Why Cleared Candidates Walk Away: Common Hiring Mistakes That Cost Employers Top Talent The cleared talent market does not behave like any other hiring market. Professionals with active Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearances are continuously visible to recruiters,...
The cleared workforce has always required a specific combination of credentials, discipline, and technical depth. In 2026, that combination is changing. Across defense, intelligence, cybersecurity, and federal contracting, AI tools are being integrated into...
The 30-Day Hiring Challenge: Can Cleared Employers Really Shorten Time-to-Hire? The average time-to-hire for cleared professionals runs far longer than for commercial roles. Internal approval chains, multi-round interviews, clearance transfer timelines, and slow...
The offer was extended. The candidate said yes. Then nothing. No response to follow-up calls. A brief message three days later that they accepted something else. If you recruit in the cleared defense contractor market, this scenario is not an anomaly. It is a...
The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency is about to oversee a dramatically larger universe of defense contractors. A major policy expansion is extending Foreign Ownership, Control, or Influence disclosure rules beyond classified programs applying them to...
For most of its history, SEWP has been thought of as a product vehicle, a fast, efficient way for federal agencies to buy IT hardware, software, and related solutions. If that's still your mental model of SEWP, the sixth iteration is worth a second look, because it...
Every day, a cleared role sits open in a mission-critical program, and money bleeds off the table. Not as a line item on a budget report, but as lost revenue, degraded performance, and compounding contract risk that most program managers and capture leaders never...
Cleared Compensation Strategy: Competitive Without Overpaying In cleared hiring, compensation problems usually do not start when an offer is made. They start earlier, when a contractor realizes the market has moved faster than its pay assumptions. A role that looked...
Why Cleared Talent Pushes Back on Culture Interviews and What Government Contractors Should Do Instead In cleared hiring, candidates usually expect the interview process to become more specific as it moves forward. Once they have gone through recruiter screening,...
