How Skills-Based Hiring Reduces Cybersecurity Workforce Shortages

How Skills-Based Hiring Reduces Cybersecurity Workforce Shortages

With over 4.8 million unfilled cybersecurity roles worldwide and threats growing in complexity, companies continue to scramble to fill cybersecurity positions of varying seniority. Yet, traditional hiring practices—fixated on degrees, certifications, and years of experience—often overlook a fundamental truth: The skills to defend your company might already exist in untapped talent pools.

What if, instead of chasing elusive "perfect" candidates, you could hack the talent gap? By prioritizing proven, real-world skills over rigid credentials, organizations can uncover capable defenders where they least expect them. Skills-based hiring is a practical, forward-thinking strategy that empowers teams to meet today’s threats head-on. This blog explores how skills-based hiring, paired with tools like cyber ranges, helps plug the gaps in cybersecurity workforces. 

What is Skills-Based Hiring in Cybersecurity?

Skills-based hiring flips the script on traditional recruitment. Instead of prioritizing degrees, certifications, or years of experience, it focuses on the thing that arguably truly matters: Can a candidate perform the job?

Ransomware attacks, phishing campaigns, and zero-day vulnerabilities don’t wait for teams to catch up and close gaps. Organizations can’t afford to rely on and wait for their idealized image of the perfect candidate. The ability to detect, respond to, and neutralize threats hinges on demonstrable skills and problem-solving aptitude—not just years in the field or a list of certifications.

Here’s the reality:

  • A degree doesn’t guarantee a candidate can handle a live incident.

  • Certifications alone don’t measure real-time problem-solving skills under pressure.

  • “X years of experience” on a resume may tell you where someone has worked, but not how they worked or what real hands-on experience they gained. (The title of a recent Financial Times piece puts this more bluntly, “Forget industry experience — cyber skills are the key.")

While having all the candidate boxes ticked off for a cybersecurity role is nice, skills-based hiring cuts through potential blind spots. It focuses on demonstrated ability—what a candidate can do in real-world, high-stakes scenarios. For cybersecurity, this could mean:

  • Responding to a simulated breach in a cyber range.

  • Diagnosing a network anomaly under time constraints.

  • Successfully securing a misconfigured cloud workload in a live assessment.

By shifting focus to validated skills, you can unlock a broader, more diverse talent pool. You get to identify self-taught defenders, bootcamp graduates, and professionals who bring unconventional paths but exceptional capability. In short, skills-based hiring aligns cybersecurity recruitment with the realities of modern threats: fast, practical, and results-driven. 

The Case for Skills Over Credentials in Cybersecurity

While traditional credentials have their place,  only focusing on typical hiring markers is out of step with reality. It creates unnecessary barriers to entry, locks out diverse talent, and leaves organizations vulnerable as threats evolve faster than hiring pipelines can keep up (remember the 4.8 million unfilled jobs?).

The defenders of tomorrow might not come from traditional paths, but they can come equipped with the right skills—if you’re willing to look beyond resumes and credentials.

Why credentials alone can fall short:

  • They’re incomplete: Passing an exam doesn’t measure real-time decision-making, adaptability, or the ability to act under pressure.

  • They’re exclusionary: Many talented individuals—self-taught practitioners, veterans, career changers—lack formal credentials but excel in solving real cybersecurity challenges.

  • They’re slow to evolve: A certification from two years ago might already be outdated, while hands-on skills can evolve with emerging threats.

If you focus on skills over credentials, you can build stronger, more agile teams ready to defend against current and future threats.

Cyber Ranges as a Catalyst for Skills Validation

The ability to prove a candidate’s skills is obviously pretty central to a skills-based hiring approach. This is where cyber ranges can prove extremely useful. More than just a training ground, cyber ranges can also act as a real-time proving ground—a place where candidates can showcase their cybersecurity capabilities in environments that mirror the pressures and complexities of live cyber operations.

Cyber ranges also help build hands-on experience for team members who need to develop or refine practical skills, which makes them invaluable for both hiring and upskilling.

At its core, a cyber range is a controlled, simulated environment designed to replicate real-world IT, OT, and/or cloud infrastructure and cyber attacks. This hands-on approach changes the way you validate skills:

  • Instead of relying on self-reported experience or abstract certifications, cyber ranges provide quantifiable, evidence-based results.

  • Candidates are tested on the same challenges they’ll face on the job, so you can see if they’re equipped to operate in live, high-stakes environments.

  • In cyber ranges, you can evaluate not just technical skills (e.g., network defense, threat hunting) but also soft skills—problem-solving, collaboration in team-based exercises, and composure under pressure.

Traditional cybersecurity hiring relies heavily on proxies for ability: resumes, interviews, and credentials. But these tools often fall short. Interviews test how well someone can talk about cybersecurity; certifications test how well they can memorize concepts. Neither reflects how a candidate will respond to a zero-day exploit at 3 AM or an active breach impacting critical systems.

Cyber ranges remove the guesswork by making skills visible and measurable. For example:

  • Can a candidate triage an escalating breach? Can they prioritize tasks under pressure?

  • How quickly can they identify a malicious event amidst thousands of alerts?

  • Can they proactively identify and patch vulnerabilities in cloud or on-prem environments?

At a time when talent shortages remain one of cybersecurity’s biggest challenges and leave businesses in precarious positions of overworked teams, cyber ranges offer a way forward by transforming skills-based hiring from an idea into a measurable, results-driven reality.

Beyond the Resume: Cloud Range Makes Skills Visible

Cloud Range’s FastTrak Candidate Assessments and RightTrak Aptitude Assessments transform the hiring process by moving beyond what’s written on a resume to what can be proven in action.

Using live, virtual cyber range simulations, FastTrak assessments creates job-specific simulations to evaluate experienced candidates in real time—measuring their timing, decision-making, and practical skills against the demands of actual cyber work roles. You get a clear, objective report of strengths, capabilities, and problem-solving performance that hiring managers can trust.  

RightTrak is designed for candidates at any stage in their journey, but it’s especially good for career-changers, entry-level applicants, or untapped talent pools. By analyzing innate strengths, learning preferences, and problem-solving aptitude, RightTrak identifies the potential for a cybersecurity career and matches candidates to the roles where they can excel.

Start reducing your cybersecurity workforce shortages today.

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