Trying to recruit cybersecurity specialists usually becomes a problem before anyone writes the job description.
A company notices that its security team is stretched, alerts are multiplying, developers are moving more applications into the cloud, and employees are accessing systems from places the business never had to think about a few years ago. More suppliers have system access, more data moves between platforms, and suddenly there are more things to protect than the existing team can comfortably cover.
The vacancy tends to appear after all of that has already happened. Someone calls it a cybersecurity specialist role, the requirements start accumulating, and before long the company is asking for cloud security, SIEM, incident response, vulnerability management, penetration testing, compliance and several certifications in the same person.
That sounds thorough. It can also be a sign that nobody has decided what problem the new hire is actually there to solve.
This matters because Europe’s cybersecurity workforce is not simply dealing with a shortage of people. ENISA’s latest European Cybersecurity Skills Framework groups the profession into 12 distinct role profiles, each with its own responsibilities, skills and competencies. The framework exists partly because employers need a clearer way to define what they are actually recruiting for.
At the same time, the wider European technology workforce continues to expand. Eurostat counted 10.45 million ICT specialists across the EU in 2025, representing 5% of total employment. The number increased by 2.6% from 2024, although growth has slowed from the stronger increases recorded earlier in the decade.
So the interesting recruitment problem is not simply finding somebody with “cybersecurity” somewhere on their CV. It is finding the person whose experience matches the security problem sitting inside the business.
The Job Description Should Start With the Risk
Consider a company that has recently moved a large part of its infrastructure into the cloud. Its engineering team has grown, employees work remotely, and several external services connect to internal systems. The security team is becoming increasingly concerned about permissions, monitoring and vulnerabilities, but nobody has clear ownership of the problem.
The easy response is to advertise for a cybersecurity specialist.
The more useful response is to ask what the person will actually spend their time doing.
If excessive permissions are the main concern, cloud security and identity management experience should carry significant weight. A business struggling to investigate incidents needs a different profile. A software company repeatedly discovering vulnerabilities in production may need somebody much closer to application security.
Those people may all describe themselves as cybersecurity professionals. Their day-to-day work can be very different.
ENISA’s framework reflects exactly this problem. Its 12 profiles cover different areas of cybersecurity work and provide employers with a common language for describing responsibilities and competencies. ENISA also specifically identifies recruitment and workforce planning as uses for the framework.
The practical lesson is simple: define the security responsibility before defining the candidate.
A Long List of Tools Can Hide a Weak Search
Cybersecurity vacancies can become impressive very quickly.
A recruiter adds AWS and Azure. Then SIEM. Then EDR. Then vulnerability management. Then penetration testing. Then threat intelligence. Then ISO 27001 and NIST. A few certifications complete the picture.
The vacancy now contains plenty of keywords for a sourcing platform to find.
It may contain very little information about the person the company actually needs.
Someone who lists Splunk, for example, might have spent years creating detection rules and investigating incidents. Another person may have used it occasionally as part of a much larger security team. Both CVs can contain the same keyword.
The same problem appears with cloud security. “AWS experience” does not tell an employer whether someone designed IAM policies, investigated exposed resources, managed secrets or simply worked in an AWS environment.
The useful question is therefore not just what technology have you used?
It is what responsibility did you have when you used it?
That shift makes sourcing harder at the beginning, but it produces a much more useful shortlist.
The Best Interview Questions Usually Start With Something That Happened
Cybersecurity interviews often lean heavily on hypothetical situations.
What would you do if an employee’s credentials were compromised? How would you respond to ransomware? What would you do if a vulnerability appeared in production?
Those questions can reveal technical knowledge, but they also allow experienced interviewees to give polished answers they have prepared beforehand.
A conversation about something that actually happened tends to be more revealing.
Ask the candidate about an incident they handled. Let them explain what they saw first, what information they had, what they did not know, how they investigated the problem and what happened once the immediate threat was under control.
The details will vary. A SOC analyst may describe an alert investigation. An incident responder may talk about containment and evidence. A cloud security engineer may describe an exposed resource or compromised identity.
What matters is how the person thinks when the information is incomplete.
Do they distinguish evidence from assumption? Do they understand which systems or accounts need attention first? Do they recognise when an incident needs to involve people outside the security team?
The strongest answers usually contain the part that comes after the emergency. Perhaps the company changed an access policy, improved detection, rotated credentials or altered a development process. That tells you whether the candidate understands security as an ongoing function rather than a series of isolated emergencies.
Give the Candidate a Problem, Not Another Vocabulary Test
A practical assessment can make that distinction clearer.
Give the candidate a situation that resembles the environment they would be joining. An employee has clicked a suspicious link, an unusual login has appeared, the account has accessed several internal resources and the security team does not yet know whether data has left the organisation.
Then let the candidate work through it.
There does not need to be one secret answer.
The interviewer is trying to see what the candidate considers important. Perhaps they want authentication logs first. Perhaps they want to understand the account’s privileges. Perhaps they would contain the account immediately while preserving evidence. Perhaps they would investigate the possibility that the unusual login has a legitimate explanation.
Those decisions reveal judgement.
That is much closer to the work than asking somebody to define phishing, explain a firewall or recite the stages of incident response.
Good Security People Know Which Alerts to Ignore
A security team can have too much information as easily as it can have too little.
Monitoring systems generate alerts constantly. Some identify genuine attacks. Others come from legitimate behaviour, configuration changes, unusual but harmless activity or detection rules that are simply too broad.
A specialist who treats everything as urgent will eventually become part of the problem.
A useful interview can focus on a false positive the candidate has investigated. What made them realise it was harmless? Which evidence did they check? Did they change the detection rule afterwards?
That final part matters because it shows whether the person thinks beyond the immediate alert.
