Why most defence tech job openings fail before the search even begins

When a position remains unfilled for months, defence companies often blame a shortage of candidates. In a new article for the Arming with Talents special project, CORE Team COO Natalia Saltykova argues that the real problem is often that the company has not defined a clear and realistic hiring brief before the search even starts.

In her column, Saltykova explains how to build an effective brief and define a realistic candidate profile.

Paradoxically, one of the biggest mistakes companies make when opening a position is being too confident that they already know exactly who they are looking for.

After years in recruitment, including the past four working with defence tech companies, we at CORE Team have noticed an interesting pattern. When a client describes the “ideal candidate” in great detail during the first briefing and leaves little room for discussion, it does not necessarily mean they have a clear idea of whom they need. Often, it means something else: the business need has not yet been properly defined, and the company is describing not a real role, but an idealised star candidate expected to solve all its problems at once.

Yes, there is a genuine shortage of candidates in defence today. But our experience shows that many positions are effectively doomed before a recruiter opens LinkedIn or starts approaching the first candidates. And the reason is often not the market. It is the brief.

There is a widespread assumption that the hiring manager always knows whom they are looking for. After all, they build the product, manage the team and are responsible for the outcome. In established industries, this assumption may often hold. But defence is different.

Ukrainian defence companies are scaling at an unprecedented pace. New products are emerging, technologies are changing and, along with them, new roles and new requirements for existing positions. Many executives are building these kinds of teams for the first time, so defining an exact candidate profile on the first attempt is not always possible.

And you know what? Not knowing the ideal candidate profile is perfectly normal. What is not normal is pretending that it already exists. That is when job descriptions start combining mutually exclusive requirements, unrealistic expectations or simply a list of everything that “would be nice to have”.

A good brief is not a list of requirements

Many people see the briefing as a stage where the recruiter simply records the hiring manager’s wishes. In reality, a good brief starts not with “Who are we looking for?” but with “What problem does this person need to solve?” That is a fundamentally different approach.

If you start with technologies, the tech stack or years of experience, it is very easy to end up with a long list of requirements. But when you start with the business problem, it often becomes clear that half of those requirements are not critical. That is why, during a briefing, we try to understand not only the future candidate but also the underlying business need.

My favourite question to ask a client is: “Tell me about this role in your own words.”

This is where it becomes clear whether the manager really understands the role and whether the other stakeholders describe it in the same way.

As the manager explains why the company needs the role, what problems the new hire is expected to solve and what they should have achieved after three to six months, it becomes clear what really matters to the business — and what ended up in the job description simply because “the guys have it, so we need it too”.

And sometimes it works the other way around. We may hear about specific technologies, tools or requirements, but the manager cannot explain what business problem the future employee is actually expected to solve. This does not mean they have prepared poorly. In a young and rapidly changing industry, it is a normal situation.

That is precisely what the briefing is for: to work together to define a realistic role profile before the search begins.

A briefing is not about having all the answers. It is about asking the right questions.

Where we start the briefing

Before starting a candidate search, we at CORE Team validate every job description provided by a client and try to answer several basic questions:

• What business problem does the new hire need to solve? Not the vacancy, not the list of tasks, but the actual problem.
• What result does the company expect three to six months after the person joins? This helps identify which competencies are genuinely critical.
• Who is involved in the decision-making process, and do they all have the same understanding of the role? If their answers differ, the problem needs to be resolved before the search begins.
• Which skills are essential for the person to do the job? This is where the must-haves are defined.
• What can the candidate learn after joining the company? This prevents the talent pool from being narrowed unnecessarily.

These questions change the conversation. They force the hiring manager to stop simply reading a carefully crafted AI-generated job description and start thinking about the actual need.

They help move the conversation away from searching for an “ideal candidate” and towards defining a realistic profile that reflects both the business need and the realities of the market.

Must-have or wish list?

Almost every Hiring Request starts with a list of candidate requirements. But not every one goes through the next step: testing those requirements for realism.

For example, a company may be looking for an engineer who has defence tech experience, deep expertise across several technology areas, is ready to take over management of a team immediately and could have started yesterday. Each individual requirement may look perfectly reasonable, but together they describe not a specific professional, but an idealised “perfect candidate”.

A good briefing helps divide all requirements into two categories:

• must-have — competencies without which the specialist cannot do the job;
• nice-to-have — skills that can shorten the onboarding period but can be developed after the person joins the company.

This is not a compromise on quality. It is a way to define a hiring brief that reflects the realities of the market.

What initially seemed like a critical requirement often moves into the nice-to-have category after discussion. And vice versa: things the hiring manager barely mentioned at first can turn out to be decisive for a successful hire.

Good recruitment starts long before the first message to a candidate

When a position remains unfilled for months, the easiest explanation is a shortage of candidates. But in practice, we often see something else: the problem is that the company failed to define a clear and realistic hiring brief before starting the search.

Hiring in defence tech is no longer simply about finding someone with the right tech stack. Companies gain an advantage when, at the briefing stage, they can honestly answer three questions:

1. What problem does the new hire need to solve?
2. Which competencies are genuinely essential for them to do the job?
3. Which requirements are critical, and which can be reconsidered if the market demands it?

The answers form the basis of a realistic candidate profile rather than a wish list for an “ideal person”.

Because a good hire does not begin when the recruiter opens LinkedIn. It begins when the business and the recruiter have the same understanding of who they are looking for, why they need them and what business problem they need to solve.

Natalia Saltykova

Operational Director at CORE Team

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