About RED SKY Consulting
A specialist firm for the hires the Fortune 100 cannot get wrong.
RED SKY Consulting places cybersecurity, IT, and AI leaders and teams for enterprises where a bad hire lands on the risk register. Three disciplines, no others. Executive search, precision staffing, and project delivery, run by senior practitioners who have been doing this work for the largest organizations in the world.
What we are
Specialists by choice, in three disciplines only.
Walk into a generalist staffing firm and cybersecurity sits somewhere between light industrial and accounting on the service menu. The recruiter working a SOC analyst requisition on Tuesday is working a warehouse supervisor requisition on Wednesday. That model can fill a seat. It cannot judge whether a candidate has actually run an incident response program under board scrutiny.
RED SKY covers cybersecurity, IT, and AI. Nothing else. Every recruiter, account manager, and delivery consultant here works inside those three disciplines every day, which is why our submittals arrive already technically screened rather than keyword matched.
The RED SKY mission, unchanged since the firm was founded
Scope stays narrow on purpose
Four service lines, all inside one specialism: cybersecurity executive placement, precision staffing for security and IT teams, professional services delivered under SOW, and AI talent and strategy. A client can move between all four without re-explaining their environment to a new firm.
We hunt rather than wait
The strongest security leaders are employed, effective, and not reading job boards. Reaching them takes direct outreach, a warm network, and a reason for them to take the call. That work happens before a role is posted anywhere.
Account load is capped, and compensation enforces it
An account manager here carries a deliberately small book, and the commission plan is built so that carrying more would not pay them more. See the arithmetic below.
Machines accelerate. People decide.
Agentic tooling handles sourcing breadth, scheduling, and market mapping. Every judgment about whether a person can actually do the job is made by a senior human inside the Triton Vetting Process.
The structural commitment
We cap an account manager at twelve clients.
Attention is the one thing in this business that cannot be claimed into existence. Every firm on a preferred vendor list promises a partnership. The honest test is arithmetic: how many other accounts are competing for the same person's calendar this week.
Twelve is a hard ceiling here, and the commission plan is what makes it hold. An account manager who performs across ten RED SKY accounts earns what a manager at a volume firm earns across thirty. Taking on more clients does not increase their pay. It only thins out what each client gets.
The practical effect is the part clients notice. Intake calls run long enough to understand the environment. Slates come back small and defensible. The person who took the brief is the same person on the debrief four weeks later, because they are not managing twenty-nine other relationships alongside it.
Attention math
Set the comparison yourselfDrag to the number that matches the firms on the current vendor list. If it is not known, thirty is a common book size at a volume staffing firm.
At 30 accounts, a RED SKY client gets 2.5x more of an account manager's week than yours does.
The model divides a forty hour week evenly across a book of accounts. Real weeks are messier than that, and the point is the ratio rather than the hours. RED SKY publishes only its own number here. The comparison figure is whatever the reader sets it to. Without JavaScript this comparator stays static: at a book of thirty, each client receives roughly two and a half times less of a rep's week than a RED SKY client does.
How we source
The people worth hiring are not applying anywhere.
A posted requisition reaches the population that is currently looking. The population of security and IT leaders who have actually run the program in question overlaps with that group far less than hiring plans assume. They are employed, performing, and have no reason to open a job board.
Reaching them takes a market map, a list of the twenty to forty people who have genuinely done the work, and a direct conversation with each one. That approach starts slower than posting and finishes faster, because the slate that comes back has already been qualified before anyone in the client's organization spends an hour on it.
Of the contract candidates we submit reach an interview. The industry baseline sits near ten percent, which is the difference between reading twenty resumes to find two people and reading ten to find three.
Direct hire submittals run at 38% against the same baseline.
Where we deliver
The searches other firms hand back.
Filling a security architect role in a major metro is a competitive exercise. Filling one in a town of forty thousand people is a different problem, and it is where a hunting model separates from a posting model. RED SKY delivers across the United States and in six international regions: LATAM, Central and Eastern Europe, the UK and Ireland, India, APAC, and MENA. The contingency terms travel unchanged.
