How do you approach hiring candidates who don’t have tech industry experience?
It helps when you can find people that have a similar mentality to what you're looking for. Someone might not know anything about security operations, but they can still understand operations in a highly regulated area because their experience translates.
Absolutely. A while back, there was a company that advertised that a decent chunk of their security QA was staffed by former line cooks. They would deliberately prospect line cooks and other folks that had done highly repetitive but high QA-burden work. Their past roles had nothing to do with security, code, or even computers, but oftentimes there was a strong desire within that group to get into tech. And that strategy worked for this company. If you can put the time and effort into establishing where those opportunities might exist, there's a lot of gold there.
I figured out that I enjoy working with special forces veterans who want to get into technology. And it's just a particular connection that tends to work well given how I operate and how they operate. There's enough commonality that we can bridge that gap; they're good at enough things that I'm not good at and vice versa, so it creates a situation where one plus one equals three. That's where I've seen successful pairings, and there are lots of different examples where that potential exists. Think about team building as if you’re creating an ever-growing collection of Venn diagram overlaps. Once you identify a gap that you have, you can figure out where that's going to interface with the rest of the organization.