CyberHire vs Immersive Labs: Screening candidates vs upskilling teams

I never bought Immersive Labs when I was hiring SOC analysts. Not because they are not a serious product. They are. I bounced because they sell a tool for a problem I did not have. My problem was filtering 200 cyber CVs down to eight humans worth interviewing. Their pitch is helping those eight stay sharp once you have already hired them.

Both real problems. Two different products.

The short version

Immersive Labs is a cyber upskilling, exercise, and resilience-reporting platform for existing security teams. The buyer is a CISO who needs to prove readiness to the board, evidence resilience to a regulator, and keep the team’s skills current against MITRE ATT&CK and DORA. CyberHire is an online technical screening platform for hiring new cyber security people. The buyer is a hiring manager with a stack of CVs and a shortlist deadline.

If you are training, Immersive Labs. If you are hiring, CyberHire. Most mature teams need both, eventually. Almost nobody needs either to do the other one’s job.

What Immersive Labs is built for

Immersive Labs (their platform brand is Immersive One) sells four things, and they sell them well.

• Continuous upskilling for technical security teams. Hands-On Labs, AI Hands-On Labs, Application Security training, Red Team and Blue Team labs. New content ships constantly, mapped to current threats.
• Cyber drills, exercises, and crisis simulations. The kind a CISO runs to find out how the incident response process actually performs under pressure.
• Workforce-wide exercises. Non-technical staff included. Finance, HR, and the engineering org getting trained on basic security hygiene with measurable progress.
• Benchmarking and reporting. How your team compares to peers, mapped to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, NIST 800-53, OWASP Top 10, and increasingly DORA. Board-ready resilience evidence.

Their case studies tell the story: HSBC, Elastic, Specsavers, Mercedes Benz, UK government agencies. Large organisations with established security teams that need to keep them sharp, prove readiness, and report up. They have earned their reputation in that market.

What they do not sell is candidate screening for hiring. Their entire product surface assumes the user is already an employee. The benchmarking compares “your team” to “peer teams”. The drills are run by “your CISO”. The training is for “your workforce”. Nothing in the pitch is calibrated for the applicants you have not hired yet.

Where Immersive Labs is the right call

Credit where it is due. If your top-of-mind problem is one of these, Immersive Labs is the platform you should be looking at.

• Continuous upskilling for an existing team. You have eight SOC analysts and you need them current as the threat landscape moves. The hands-on lab format is genuinely good for this and the content cadence is hard to match.
• Cyber drills and exercises. You want to stress-test how your team responds to a realistic incident. Their cyber drills product is purpose-built for this and has years of refinement behind it.
• Board and regulator reporting. You need to walk into a board meeting with a number on cyber resilience. You need to file something against DORA. Their reporting layer is built for exactly that.
• Workforce-wide security training. You need to train the wider organisation on basic security hygiene, with measurable progress. Their workforce exercises product covers this.

If any of those is your problem, do not let a comparison post talk you out of it. Book the demo, see the platform, make the call.

Where Immersive Labs cannot help you

The comparison gets honest fast when the problem is hiring.

It does not screen candidates

A candidate, by definition, is not on your payroll. Immersive Labs has no candidate-facing flow. There is no way to send an external email address an assessment, get a calibrated score back, run integrity checks against the result, and rank that person against the rest of your applicants. The product lives on the inside of the organisation.

That is not a missing feature. It is a different product.

There is no calibrated hiring test from a job spec

You cannot paste a SOC analyst job specification into Immersive Labs and get back a tailored screening assessment. You can subscribe your existing analysts to a learning path. Useful for them. Useless for the eighty applicants whose CVs are sitting in your inbox.

CyberHire does this. Send us the job spec and we build a calibrated assessment for you, ready to send. You can edit anything, but you never have to.

Custom challenges are not admin-prompted

A hiring manager who wants a challenge that does not exist - “build me a KQL hunt for suspicious sign-ins against this Entra ID tenant” - cannot ask the platform to generate one. The library is the library. With CyberHire, if the role needs a challenge that does not exist yet, we build it. Admins can also prompt for one in plain English themselves if they want to.

There is no integrity layer built for external candidates

The threat model of a trusted internal learner with no incentive to cheat is nothing like the threat model of a candidate trying to land a £75k job. Immersive Labs’ integrity surface is designed for the first. CyberHire has three integrity modes - Unmonitored, Standard, Proctor - configured per assessment, with a UK GDPR-aligned candidate consent flow. Tab-switch and time-away tracking, external paste detection, fullscreen enforcement, second-screen detection, IP address and location for every candidate, and optional webcam snapshots in Proctor mode with consent.

An annual upskilling contract for a hiring problem

Immersive Labs is an enterprise platform, bought as an annual contract. That is the right shape for continuous team upskilling. It is the wrong shape for filling a role, even setting aside that the product does not screen candidates.

CyberHire is bought per role: one live role is a 90-day role campaign with no recurring commitment, and organisations hiring continuously take a tailored annual programme. Usage is counted on completed assessments, not invitations.

Feature comparison

Dimension	CyberHire	Immersive Labs
Built for	Hiring new cyber security people	Upskilling and exercising existing teams
Candidate-facing screening flow	Yes, end to end	None
Calibrated assessment from a job spec	Yes, AI-generated	No
Admin-prompted custom challenges	Yes, in plain English	No
Who builds the assessment	We do, from your job spec (you can edit it)	Not applicable (no hiring flow)
Real Linux / KQL / log environments	Yes, per candidate	Yes, for internal learners
Integrity modes for external candidates	Three (Unmonitored / Standard / Proctor), candidate consent flow	Designed for trusted internal users
Cyber drills and crisis simulations	No	Yes, market-leading
Workforce-wide security awareness	No	Yes
Board-reportable resilience scores	No	Yes
MITRE ATT&CK / DORA / NIST-mapped team reporting	No	Yes
Pricing model	Per role campaign, or a tailored annual programme	Annual, enterprise contract

They are not actually competitors

Worth saying out loud. Immersive Labs and CyberHire are not after the same buyer or the same budget.

Immersive Labs sells to the CISO, the head of security training, the head of incident response, the learning and development function inside a security organisation. The budget line is “team readiness and resilience reporting”.

CyberHire sells to the cyber hiring manager, the talent function inside a security team, the founder of a smaller security-led company who is doing the hiring herself. The budget line is “talent acquisition and screening”.

A mature security organisation eventually buys both. They use Immersive Labs to keep their incumbent team current, run drills, benchmark, and report to the board. They use CyberHire to screen the applicants for the next hire, with scored, evidence-backed results, before the SOC lead spends a single hour on a first interview.

If you are being told to pick one, you are being given a false choice.

When CyberHire is the right call

• You have open cyber security roles and a stack of applicants.
• You want to measure hands-on skill in an environment that looks like the job, not a multiple-choice approximation of it.
• You want a role-specific assessment built for you from your job spec, ready to send.
• You want integrity modes built for external candidates, not for trusted internal learners.
• You want to pay per role, with no annual commitment unless you choose an ongoing programme.

If you have a role open now, get a free assessment built for your role.

One honest sentence

If you are training your team, Immersive Labs is one of the best in the market and a comparison post is not going to change your mind. If you are hiring, you are looking at the wrong tool, and we built the right one.