New Cybersecurity Tool To Help HR Find Qualified Applicants

What's going on with the CyberSecurity Industry's talent, or lack thereof?

In today's tech climate, not only are there 80,000 Entry-Level, Non-Sexy Tech Jobs that Undergrads Don’t Want, as we saw in yesterday's post, but it looks like when they finally do apply the majority of applicants turn out to be unqualified.

“On average, 59 percent of enterprises get at least five applicants for each open cybersecurity position, but most of these applicants are unqualified,” the report states.

Most organizations surveyed are focused on hiring cybersecurity experts who have hands-on experience and certification rather than formal education. But, according to the report, in a newly burgeoning field, that’s hard to find.

“Almost 27 percent of respondents state that they are unable to fill open cybersecurity positions in their enterprises—with another 14 percent of respondents unaware as to whether their enterprises could fill these positions or not,” the report states.
Source: REPORT: INDUSTRY GROUP RAISES ALARM ABOUT CYBERSECURITY SKILLS GAP

Help is Available

But ISACA is looking to fix that by helping HR departments find the most qualified it pros with their certification platform, which provides a 2-hour test that will report on strength and weaknesses of a candidate as well as offer performance based online training.

“It is all virtual machines, which means in each particular lab you’re talking to a real firewall, a real DMZ, a real web server, a real database server, whatever the configuration happens to be,” Chief Innovation Officer Frank Schettini explained to Associations Now. “And they’re actually up and live up in the cloud, so it is actually a real-time lab.”
Source: NEW TOOL LETS HR TEST APPLICANTS’ CYBERSECURITY SKILLS

Streamlining The Process

It helps HR easily test competencies of a cybersecurity candidate as well as letting managers improve their existing IT employees.

“Now instead of going through a process of blindly hiring someone, you go through the process of having them run the skills assessment test, reading the results, and then deciding whether you want to hire the individual,” Schettini said.

“What this tool allows you to do is … know up front before you hire them what type of training investment you’re going to want to do to bring them on board,” he continued. “So the hiring process becomes much more straightforward—you know what you’re getting, you know what training program you want to set up—and the beauty of the platform is you can leverage the platform any way you want to set up that training program.”

Source: NEW TOOL LETS HR TEST APPLICANTS’ CYBERSECURITY SKILLS

Hopefully, this tool, along with a real concerted effort to teach the much-needed cybersecurity skills to the new crop of it professionals, will help us close our rather large current skills gap.

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