Source technical talent
through U.S.NETSEC.

Founded in 2011 by engineers who came out of federal agency work, U.S.NETSEC has spent fifteen years hiring the people we needed: cleared cybersecurity analysts, cloud engineers, threat intelligence operators, red teamers, and platform engineers who could work inside federal programs. We built a recruiting capability because the market version didn't work for us — most firms didn't understand what we were looking for, and we couldn't afford to get it wrong.

That capability is now available to you. The process, the tooling, and the engineering oversight we use to staff our own teams is the same process we run for clients. We didn't build a separate product for external work — we opened the door.

Most technical recruiting firms don't have engineers in the loop. They receive job descriptions, parse for keywords, and return candidates who match on paper. When the hiring manager interviews the shortlist and finds two of three are misrepresenting their depth, the recruiter shrugs and finds three more. The engagement ends when a role fills, not when you get someone good.

We don't operate that way. Every search at U.S.NETSEC is calibrated by a practitioner from the relevant discipline — someone who has held the role, knows what good looks like, and can tell the difference between a candidate who used a tool and one who built something with it. They set the capability profile, review the assessment output, and sign off on every shortlist before it reaches you. The result is fewer submissions that actually convert.

We decompose every role into a capability profile before we source a single candidate: what the role actually requires (not just the job description), what evidence we'll accept in place of direct experience, and what adjacent titles we should be looking at. This profile is the contract the search runs against.

From that profile, we run structured sourcing — AI-assisted to maximize coverage across active and passive candidates — and score every candidate on three axes: direct fit against your requirements, transferable capability from related roles, and qualitative signal about trajectory and work environment. You receive a shortlist with documented reasoning on each candidate, not a stack-ranked pile of resumes. Our hiring managers know what they're reading before the first interview.

We operate in four practice areas: cybersecurity operations, cloud and infrastructure, data and ML engineering, and DevOps and platform engineering. Each search is overseen by a U.S.NETSEC engineer or operator who has worked in that discipline — not a generalist recruiter who attended a half-day training on cybersecurity roles.

They know the difference between a SIEM operator and a detection engineer, between a cloud architect who has run a production environment and one who has only certified for it. For cleared roles, they understand how clearance history and investigation timelines interact with your hiring pipeline. That calibration is what makes our shortlists shorter and our fill rates higher.

Our recruiting runs on a platform we built specifically for this work. Structured candidate assessments, documented capability scoring, and searchable candidate history are all part of the platform. Your hiring managers get read access for the duration of your engagement: they can review the live pipeline, read assessments, and leave feedback directly without routing everything through a recruiter as intermediary.

We built the platform because no off-the-shelf ATS was designed for the kind of structured, evidence-based assessment we run. It reflects the way we actually think about candidates — not as profiles to be matched, but as practitioners to be evaluated against a specific set of requirements.

Every engagement starts with a capability session — typically ninety minutes with your hiring manager and, wherever possible, a senior practitioner from the team you're hiring for. We use that conversation to build a capability profile that drives the search: what the role requires, what we'll accept as equivalent experience, what adjacent roles map well onto it.

From profile sign-off to first shortlist delivery is typically five business days. We run weekly pipeline reviews during active searches and communicate blockers immediately — not at the next scheduled check-in. If the market for a role is thin or your compensation is below where we need it, you will hear that in week one. We don't wait until a search has stalled to surface problems.

The embedded model is best for sustained hiring volume in a single practice area. Retained search is for roles where the cost of a bad hire or a slow fill outweighs the fee premium. Contingency is for well-defined mid-level roles where speed matters more than exclusivity.

We will tell you when a search is harder than we expected. If the market for your role is thin, or if your compensation is below where we need it to be, you will hear that in week one — not after a month of silence. We submit candidates we would hire ourselves, which means the shortlists are shorter but the conversion rates are higher. We will not pad a pipeline to demonstrate activity.

You will have a named point of contact who knows your search. Not a team mailbox. Not a coordinator who hands off to a different recruiter at each touchpoint. One person who owns the engagement and can answer questions about specific candidates without looking anything up.

A thirty-minute call is enough to tell us whether we can help you. We'll ask about your current hiring velocity, your practice area, and what's made past searches hard. You'll leave with a clear answer on whether we're the right fit — and if we're not, we'll tell you that too.

Email reaches us directly. No form, no intake coordinator, no automated reply promising a response within five business days.