Nearly half of cybersecurity roles take over six months to fill due to a shortage of qualified candidates and a skills mismatch that worsens hiring friction for entry-level positions. Early-career hiring for Cybersecurity and Information Security Engineer jobs is especially challenging in France, where the rapid market growth is colliding with complex candidate evaluation issues.
While demand for cybersecurity professionals surges—France’s cybersecurity sector is projected to grow by nearly 40% by 2025 and will face an estimated shortfall of over 15,000 professionals—entry-level hiring remains a bottleneck. Companies struggle not just to find talent, but to accurately identify job-ready candidates who combine hands-on skills with theoretical knowledge.
This blog takes a deep dive into why early-career hiring for cybersecurity engineers is broken, the common frictions recruiters face, and how a focus on realistic work-sample assessments can create more effective, inclusive hiring practices that align with the French market’s dynamism.
Current Frictions in Early-Career Cybersecurity Hiring
Application Volume Overload
Entry-level cybersecurity roles see a high volume of applications, often from candidates lacking the practical skills employers need. This flood increases screening time and lowers signal quality, making it harder to identify motivated and capable candidates.
Extended Time to Hire
Industry data shows it can take over six months to fill cybersecurity roles, particularly at junior levels. This lengthy process delays critical team building and leaves organizations vulnerable to rising cyber threats while candidates lose interest.
Skills Mismatch
The cybersecurity skills gap is a multilayered issue: understaffing, lack of specialization, and insufficient real-world hands-on experience all contribute. Candidates often have academic qualifications but lack readiness for the complex, evolving security environments seen in enterprises today.
Poor Signal Quality in Hiring
Traditional resumes, certifications, and abstract interviews fail to surface practical skills or motivation. Employers get shallow signals, increasing risk of bad hires or missed talent.
Assessment Drift
Cybersecurity roles require a blend of technical and soft skills that evolve quickly with emerging threats and tools. Relying on outdated or generic assessment approaches leads to misalignment in candidate evaluation and results in poor job fit.
What Makes Early-Career Cybersecurity Engineer Roles Hard to Evaluate?
Cybersecurity engineers deal with a complex mix of skills ranging from network security, incident response, cloud and IoT security, to compliance with regulations like NIS 2 and DORA. The role requires both deep technical knowledge and the ability to think strategically under pressure.
Emerging technologies and tools like AI-driven detection and zero trust architectures deepen this complexity, making it hard for recruiters to evaluate junior candidates who may not yet have mastery or direct experience with every aspect. Additionally, unclear role titles and overlapping responsibilities create confusion in defining what “entry-level” means for each company.
The Alternative: Work-Sample Evaluation for Better Hiring Outcomes
Work-sample assessment is a straightforward way to evaluate candidates based on real tasks they would perform on day one. Instead of relying on resumes or theoretical quizzes, candidates complete short, realistic challenges that demonstrate problem-solving and technical skills in context.
This approach benefits all stakeholders:
- Students and early-career candidates gain clarity on role expectations and build confidence through practice
- Employers receive objective evidence of capability and motivation, reducing hiring time and improving quality
- Universities can better align curricula with industry needs, enhancing graduate readiness and employability
By focusing on role-relevant challenges, work-sample evaluation reduces the skills mismatch and lifts signal quality, enabling recruiters to identify hidden gems and surface motivated talent ready to contribute from day one.
Talantir’s Perspective: Aligning Learning and Hiring Through Real Work Simulation
Talantir is built around authentic, company-aligned career roadmaps where students complete job-based cases reflecting real cybersecurity engineering tasks. These short, structured missions help learners build practical capabilities incrementally.
Through this model, universities can scale career readiness without extra workload, while employers launch targeted challenges to find candidates who have practiced true-to-role cases. Talantir’s AI-driven profiles give employers transparent insights into how candidates think and solve problems, far beyond traditional scores or certifications.
In cybersecurity, where the mix of skills is complex and rapidly evolving, Talantir surfaces better-matched, motivated candidates with evidence-backed readiness signals. This approach reduces time to hire and builds deeper confidence in the candidate selection process—crucial in fast-growing markets like France.
Universities, employers, and students all benefit from this capability-first, practical focus:
- Universities: deliver aligned readiness programs and report on cohort progress
- Employers: see ranked, deep profiles with motivation signals and reduce mis-hires
- Students: gain clarity, confidence, and an evidence portfolio proving their skills in context
Conclusion: What If We Evaluated Real Work, Not Promises?
The cybersecurity talent shortage and tight hiring timelines highlight a systemic failure in early-career hiring: much emphasis on credentials, little on real capability. What if hiring focused on what candidates can actually do—the tasks, decisions, and problem-solving they will face from day one?
For France’s burgeoning cybersecurity market, resetting early-career hiring standards with work-sample assessment can dramatically improve fits, reduce delays, and unlock opportunities for the next generation of cybersecurity engineers.
Talantir invites students, employers, and universities to rethink traditional hiring and preparation approaches and explore how practical, skills-first evaluation can create a more inclusive, dynamic cybersecurity workforce.
Explore how work-sample evaluation can reset early-career hiring standards.