Why IT Recruiters Fail at OT Hiring

We get this call all the time. A company has been working with their usual recruiting firm — the one that's great at filling IT security roles but they just can't close an OT position. Three months in, no hires, a pile of irrelevant resumes. What's going wrong?

Everything.

IT recruiting firms fail at OT hiring for one fundamental reason: they think it's the same thing. It's not. Not even close.

An IT recruiter sees "cybersecurity" on a job description and starts searching for people with CISSP certs and SIEM experience. That's fine if you're hiring a SOC analyst. But if you need someone who understands Modbus, who's worked in a plant environment, who knows why you can't just push a patch to a PLC on a running production line, those keyword searches return nothing useful.

The vocabulary is different. In OT, we talk about safety instrumented systems, not firewalls. We talk about Purdue Model levels, not network segmentation zones. An IT recruiter doesn't know what questions to ask, so they can't tell the difference between someone who's genuinely worked in OT and someone who added "SCADA" to their LinkedIn because they read an article about it.

Then there's the cultural mismatch. OT professionals tend to come from engineering backgrounds, not IT help desks. They've worked on plant floors, not in server rooms. They think in terms of physical processes and safety, not uptime SLAs. A recruiter who doesn't understand that culture will never build trust with these candidates.

This isn't a knock on IT recruiters. They're great at what they do. But OT hiring requires a specialist who lives in this world every day. Someone who speaks the language, knows the players, and understands that in OT, the stakes aren't data breaches — they're explosions.

That's why we exist.