Your Talent Report

The core feature of Pythia Cyber's talent practice is a talent-oriented assessment. The goal of the talent assessment is to capture in score form the candidate's capacities to be successful on the job.

People keep asking me what, exactly, they get when they have us assess a candidate or employee. Here is an overview of the process:

1. You indicate who is to be assessed.
2. We send that person a personalized link to a web-based assessment.
3. The assessment is timed and takes between 20 and 30 minutes.
4. The assessment is scored by the platform.
5. The scores are made into a profile by a specially trained AI
6. A human expert reviews the profile and makes recommendations
7. You get the expert's report and a comparison to our library of profiles

The library of profiles is not random: we have curated it by carefully selecting who is in the comparison group. This group is not a "normal" set of subjects because we have selected particularly effective people against whom to compare any given subject. This allows you to decide if your subject meets your abstract standard.

If you have multiple subjects to consider we are happy to use your subjects as the only members of the pool. This allows you to pick the best of the available candidates, because sometimes filling a seat is time-critical and the best option is the option you need to take.

There are three different assessments, each specific to a particular role:

• Cyber Leader
• Cyber Manager
• Cyber Security Engineer

Let's consider the Leader assessment in detail. This assessment has five parts: Direction, Drive, Influence, Relationship, & Execution. Within those are specific talent indicator themes. In brief, direction is about where your subject as a leader wants to take the function; drive is about your subject's motivation to do that; influence is the sales part of leading, about connecting with people; and execution is the final step, how your subject is going to get their vision enacted. 

Technically the assessment has content validity in that it is linked to the NIST CSF aspects of the role -- governance, identification,  protection, detect, response, and recovery. Also, the assessment has construct validity in that it is linked to the nature of talent as we describe it here (Direction, etc.).

The assessment does not provide mental health screening. Our mandate is to focus on work-related performance.

Given our experience, we do provide a basic "recommended" / "not recommended" determination on the candidate, but that is the grossest measure. The good news is that the various parts of the profile give you a nuanced picture of what you can expect from this subject in this role. The bad news is that this will help you make your decision but it won't make your decision for you. You have to know what you are looking for, what your organization needs in the present and what you think your organization will need in the near future.

Someone who is "recommended" has talents in multiple areas to effectively lead a cybersecurity function. Some people are more talented in certain areas, for example, more governance-oriented than respond-oriented. 

Some people have lower levels of talent. That usually indicates that they are focused on technical credentials and systems than on leading or working with people -- but that's what a large part of cyebrsecurity is about. 

This is the heart of our Talent Acquisition  & Upskilling (TAU) services: actual data on a person's talent, to help you put their past experience and certifications into context and to help you predict their future performance in a given role. In Risk Management terms, we help you lower the risks of staffing by raising the chances of a successful placement.

It is common to equate "placement" with "hiring" but that is not the case: being better able to place and manage the people you already have--people acquired and trained at real costs in time and money--is also important. In some ways more important because a bad promotion means losing a high performer in both the previous role and new role.

Acquire talent with more confidence. Manage that talent with more specificity. Upskill that talent more appropriately. Promote that talent with clearer and better expectations.

Hiring, managing and promoting cybersecurity people is hard. We can help. Ask us how.