Securing Cyber Talent: How to Build and Keep a High‑Performance Security Team (Inspired by Dr. Kevin L. McLaughlin)

If you’ve ever lost a great analyst to burnout or watched a promising hire walk because “the culture wasn’t right,” you already know the silent breach most CISOs face isn’t always technical—it’s talent exfiltration. You can buy tools. You can’t buy resilience. Resilience gets built by people who feel safe, supported, and challenged in the right ways.

That is the core message behind Securing Talent: Building and Retaining High-Performance Cybersecurity Teams by Dr. Kevin Lynn McLaughlin. His stance is simple and powerful: in a market where the cybersecurity talent gap keeps widening, culture is your competitive advantage. Not perks. Not a shiny SIEM. Culture.

Let’s dig into what that looks like in practice—how to attract, develop, and retain top security professionals, even when everyone else is hiring too.

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The Cyber Talent Gap Is Real—And Culture Is Your Force Multiplier

The shortage isn’t new, but the stakes have never been higher. The latest (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study estimates a multi-million-person gap between the global demand for cybersecurity talent and the available workforce. That gap keeps widening as threats evolve and attack surfaces grow in the cloud, IoT, and AI eras. Here’s why that matters: when threats scale but teams don’t, risk compounds.

The (ISC)² study shows a persistent global shortfall in qualified cybersecurity professionals. Read their latest findings.
Year after year, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report reminds us that human-led detection, response, and secure engineering practices drive outcomes more than any single tool. See the DBIR.

Dr. McLaughlin’s thesis aligns with what many leaders quietly admit: the orgs winning the talent game aren’t paying the absolute most—they’re offering the best environment to do meaningful security work. People join for mission and learning. They stay for leaders and culture.

What High‑Performance Security Teams Actually Look Like

Before we talk tactics, let’s define the destination. High-performance security teams:

Deliver outcomes: faster detection and response, fewer repeat incidents, clearer risk reduction.
Learn relentlessly: blameless postmortems, structured knowledge sharing, and continuous skill-building.
Collaborate well: security partners with engineering, IT, product, and legal—not as the “department of no,” but as a risk advisor.
Automate the boring: people focus on analysis and design, not swivel-chair toil.
Have a clear mission and compass: everyone knows the “why,” the current priorities, and what “good” looks like.

In short, they ship security value, not just tickets.

Attracting Cyber Talent in a Competitive Market

Top candidates have options. Winning their attention requires clarity, credibility, and a compelling employee value proposition (EVP).

Sharpen your EVP for security professionals

Emphasize what practitioners care about most: – Mission and impact: What critical systems do you protect? Who relies on you?
– Autonomy and mastery: Will they own domains, learn new tech, and experiment?
– Modern stack and scope: Are you tackling cloud, detection engineering, AppSec, or purple teaming?
– Leadership quality: Who will they learn from? How do you lead and recognize people?
– Work-life balance: How sustainable is on-call? What’s the real pace?

Be specific. “We support your growth” is vague. “$3,000 annual training budget, 10% learning time, and funded cert attempts” is compelling.

Write skills‑based job descriptions

Laundry lists repel great candidates. Instead: – Separate must-haves from nice-to-haves.
– Focus on competencies (threat hunting, cloud security design) instead of tool brands.
– Remove unnecessary degree requirements; value portfolios, labs, and contributions.
– Map roles to recognized frameworks like the NIST NICE Framework for clarity and progression. Explore NICE.

Example must-haves for a Detection Engineer: – Proficiency writing detection logic (KQL, SPL, Sigma).
– Experience tuning alerts for precision and recall.
– Understanding of MITRE ATT&CK techniques and coverage. See ATT&CK.

Nice-to-haves: – SOAR automation experience.
– Cloud telemetry (AWS CloudTrail, Azure Defender, GCP logs).
– Threat intel enrichment and pipeline work.

Source where security talent lives

Beyond job boards: – Conferences, meetups, and CTFs (sponsor a challenge, host a workshop).
– Open-source communities, bug bounty forums, and security blogs.
– Veteran transition programs and community colleges.
– Apprenticeships and returnships for career changers.

Employer brand matters. Publish redacted postmortems. Share engineering deep-dives. Send your leaders to speak at local meetups. Show your team’s thinking, not just your logo.

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Building the Pipeline: Train, Reskill, and Grow From Within

There isn’t enough senior talent to hire your way out of every problem. Grow it.

Adopt a 70‑20‑10 learning model

70% on-the-job projects (rotations, stretch assignments).
20% coaching and mentoring (peer reviews, pair hunts).
10% formal training (courses, certs, labs).

Fund it. Schedule it. Celebrate it. Otherwise, it gets squeezed out.

Design internal mobility paths

Create clear bridges between roles: – IT or DevOps to cloud security and identity engineering.
– Software engineering to application security and DevSecOps.
– Network engineering to security architecture and segmentation.
– Data analytics to threat detection and intel.