If the same false positive appears every week, closing it every week does not improve the security operation. The detection system itself needs attention.
That kind of judgement becomes more valuable as organisations collect larger amounts of security data and automate more of their monitoring.
Also read: When Should You Outsource IT Recruitment in Europe?
Cloud Security Has Changed the Profile Companies Need
Moving infrastructure into the cloud has not made security simpler. It has changed where many of the difficult decisions happen.
Identity, permissions, APIs, automated infrastructure, storage, workloads and third-party services all interact. A mistake in one permission setting can create a very different kind of exposure from the network-security problems many companies traditionally associated with cybersecurity.
This is why “AWS experience” is a poor standalone requirement.
A stronger recruitment process asks what the candidate actually secured. Did they manage privileged access? Review permissions? Protect secrets? Investigate suspicious activity? Respond to a misconfigured production resource?
Those questions establish whether the candidate understands cloud security or has simply worked in a cloud environment.
Also read: Where Can You Find the Best Developers?
Application Security Needs Someone Who Can Work With Developers
For software companies, the biggest security problem may sit inside the product.
A vulnerability appears. The development team fixes it. The ticket closes. Several months later, something remarkably similar happens again.
That pattern tells the security team something.
Fixing the individual vulnerability is not necessarily fixing the process that keeps producing it.
Application security specialists often sit much closer to software development. Their work can involve secure coding practices, threat modelling, architecture reviews, vulnerability management and security testing throughout the development lifecycle.
Technical knowledge matters, but so does the ability to work with engineers.
During an interview, a useful question is what happened after the candidate discovered a vulnerability. Did they simply report it and move on, or did they work with developers to understand the cause and reduce the chance of seeing the same problem again?
That distinction can tell an employer considerably more than another certification on the CV.
AI Is Changing What Employers Should Test
AI has introduced another problem into technical recruitment.
Candidates can now use AI tools to generate scripts, analyse information, research unfamiliar technologies and explain vulnerabilities. Experienced security professionals can use those capabilities to move faster, but the same tools can also produce answers that sound convincing while being wrong.
ISC2’s 2025 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, based on 16,029 cybersecurity professionals and decision-makers, found that organisations are increasingly prioritising specific skills over simply adding more people. The study also identifies AI as a major influence on cybersecurity roles and the skills professionals will need.
That creates a useful interview opportunity.
Instead of asking whether somebody uses AI, give them an AI-generated security finding and ask them to evaluate it.
What would they verify? What evidence would they need? How would they determine whether a reported vulnerability is actually exploitable? What would make them reject the tool’s conclusion?
A security professional does not need to distrust AI.
They need enough technical judgement to know when the machine is wrong.
European Talent Makes the Search Bigger, Not Automatically Better
The broader European labour market creates another option for employers that cannot find the right specialist locally.
Eurostat’s 2026 digitalisation data shows that ICT specialists now account for 5% of EU employment, but the distribution is uneven. Sweden had the highest share in 2025 at 8.9%, while Romania was among the countries with the lowest share at around 3%.
That does not mean a company should automatically choose the country with the largest technology workforce.
The relevant question is where the required skills are accessible.
A company looking for a cloud security engineer, for example, is not searching for “ICT workers” in the abstract. It needs people with particular experience, at a particular seniority, who are available for the kind of work and compensation the company can offer.
That is where European recruitment becomes more interesting.
The employer’s potential talent pool can stretch beyond its domestic market, but so can the competition. The same experienced security professional can be approached by companies in several European countries.
A larger search therefore needs better definition, not just more CVs.
The Candidate Is Evaluating the Security Culture
An experienced cybersecurity professional is also likely to investigate the employer before accepting the role.
Who makes security decisions? What happens when security identifies a serious vulnerability? Can the security team challenge a product release? Does management act on security recommendations? What authority will the new hire have?
Those questions matter because cybersecurity professionals can quickly recognise the difference between an organisation that wants stronger security and one that simply wants someone to carry the responsibility for it.
A company can offer a strong salary and still struggle to attract senior talent if the position gives the employee responsibility without authority.
The recruitment process therefore has to sell the actual working environment, not just the job title.
A Good Cybersecurity Hiring Process Does Not Need Seven Interviews
Security is important enough to justify proper assessment. It is not a good reason to make candidates repeat the same conversation five different times.
The hiring manager should know what they need to establish. The technical assessment should test something relevant to the role. The final conversation should resolve the questions that remain.
Everything else creates delay.
That matters because the candidate is making decisions too.
Someone with experience in cloud security, incident response or application security may already have a job and may be speaking to several employers. A company that takes weeks to decide whether it wants to hire them may discover that another employer made the decision much faster.
The answer is not to lower the hiring standard.
It is to make every stage useful.
Final Thoughts
The strongest cybersecurity candidate is not necessarily the person with the longest CV, the most impressive title or the largest collection of certifications.
The better hire is the person whose experience matches the risk the organisation is trying to reduce.
They can investigate when the evidence is incomplete. They understand the systems they protect. They can distinguish a genuine threat from ordinary noise. They can explain technical risk to people outside the security function. They can work with developers and infrastructure teams instead of simply reporting problems to them.
Most importantly, they understand that security work continues after the immediate incident has ended.
Europe’s cybersecurity skills challenge is becoming more structured, not less. ENISA is currently revising the European Cybersecurity Skills Framework to reflect the changing digital environment, emerging threats, new EU cybersecurity policies and the need for clearer proficiency levels. A public consultation on the revised framework is planned for the end of 2026.
For employers, that points towards a more precise way of hiring.
Start with the risk. Define the responsibility. Identify the evidence that would prove someone can handle it. Then search for that experience, whether the candidate sits in your own market or somewhere else in Europe.
The CV can get the person into the interview.
It should not be doing the interviewing for you.
