Round and Around We Go: Interviews, What Do You Know?
Erin Barry
BSidesSF 2025 — Here Be Dragons · Day 2 · Main
Erin Barry, VP of Security Talent at Code Red Partners, brought a year's worth of real hiring data from 30 security engineering and leadership placements to debunk myths and lay out hard truths about the security job market. The average time-to-hire is 48 days — nearly seven weeks — the process is widely acknowledged as broken, and the most common rejection reasons have nothing to do with technical skill. Her talk is part data briefing, part field manual for candidates navigating an increasingly competitive and opaque hiring landscape. ---
AI review
A recruiting professional's year-in-data talk about security hiring timelines and rejection patterns. Average time-to-hire is 48 days, average base is $261K, most rejections are behavioral not technical. Useful career advice for junior practitioners, wrong venue for this audience.