The Market Is Moving Again
2023 was a year the industry would rather forget. Funding dried up, RIFs swept through organisations large and small, and hiring slowed to a crawl. By 2025, the market is back — and in many ways, accelerating.
Different Capital, Different Companies
The funding that returned looks different to the boom years of 2021–22. Rather than headline-grabbing rounds of hundreds of millions, we’re seeing seed and Series A rounds in the $10–30M range. Leaner, more deliberate, and focused on building real product foundations before scaling revenue teams.
Ready to Scale
Those companies are now ready to scale. What started as one or two founding hires is becoming five, ten, twenty — across sales, marketing, and customer success. The brakes are off, and talent competition is following closely behind.
Everyone Is Chasing The Same Person
If there’s one thing that came through loud and clear at RSA, it’s this: every vendor wants a 10 out of 10. The challenge? Those people are hard to move.
The Quota Carrier
Startup experience within cyber, directly adjacent niche, consistent quota attainment, owns their pipeline, needs no hand-holding.
The Function Builder
The person who has built a marketing function from zero. Not inherited, not inheriting — built from scratch in a resource-constrained environment.
The Stage-Matched Hire
Someone who has done it at a company the same size, same shape, same stage. Transferable experience is not enough — stage-match is everything.
The Gap Is Real
Every vendor wants the same narrow profile. The talent pool for those people is small — and the gap between demand and supply is wide, and growing.
Strong tenure is rarer than it used to be. The best people are performing, and they need a genuinely compelling reason to move.
“These people are performing, well-compensated, and moving to an early-stage company means rebuilding from scratch — with a 6–12 month enterprise sales cycle before they earn significant commission.”
OTE Is Rising for the First Time in Years
Salesperson OTE is climbing again. We’re seeing $300K move to $340–400K in competitive markets and niche areas. Strong tenure is rarer than it used to be, which makes those candidates even more in demand — and even more expensive to attract.
The AI Hiring Trap
AI was everywhere at RSA — in products, in pitches, in threat models, and increasingly in job descriptions. But some vendors are creating their own problem.
An Impossible Bar
Some vendors are asking for candidates with two or more years of hands-on experience with AI agents and AI-powered security platforms. AI at this level of commercial maturity simply has not existed long enough. Companies that insist will wait a long time — and lose good candidates to more pragmatic competitors.
The Right Question to Ask
The tone at RSA shifted from fear to possibility. AI is becoming embedded, not exceptional. The right question is not “how many years with AI tools?” — it’s “can they learn fast and have credible conversations with buyers thinking about exactly this?”
What CISOs Are Actually Thinking
Understanding the buyer matters as much as finding the right seller. Here’s what we heard from the other side of the table.
Back to Basics
After years of tool sprawl and overlapping categories, security leaders are returning to fundamentals. Asset visibility. Identity controls. Access policies. Vulnerability management. Not “what new tool?” — but “are we using what we have correctly?”
How Vendors Need to Sell
Companies winning deals aren’t necessarily those with the newest product — they’re the ones whose teams can meet CISOs in that conversation. Credibly. Without overselling. Context-first, not feature-first.
The Hardest Truth
The biggest blocker is not the competition. It’s doing nothing. Most security teams are not running ten-vendor evaluations — they’re deciding whether to prioritise the problem at all this quarter.
“The hardest thing in cyber sales is not beating the competition — it’s getting on the agenda in the first place.”
The Most Expensive Mistake in Early-Stage Hiring
Here’s a pattern we see repeatedly — and it came up more than once in conversations at RSA.
The Pattern
A vendor raises a Series A. They need revenue. They hire a founding Account Executive at $300K+, expecting those relationships to drive pipeline.
What actually happens: there’s no BDR function, no outbound motion, no marketing support. The AE is on the phone doing cold outreach — at $300K. An expensive way to learn that a Rolodex alone does not build a sales engine.
Getting It Right
- Think about GTM structure before you make the hire
- Consider a founding BDR who has built that function from scratch, alongside the first AE
- Be honest about what support exists — and what does not
- Give people a realistic ramp in a market where enterprise cyber cycles run 6–12 months
High-stakes hiring without a plan is one of the costliest mistakes a scaling vendor can make.
What Companies Are Hiring For Right Now
Coming out of a downturn, the pattern is predictable: sales gets rebuilt first. But the second wave is well underway.
Account Executives & RSMs
Individual contributor sales roles remain the toughest searches. The profile is narrow, the competition is fierce, and the best candidates need a compelling reason to move.
Sales Engineers & Customer Success
Now firmly in focus — particularly for vendors past the founding stage thinking about retention and expansion revenue, not just new logos.
Field Marketing, Channel & Alliances
Seeing real investment again. After a period as “nice to have,” vendors are recognising that a sales team without marketing support is a liability.
Where the Action Is
Identity
Consistently active. Strong hiring demand across vendor types and sizes. Has been a CISO priority and shows no signs of slowing.
Offensive Security
High demand. Specialist talent pool. Highly competitive. The organisations winning here are moving fast and paying to match.
AI-Powered Security
Impossible to ignore. Every conversation touched on it. The most credible vendors articulate how AI solves real, long-standing problems — not just ride the trend.
