How to interview security engineers without wasting time

Interview the work they will do, not the job title on the advert

The NICE Workforce Framework from NIST is a useful reference for describing security work in plain, shared terms.

A security engineer is not one thing. One person spends their week hardening cloud environments, another writes detections, another handles incidents, and another spends most of the time on tooling and automation. If your loop treats those as the same, you will either reject the right person or hire someone who looks strong in the room and weak in the job.

Start with the work itself. Ask what environments they have run, what detections they have written, what incidents they have handled, and where they have been closest to production risk. That gives you something real to probe, rather than a list of certifications and fashionable tools.

A good brief for interviewers sounds concrete. It says what the role must change, where the risk sits, and what success looks like in the first few months. If you cannot write that down, the interview loop will drift into general chat.

Use the same frame every time:

The point is not to catch people out. The point is to see whether they have done the work, at scale, under pressure, and with enough detail to explain the trade-offs. That is what separates depth from buzzwords.

• What systems have they actually secured or improved.
• What alerts, detections or controls have they owned.
• What incidents have they been part of, and what changed afterwards.
• What size of environment they worked in, and what constraints came with it.
• What they fixed without being told twice.

A sensible interview loop is short, structured and fast

Security engineers do not need six stages. They need a clear process, a few focused conversations, and feedback that arrives while the candidate is still engaged. More stages do not improve accuracy on their own. They usually just create drop-off.

A better loop is usually three stages. First, an initial screening on scope and motivation. Second, a technical interview focused on the work. Third, a short practical discussion with the hiring manager or team lead to confirm fit with the environment and priorities.

You can stretch to four stages if the role is senior or sensitive, but only if each stage does something different. Two interviews that both ask about incidents and logging are not two stages. They are one stage with more calendar friction.

The cyber security recruitment page explains how a specialist search for these roles runs.

A practical structure for interviewers looks like this:

That is enough to find out most of what you need. If you still cannot tell whether the person fits after that, the issue is usually the brief, not the candidate.

Speed and clarity count, because your hiring process is a product demo.

• 20 to 30 minutes on the background, the sort of environments they have worked in, and why they are open to moving.
• A technical conversation on one or two areas that matter most to your role, such as cloud security, detection engineering, SOC work, application security, or incident response.
• A scenario discussion with the manager, focused on how they think, prioritise, and communicate under pressure.

A practical exercise should mirror the job and respect the candidate's time

The best exercise for how to interview security engineers is short, specific, and close to the actual role. It should show how they think, not how long they can sit in front of a whiteboard pretending to enjoy it.

Give them a small, real problem. For example, a cloud environment with a few obvious weaknesses, a sample alert that needs triage, or a short incident timeline with missing details. Ask what they would do first, what they would ignore for now, and what they would want to know before acting.

Keep the time bounded. A sensible exercise is 30 to 45 minutes live, or a take-home task that can be finished quickly and discussed in the interview. Anything much bigger starts testing free labour, not competence.

A useful exercise should reveal:

For some roles, a live scenario is better than a take-home. If the team needs someone in incident response or detection engineering, a conversation about an active alert or a noisy rule set often tells you more than a polished document. If the role is more design-led, such as security architecture, a short written response can work well.

The wrong exercise is the one that asks for a full security programme design, a week-long build, or an abstract puzzle that no one on the team actually faces. That tells you little about the candidate and a lot about the interview panel.

• Whether they can prioritise under uncertainty.
• Whether they understand risk, not just tooling.
• Whether they can explain decisions in plain language.
• Whether they notice what is missing from the information provided.
• Whether they know when to escalate.

The right questions expose depth, ownership and judgement

Many interviews fail because the questions are too vague. If you ask, “Tell me about your experience”, you will get a biography. If you ask, “What did you build, why, and what changed after you shipped it”, you get evidence.

You want questions that force specificity. A person who has really run environments, written detections, or handled incidents will have detail. A person who has learned the right words will usually stay high level.

Use questions like these:

For detection engineers, ask about false positives, tuning, coverage gaps, and how they measure whether a rule is worth keeping. For cloud security, ask how they work with engineering teams without becoming the person everyone avoids. For incident response, ask how they handle uncertainty, pressure, and handover.

The point is not to catch them out with trivia. It is to see whether they have judgement, ownership, and enough real-world scar tissue to make good decisions quickly.

Outreach matters as much as the brief, which is why security engineers ignore most messages.

• What environment were you responsible for, and what was the scale.
• What was the biggest security issue you inherited, and what did you change first.
• What detection or control did you build that actually reduced noise or risk.
• Tell me about a bad incident. What happened, what was your role, and what changed afterwards.
• Where did you disagree with engineering or IT, and how did you resolve it.
• What do you wish had been in place before you joined.

The signals that predict a good hire are plain, not polished

A polished candidate can still be the wrong hire. A slightly rough one with clear judgement and real ownership is often the better bet. You need to listen for the signals that matter in the job, not the ones that sound impressive in the room.

The strongest signals are usually simple. They speak in specifics. They can name what they owned, what they broke, what they fixed, and what they would do differently now. They talk about trade-offs without trying to make every answer sound perfect.

You also want to see how they work with others. Security engineers who can explain risk to non-security people are usually easier to place in a real team than those who speak only to other specialists. If they can translate a problem into plain English, that is worth far more than fancy terminology.

Watch for these signs:

A weaker interview often shows the opposite. The candidate talks in tool names, not outcomes. They describe the team’s work as if they were near it, but cannot explain the actual sequence of events. They can recite common frameworks, but not the part they personally shaped.

That is why the interview should keep returning to the same anchor points. What did they do, what changed, and how do they think about the next problem. If those answers are thin, the hire is likely to be thin too.

• They answer directly and do not drift into jargon.
• They can explain the why behind a decision.
• They acknowledge mistakes without hiding behind process.
• They know where they were hands-on and where they were advising.
• They can say what good looks like for the team they want to join.

A sample interview plan keeps everyone honest

If you need a starting point, use a plan like this and adapt it to the role. It is tight enough to move quickly and broad enough to test real capability.

This plan works because it keeps the same thread running through the loop. Every stage adds a different angle. None of them exists just to fill time.

If you are hiring across Europe, the Middle East or Africa, or building security capability in a technical business, it also helps to be realistic about the market. Roles with vague scope, slow feedback, or too many interviewers lose good people first. That is not a candidate problem. It is a process problem.

A practical reference for role design is the NIST NICE Workforce Framework page, which helps anchor responsibilities in shared language before you start the search.

If the role is broad, split the interview into the work you actually need covered. If the role is narrow, stop asking broad questions. Either way, keep the process moving and make each conversation earn its place.

If you are hiring for a role like this, talk to KOLY about how the search would run.

• Recruiter or hiring manager screen. Confirm motivation, scope, location, notice period, and the kind of work they want.
• Technical interview. Go deep on one or two relevant areas, such as cloud security, detection engineering, SOC, application security, or incident response.
• Practical scenario. Use a short live exercise tied to the role. Keep it close to actual work.
• Team conversation. Check communication, collaboration, and how they think about handover.
• Final decision. Compare notes against the brief, not against who spoke best in the room.