The talent pool is real but tight. There are approximately 143,000 individuals in the UK cyber security workforce, with growth moderately accelerating from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024 Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025 - GOV.UK. That tells you two things at once. The pool is growing, so the people you need do exist. But it is still a small, specialised community, so a vague or slow brief loses you the best of them fast.
Threat intelligence sits at the sharp end of that market. It asks for people who can read adversary behaviour, work with ambiguous signals, and turn raw data into decisions a leadership team can act on. When the pool is this specialised, the quality of your brief matters as much as the size of your budget. You are not filling a seat. You are hiring judgement.
A generic job spec lists tools and certifications. A live role shows what the work actually is this quarter. When you brief a first threat intel analyst against the threats you are tracking right now, you surface the skills that matter in context: the actors you watch, the sectors you protect, the reporting lines you rely on, and the decisions your intelligence has to inform.
This matters more for your first hire than any later one. A first analyst sets the standard for the function. If you brief them against a copied template, you get a copied analyst. If you brief them against live priorities, you get someone who can think about your real problem from day one. The work is the brief, and the brief is the test.
Practically, that means writing the role around current intelligence requirements rather than a wish list of acronyms. What questions does your organisation keep asking that nobody can answer yet? What signals do you miss? What would a strong analyst have caught last month? Those questions become your real assessment criteria.
Start with clearance and context. Defence and security roles often carry vetting requirements that shape who can apply and how long onboarding takes, so build that into your timeline before you advertise. Be clear about what is required on day one versus what can be sponsored, because that single detail widens or narrows your pool dramatically.
Then assess for reasoning, not recall. A certificate proves someone passed an exam. A short, scenario-based exercise built from a live threat shows how someone thinks under uncertainty, which is the actual job. Ask them to triage a realistic signal and explain their reasoning. You learn more in 20 minutes of that than in an hour of competency questions.
Speed is a kindness and a competitive edge. In a specialised field, a slow, unclear process signals a team that does not know what it wants. A fast, well-briefed one signals the opposite, and the right analyst notices.
Once your brief is grounded in live roles, you still need to reach the right people quickly. We search a database of 15 million candidates and build a ranked shortlist in under 30 seconds, then manage the process end to end so you can focus on assessing judgement rather than chasing admin. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. Brief us with your live role today and see who we surface.
