Boost Leadership & Staff Hiring: Adopt an Effective Cyber Hiring Strategy

Today's cybersecurity teams can't be built solely with traditional hiring methods that rely on years of corporate experience or academic qualifications as a guide for weeding out candidates. This piece explains why hiring teams must evolve their recruiting methods and offers some effective ways to uncover true cyber talent during the hiring process.

Traditional Hiring Strategies Ignore Practical Experience

Cybersecurity requires a specific set of technical skills and knowledge that can be overlooked when solely evaluating candidates on years of experience, degrees and certifications. First, cybersecurity is a field where hands-on experience is crucial. While certifications help practitioners have theoretical knowledge of cybersecurity concepts, they do not ensure hands-on experience. For example, the ability to respond to and contain a breach in real time is much more valuable than simply understanding, conceptually, what would need to be done. Similarly, tenure in a job—no matter how lengthy—doesn’t always equate to years of hands-on experience.

Effective Hiring Practices to Consider

By adopting nontraditional hiring practices, hiring managers can identify candidates who have practical experience, technical skills and the mindset to be able to combat cyber threats and help elevate their organization’s security posture. Hiring practices to consider include:

• Focusing on hands-on experience: Instead of eliminating candidates who do not have certifications or traditional education, review their resume for hands-on domain experience that aligns with opportunities within the department.
• Reviewing candidate portfolios for open source contributions: This demonstrates their technical expertise, as well as a commitment to the field. It also showcases their coding abilities, problem-solving skills and familiarity with security tools and techniques.
• Using scenario-based questions for initial screens and behavioral interviews: This will help evaluate candidates' decision-making processes. Understanding if candidates are able to effectively perform root cause analyses, use deductive reasoning and translate strategy into operations will be extremely valuable to the hiring process and help improve team success.

Download: 2025 Cybersecurity Staff Compensation Benchmark Report

How to Gauge Soft Skills in Hiring

It is quite common for hiring teams to focus on technical capabilities and overlook soft skills. Cybersecurity teams must work across other functions within their organization to gather information, deploy projects and improve their services. As a result, it is important that they are able to effectively communicate, collaborate, practice active listening and adapt their messaging to their audience.

Within screening and interviews, hiring teams should be sure to include questions to assess the candidate’s ability to exercise the following soft skills effectively: attention to detail, adaptability, problem solving, collaboration, resilience, empathy, curiosity and continuous learning. Some questions to consider include:

• Tell me about a time you led a project that required collaboration across more than one team.
• How do you prioritize tasks when you have more than one deadline to meet?
• Tell me about the most significant problem you solved for your team or a project.
• Sometimes results don’t align with expectations. Tell me about a time when you had to navigate a customer or collaborator through this scenario.
• Tell me about a time where you needed to make a decision without leadership supervision. What did you consider and what was your process?
• What has been your biggest failure and what did you learn from this experience?

Take the Staff Survey: 2025 Cybersecurity Staff Compensation and Career Survey

Tips to Hire Top Cybersecurity Talent

Traditional hiring methods don’t work in today’s modern cyber environment. Here are a few small changes that can have a big impact on your talent acquisition process:

• Increase collaboration between HR and cybersecurity hiring managers to understand the practical skills needed for current and future cybersecurity needs.
• Enhance resume review procedures to identify more than years of experience, certifications and degrees. Assess how each applicant has helped contribute to increasing the strength of their organization’s security program.
• Interview candidates to assess both technical and soft skills because cybersecurity teams require cross-functional collaboration to be successful.

With threat actors rapidly evolving their tactics, it’s more important now than ever to have a cybersecurity team that isn’t just educated but has the practical expertise to help protect our technology ecosystems— especially when breaches can have detrimental effects on our companies and communities.

Download:  2025 Guide to Hiring and Retaining CISOs and Security Leaders

CISO Compensation & Security Budget Benchmark Reports

Each year, IANS, in partnership with Artico Search, releases a series of benchmark reports on CISO compensation, security budgets, key security staff compensation and job satisfaction.

These in-depth reports feature new takeaways, uncover a wealth of insights and provide valuable leadership guidance to fine-tune your current role, department and career path.

Download the 2025 Cybersecurity Staff Compensation Benchmark Report – for additional insights and data for hiring and retaining staff within the security organization. Download the 2025 Guide to Hiring and Retaining CISOs and Security Leaders – for valuable guidance and data for hiring and retaining CISOs and security leaders within the security organization.

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