Publish a skills matrix. Define level expectations, sample projects, and study paths. Make it obvious how a SOC analyst can grow into detection engineering, intel, or DFIR—and what support they’ll get.

Create hands‑on labs and real practice

Cloud sandboxes with real logs and attack simulations.
Purple-team exercises to validate detections and improve controls.
Tabletop incidents with cross-functional stakeholders.

Pro tip: tie labs to actual backlog items. “Develop a detection for T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter using our EDR telemetry” beats “watch this video.”

Retaining Top Cyber Talent: Culture, Leadership, and Burnout Prevention

People don’t burn out because the work is meaningful. They burn out because the work is relentless and thankless. Let’s fix that.

Build psychological safety and a learning culture

Teams learn faster when people can admit risk and share mistakes without fear. Research consistently shows psychological safety is a key predictor of team performance. For a practical playbook, see Harvard Business Review’s guidance on psychological safety. Read the HBR article.

Tactics: – Adopt blameless postmortems with clear remediation owners.
– Normalize “I don’t know—let’s find out.”
– Recognize learnings publicly, not just wins.

Make on‑call humane

Document runbooks for common alerts and incidents.
Automate routine enrichment and triage with SOAR.
Implement sustainable rotations (follow-the-sun if possible).
Offer protected recovery time after major incidents.
Track pager load and alert quality; tune ruthlessly.

For incident response principles and planning, review CISA’s guidance. Visit CISA Incident Response.

Reduce toil and alert fatigue

The fastest way to lose a great analyst is to drown them in noise. Attack the problem from both ends: – Prevention: fix repetitive root causes, improve baseline controls.
– Detection: measure alert precision; retire low-signal rules.
– Automation: auto-close known benign patterns; pre-enrich alerts with context.
– Simplify tool sprawl: consolidate where it makes sense; integrate the rest.

Give growth, not just gratitude

Fund certifications and conferences.
Offer stretch projects and rotations across blue, red, and purple functions.
Pair juniors with senior mentors; reward mentors explicitly.
Publish career ladders with example competencies and compensation bands.

People will leave for growth if you don’t offer it. Offer it.

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The Manager’s Weekly Playbook

Small, consistent habits beat big, sporadic gestures.

Weekly 1:1s with each team member
Agenda: progress, blockers, wellbeing, growth.
Ask: “What should I stop, start, continue to help you do your best work?”
Monthly learning day
Internal talks, lab time, capture-the-flag, vendor demos.
Blameless postmortems
Within 5 days of any substantive incident. Publish findings internally.
Recognition rituals
Shout-outs in standups and Slack. Tie kudos to observable behaviors.
Quarterly career check‑ins
Update the IDP, assess skills progress, set the next stretch project.

These rituals cost little. Their retention impact is huge.

Compensation, Perks, and What Actually Matters

Pay fairly and transparently. Then focus on what security pros value most.

Competitive base pay aligned to market data and cost of living.
Performance-based bonuses tied to team outcomes, not just vanity metrics.
Training budget, paid study time, and exam fee coverage.
Remote-first or flexible hybrid options.
Sustainable on-call compensation and time-off policies.
Hardware and tool allowances for productivity.

Remember: people rarely leave only for money. They leave when pay is mismatched and growth or culture is broken.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Expand the Talent Pool

You can’t solve a scarcity problem by filtering out non-traditional candidates.

Skills-based hiring: emphasize competencies, not pedigrees.
Structured interviews: standard questions and a scoring rubric to minimize bias.
Practical assessments: short, realistic exercises over trick questions.
Apprenticeships and internships: paid, mentored, and outcome-based.
Returnships for caregivers and career changers.
Outreach to underrepresented groups and partnerships with community orgs.

Diverse teams catch more blind spots and build more resilient defenses. That’s not politics—it’s performance.

Metrics That Matter (Without Gaming the System)

Measure what drives real resilience. Watch for Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Leading indicators (health of the team)
Retention rate and regrettable attrition.
eNPS or engagement scores for the security org.
On-call load per person; alert precision/recall.
Training hours completed and certifications achieved.
Leading indicators (security capabilities)
Detection coverage mapped to MITRE ATT&CK.
Mean time to triage (MTTT); alert backlog size.
Patch SLAs for critical vulnerabilities in key assets.
Lagging indicators
Mean time to detect/respond (MTTD/MTTR).
Number of repeat incidents by root cause.
External audit and control effectiveness trends.

Tie people metrics to operating metrics. Example: “After tuning detections and adding SOAR playbooks, MTTT fell 40% and on-call pages dropped 35%—and our retention improved.”

For broader industry context, see ISACA’s State of Cybersecurity and the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook.
– ISACA State of Cybersecurity
– WEF Global Cybersecurity Outlook

From Tools to Teaming: Build a Stack That Helps People Shine

More tools don’t equal more security. They often mean more swivel-chair and fatigue.

Integrate telemetry: SIEM as a hub; fewer dashboards, richer context.
Standardize data schemas and alerting conventions.
Maintain living runbooks alongside detections.
Use playbooks for enrichment, deduplication, and common responses.
Track ownership: every control, detection, and playbook has a named steward.

