, so mission-critical skills are repriced faster than any award or agreement can follow.
The cost of getting it wrong
Hire too slow and the program slips. Hire too fast and the job stops.
Both failures come from the same blind spot: nobody can see, quickly and honestly, who is genuinely capable and genuinely available right now.
Delays compound down the program
A four-week gap filling one commissioning lead pushes energisation, witness testing and handover. On a staged AI campus, that single vacancy can idle three other crews and a rented switchroom.
A rushed hire can stop a job
Put someone on HV switching or a live UPS bypass before they're ready and the outcome isn't a slow week — it's a stop-work, an incident report and a client who reopens the contract.
It can also stop a career
The person carries it too. One bad placement outside their real capability follows a tradesperson for years. Matching honestly protects both sides of the handshake.
Demand is moving faster than supply
AI infrastructure is now first in the queue for every scarce trade.
Hyperscale and GPU campuses, transmission upgrades, substations, battery storage and the cooling systems that keep racks alive are all being built at once, in the same regions, with the same workforce. Mining, rail, water and commercial construction are bidding against that. When one sector can pay more and mobilise sooner, the people with mission-critical experience move — and the crews left behind inherit the schedule risk.
That competition is not a problem to lament. It is a market that needs better information. Poachd reads real capability rather than keywords, credits transferable experience across verticals, keeps rate and licence private until both sides opt in, and prices our own fee against the hours actually worked — so a fast, correct match is the outcome everyone is paid for.
Founder
Doug Hastings
Founder, Poachd — Founder, Hindsite Industries
Doug built Hindsite Industries for the skilled worker on the tools: workflow intelligence and embedded microlearning that make sure every task on a complex job is completed correctly, first time, with the evidence to prove it.
Solving execution exposed the bigger constraint. Getting the work done right depends on having the right person there in the first place - and that is where industry keeps losing weeks it cannot afford. Poachd is the other half of the problem: making sure the right person is available for the right work, verified and matched at speed.
Poachd finds and mobilises the right people. HINDSITE makes sure the work they do is executed to standard. Together they form an end-to-end workforce intelligence ecosystem for the industries building the AI economy.