Ability should matter more than appearances.

I applied for the SANS Cyber Academy alongside around 25,000 other people.

They didn't just ask who had the best CV.

They tested us.

Aptitude. Technical ability. Potential.

32 people were selected. I finished second.

That opportunity changed the direction of my career. And I've never forgotten what made it possible.

Someone gave me the chance to show what I could do. Had the process simply been "pick the 32 most impressive CVs", I am not convinced I would have made it through.

That stuck with me.

Years later, I was hired as a Cyber Security Manager at a fintech to build a brand new SOC team from scratch.

This time I was the person doing the hiring.

Hundreds of applications landed for each role within the first week. Suddenly I was seeing the same problem from the other side.

HR ran the initial CV screening and kept escalating candidates because they could not confidently separate the good from the bad.

So I took the filtering on myself.

Hours and hours spent reviewing CVs. Job titles. Certifications. Years of experience. Employer names. Trying to work out who could actually do the job from everything surrounding the person.

Then came the interviews.

The CCNA holder who could not explain the difference between TCP and UDP.

The CISSP who could not reason through a basic security alert.

Candidates who looked exceptional on paper but fell apart the moment the conversation became technical.

And occasionally the opposite. People whose CVs were not particularly impressive who clearly knew their stuff.

It became obvious: looking capable and being capable are not the same thing.

There had to be a better way.

Why were we spending so much time trying to infer technical ability from CVs and interviews when we could just give people the opportunity to demonstrate it?

I built a Google Sheet to track candidates against the criteria that actually mattered.

Helpful. But still mostly theoretical.

I did not need a better way to organise claims. I needed a better way to measure ability.

So I started writing practical scenarios. Realistic security problems based on the work candidates would actually be expected to do.

I asked candidates to work through them remotely.

The difference in signal was immediate. Within an hour I had a much clearer picture of how they investigated, prioritised, reasoned and solved problems.

Not what they said they could do. What they actually demonstrated.

I assumed somebody must already have built this properly.

So I looked. Booked demos. Tried the platforms.

Most were built around training, certification practice, generic testing or CTF-style learning. None felt like the hiring product I had wanted when I was sitting there with hundreds of applicants and a SOC to build.

So I decided to build it.

Quit the job. Moved back in with my parents. Put my savings into creating the platform I wished I'd had.

Three years. Thousands of development hours. Hundreds of design hours.

Burnout. Stress. Running out of money.

Taking contract work to keep funding it. Stopping. Starting again. Stopping again. Then starting again anyway.

CyberHire is finally here.

A fully managed technical screening service built specifically for hands-on cybersecurity hiring.

You give us the role and the candidates. We build the technical challenge, manage the assessment process and give you back a clear report showing who actually demonstrated the strongest capability and why.

The product I wanted when I was hiring in 2022 is now the product I can give to other hiring teams.