The Cliff Series · Part 3
Most of the frustration vendors feel with their searches traces back to one distinction.
Hiring is reactive. Post the role, sort what comes in, schedule interviews, hope the right person is in the stack.
Recruitment is a deliberate effort, and it doesn’t start with outreach or posting.
Most job descriptions have the feel of “needed to get this done so I could post this job.” A list of every quality anyone in the room wanted.
Recruitment starts by treating those qualifications as a draft. They get reviewed and refined with the hiring manager to zero in on the nuance. What’s actually required at this stage of the business. Where the role flexes. Which assumptions in the JD don’t align with real life.
That conversation gets documented, and the documentation is what guides the search.
Posting JDs gets an interview pipeline set up, but let’s be honest, most shouldn’t have been booked. The hiring manager’s time gets burned and the process drags an extra quarter. Time invested up front to qualify details and challenge assumptions saves time on the back end with fewer, higher quality interviews.
There’s a second calibration that happens before sourcing, and skipping it is one of the biggest challenges setting companies back against their timelines: searching for someone who doesn’t exist.
The skill set, the experience profile, the comp range, the level of the role. Each one gets defined internally with logic that makes sense, but the combination doesn’t always exist in the market.
Learning that mid-search is costly. Lots of interviews, no matches or accepted offers.
Pressure-testing the profile against market realities before the search starts helps avoid misfires. Experience that meets today’s GTM needs, comp aligned with industry standards, and looking at the right level for execution. Those are the searches that succeed!
We don’t post job openings. It isn’t philosophy. It’s math.
The math behind a posted job is simple. The post invites everyone. Qualified, unqualified, mismatched, opportunistic. Someone has to sort that volume before any qualified conversation happens, and those are hours that could have been spent conducting targeted outreach to qualified prospective candidates.
The strongest GTM professionals aren’t reading job posts. They’re employed, or being very deliberate about which opportunities they choose to explore. They tend to respond to outreach showing real research and intent.
A search built on inbound is reactive and amounts to sorting noise. A proactive search runs toward a targeted list of qualified prospects and is built from the documented profile. Two different jobs.
Here’s what makes the proactive side harder than it sounds. The strongest GTM cyber professionals are usually passive, or are approaching opportunities with a healthy dose of skepticism.
GTM resets, product pivots, funding challenges. If you’ve been in the market for more than a couple of years, you know what I mean.
To have a real conversation with a serious professional, there is a level of trust required, and that trust is built through credibility. Mass InMail blasts, or a clear lack of real understanding by a recruiter of their clients or the industry, don’t build that trust.
When a search runs without the credibility, the hiring team isn’t getting an accurate picture of available talent in the market. The slate looks full. It just doesn’t represent the pool. How would you know which professionals you’re losing before they ever show up in your pipeline?
Qualify the role with the hiring manager. Calibrate the profile against what the market actually holds. Skip posting, build target lists, and conduct outreach with enough credibility to get a real conversation.
None of these steps is complicated, it just comes down to execution. That’s the difference between recruitment and hiring, and it’s usually the difference between a search that’s filled within the timeline and one that produces a bunch of interviews that shouldn’t have been booked.
This is the third piece in a series on how cybersecurity vendors build GTM teams. The series covers the market math behind the talent pool and the two standards of recruitment.
Insights on cybersecurity recruitment, talent strategy, and the cyber vendor landscape.
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