Where to focus: the “boring basics”—identity, patching, hardening, and secure software practices—prevent entire classes of incidents. For application security foundations, revisit the OWASP Top 10.

Align Security Work With Business Risk

High-performing teams don’t chase tools; they manage risk.

Establish a simple, shared risk taxonomy with the business.
Map key risks to supporting controls and owners.
Prioritize work by risk reduction value, not noise volume.
Tell the story: translate security outcomes into reduced loss exposure, improved uptime, and trust.

Stakeholders fund what they understand. Make the impact clear.

A Practical 90‑Day Plan to Elevate Your Security Team

Here’s a simple roadmap you can start next quarter.

Days 1–30: Assess and Stabilize

Run a culture and workload survey. Ask about burnout, blockers, growth.
Inventory alerts; measure precision and triage time. Identify the top 10 noisy rules.
Map current roles to the NIST NICE framework; find skill gaps.
Quick wins: tune 3–5 high-noise detections, document top 5 runbooks, set weekly 1:1s.

Days 31–60: Build and Enable

Launch a mentorship program; pair juniors and seniors with goals.
Approve an annual training budget and a 10% learning time policy.
Publish career ladders and a skills matrix.
Pilot a monthly learning day and a blameless postmortem template.
Start an employer-brand initiative: blog posts, talks, open-source contributions.

Days 61–90: Scale and Sustain

Introduce SOAR automations for 3 common workflows.
Implement structured interviews and revise job descriptions skills-first.
Add capacity planning to prevent chronic overload; set WIP limits.
Review metrics: retention, eNPS, MTTT/MTTR, alert quality.
Share a “state of security team” update with execs—highlight risk reduction and culture wins.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Hero culture: rewarding firefighters while ignoring arson (broken systems).
Tool sprawl: buying platforms without integration or process changes.
Vague growth promises: “We support learning” with no budget or time.
Invisible work: no recognition for hardening, tuning, and prevention.
Unbounded on‑call: constant interruptions, no recovery time.

The fix is operational discipline and leadership intent, not another dashboard.

Connecting the Dots: Culture as a Security Control

Dr. McLaughlin’s perspective is both pragmatic and hopeful: despite the global talent squeeze, organizations can build exceptional teams by designing for human performance. Not by working harder—but by working smarter and together.

Culture creates capacity.
Clarity reduces friction.
Learning compounds advantage.

And yes, it’s measurable when you track both human and technical indicators.

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FAQs: Building and Retaining High‑Performance Cybersecurity Teams

Q: What’s the most effective way to reduce burnout in SOC teams?
A: Improve alert quality and on-call design. Tune noisy detections, automate enrichment, document runbooks, and cap pager load. Provide recovery time after major incidents. Pair this with clear priorities so not everything is “P1.”

Q: Do certifications actually help with retention?
A: They help when paired with real projects and a clear career path. Fund certs, give paid study time, and connect learnings to stretch assignments. Certifications without practical application won’t move the needle.

Q: How do I recruit security talent without overpaying?
A: Strengthen your EVP: learning time, modern stack, mentoring, humane on-call, and visible leadership support. Use skills-based hiring and recruit from adjacent fields. Candidates will trade a bit of comp for purpose and growth.

Q: What metrics should I show executives to justify investments in the team?
A: Combine people and performance metrics: retention, eNPS, alert precision, MTTD/MTTR, detection coverage mapped to ATT&CK, and reductions in repeat incidents. Link these to risk reduction and incident cost avoidance.

Q: How can smaller organizations compete for cybersecurity talent?
A: Offer breadth and ownership. Let hires wear multiple hats, shape strategy, and see the impact. Provide flexibility, learning budgets, and remote options. Partner with MSSPs for scale while you grow internal capability.

Q: Where can I find frameworks to structure roles and skills?
A: Start with the NIST NICE Framework for role families and competencies. Explore NICE.

Q: How often should we run postmortems?
A: After any significant incident or near-miss—and at a regular cadence for learning. Keep them blameless, action-oriented, and transparent.

Q: What’s one change I can make this month that has outsized impact?
A: Implement weekly 1:1s with your team and fix the top three noisy alerts. You’ll improve trust and reduce daily pain fast.

Final Takeaway

You don’t need the biggest budget to build a high-performance cybersecurity team. You need clarity, continuity, and a culture where people can do the best work of their careers. Invest in learning, design humane operations, measure what matters, and tell a clear risk story. The result is a team that stays, grows, and outperforms.

If this resonated, stay tuned for more practical playbooks in our Security, Audit, and Leadership series—or subscribe to get the next guide in your inbox.

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Securing Cyber Talent: How to Build and Keep a High‑Performance Security Team (Inspired by Dr. Kevin L. McLaughlin)

The Cyber Talent Gap Is Real—And Culture Is Your Force Multiplier

What High‑Performance Security Teams Actually Look Like

Attracting Cyber Talent in a Competitive Market