We Need a New Approach: From Filling Roles to Workforce Intelligence

For years, the conversation about cybersecurity workforce challenges has fixated on one motion: getting roles filled. Spread an opening across as many agencies as possible, generate as much résumé volume as possible, and hope the right person surfaces. The logic feels intuitive. In practice, it produces the opposite of what leaders actually need.

The deeper problem was never a sourcing problem. It was — and remains — an intelligence problem. Leaders lacked visibility into how their workforce ecosystem actually operated, where capability existed, and where operational risk was concentrated. Volume was a substitute for understanding. It still is.

The volume model rewards the wrong behavior

The contingency approach looks reasonable on the surface. Hand an open role to several firms, pay only when someone is placed, and let the market compete. More participants, the thinking goes, means broader coverage and a higher probability of success.

The reality runs the other direction.

"The more agencies a hiring organization gives the opening to, the less the contingent recruiter works on it because of the inherent risk involved."

When everyone is competing for the same outcome and only one party is paid, the rational move is to invest the least effort while submitting the most résumés. The organization receives untargeted, sub-par candidate flow from multiple sources — and ends up doing more work, not less. It is a colossal waste of money, time, and energy that companies turned to an external firm specifically to avoid.

The same dynamic punishes the most skilled specialists. The model lumps deeply experienced practitioners and low-effort, high-volume providers into one bucket, expecting both to work at the same below-market terms. You get what you pay for — and the volume model is engineered to pay for noise.

The real shift is from sourcing to visibility

This is where the original argument still holds, and where current positioning sharpens it.

"A paradigm shift is required for how companies go about securing security talent."

That shift is Workforce Intelligence. Instead of asking how fast can we fill this role, leaders should be asking a different set of questions:

• How does our workforce ecosystem actually operate?
• What capabilities exist across the organization today?
• Where is operational workforce risk concentrated?
• How does our workforce structure support — or constrain — security strategy execution?

None of those questions are answered by résumé volume. They are answered by visibility — into capability coverage, into how roles connect, and into where the organization is exposed.

Why this matters more now, not less

The original critique was aimed at a broken recruiting transaction. The lesson scales to something larger. Security leaders are accountable for program outcomes, board-level risk conversations, and the resilience of their function over time. Those outcomes depend on understanding the workforce as an ecosystem, not on the speed of any single transaction.

When you can visualize capability coverage across your organization, you can see where risk lives before it becomes an incident. You can make deliberate workforce strategy decisions instead of reactive ones. You can optimize the structure you already have rather than defaulting to volume every time a gap appears.

That is the difference between operating blind and operating with intelligence.

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The old model asked how many résumés it could generate. The better question — the one leaders are accountable for — is how clearly they can see their own workforce. CyberSN exists to provide that visibility: the Workforce Intelligence security and IT leaders use to understand their ecosystem, manage operational risk, and align their workforce with strategy.

The shift isn't a faster way to close open roles. It's a clearer way to lead.