Building a More Inclusive Future in Cybersecurity

This live Q&A has Michelle Winters answering audience questions about hiring and building a more inclusive cybersecurity workforce. She opens by saying her organization is hiring across technical and non-technical roles, with openings added on a quarterly cycle. Interested people can reach her on LinkedIn for an introduction to the HR team, and she offers to help newcomers tune their resumes with the right keywords, even when they cannot join her company.

The middle of the discussion focuses on hiring managers. Her advice is that one company cannot make diversity progress alone, so managers should partner with associations and groups for women starting cybersecurity careers while pressing their own employers to set annual diversity goals. She describes a personal practice of interviewing at least one candidate without a cybersecurity background for every few hires, since internal referrals often crowd out outsiders and many roles are never posted publicly. She also keeps reminders of key traits visible during interviews to counter unconscious bias.

On the labor market, she sees many people switching careers, and she has hired former teachers whose customer-facing skills transferred well. The gap she sees is that many candidates do not know how to shape their resumes, so she talks with promising applicants early. The takeaway for practitioners is to widen the candidate pool, look for transferable skills, and help applicants present their experience in terms recruiters can match.