A Fortune 500 manufacturer in western Michigan
Two national search firms had already returned the mandate. The constraint was never the skill set. It was persuading senior technologists to build a life ninety minutes from a major airport. We filled every requisition they sent us, and the relationship has run for years since.
A national logistics operator, hours from the nearest metro
Every technical role at this site sat outside commuting distance of any talent pool. Job boards produced nothing usable because nobody in that market was searching. We mapped the candidates who had roots in the region or a reason to want it, and filled the roles quickly.
Security leadership in a university town
A local market with a strong graduate pipeline and almost no senior security bench. The answer was a national search with a regional relocation story that stood up to scrutiny, plus honest conversations about compensation before anyone got attached to a candidate.
LATAM, on the same terms as San Antonio
When an existing client opens roles in Brazil, the engagement does not restart with a new vendor, a new contract, and a new explanation of the environment. The same account manager runs it, the contingency model holds, and the delivery standard travels with it.
Central and Eastern Europe engineering hubs
Poland and the wider CEE region carry deep infrastructure, platform, and security engineering benches that US hiring teams rarely reach directly. We source into them for clients building follow the sun coverage or standing up a second engineering center.
APAC regional security leadership
Regional CISO and head of security mandates across APAC carry a governance dimension that a purely technical search misses. We run these with the same executive process used in the US, adapted for local regulatory context and the realities of a smaller senior market.
Location constraints usually sit inside a wider industry problem. See how the same model applies in financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, or browse every industry we serve.
How a search runs
AI moves the search. People make the call.
No board is going to accept a chief information security officer chosen by a model, and they are right not to. Automation is genuinely good at breadth, speed, and hygiene. It is not good at deciding whether someone can hold a room during a breach.
RED SKY uses agentic tooling across sourcing, verification, and pipeline management, and draws a hard line at judgment. Every candidate who reaches a client has been assessed by a senior recruiter inside the Triton Vetting Process, the vetting method the firm has been refining for more than twenty years.
Breadth, speed, and hygiene
Handled by tooling, reviewed by a person
- Market mapping across every reachable source, rather than the handful that happen to be indexed on a job board.
- Identity and employment verification before a profile reaches a recruiter, which matters now that candidate impersonation is a live enterprise risk.
- Scheduling, reminders, and pipeline hygiene, so no candidate goes quiet because a follow up slipped.
- Live compensation banding pulled from current market data, so intake conversations start from what a role actually costs today.
- First pass skills extraction against the requirement set, which clears the obvious mismatches before a human spends time on them.
Judgment, and everything that depends on it
Never delegated to a model
- The intake conversation that establishes what the role genuinely requires, which is often different from what the requisition says.
- Technical screening by a recruiter who has worked inside the discipline and can tell a certification from a track record.
- Leadership and culture assessment, including how a candidate has handled the specific pressures of the team they would inherit.
- Reference conversations that surface what a resume never will, drawn from relationships built over two decades in this market.
- The uncomfortable counsel, telling a client when the requirement and the budget do not meet, before three months of search time is spent proving it.
- Candidate advocacy through offer, resignation, counteroffer, and start date, which is where placements are usually lost.
Who runs the work
Senior people, on the search, from the first briefing.
The pattern in this industry is a senior partner on the pitch and a junior researcher on the delivery. RED SKY is small on purpose so that the person who takes the brief is the person who runs it. Internal staff average more than fifteen years each in cybersecurity and IT recruiting.
Séan Donovan
Founder and Chief Executive OfficerSéan founded RED SKY and has led it ever since. He still works executive mandates personally, which is why the reference network behind this firm, more than thirty five Fortune 100 CISOs and CIOs who will take a call on request, exists at all. It was built one relationship at a time, mostly in person, over a very long period.
Karly Koons
DirectorKarly runs client accounts day to day. Under a twelve client cap that means staying close enough to each engagement to know what is actually happening inside a hiring process, rather than reporting on it from a dashboard once a fortnight.
The firm also supports the field it recruits from. See community and giving back, or read what the team says about working here on our staff voices.
The proof
References, not adjectives.
Anyone can write that they build relationships. The version of that claim worth anything is a list of senior people who will pick up the phone and say so without being asked twice. RED SKY can put a prospective client on a call with more than thirty five Fortune 100 CISOs and CIOs.
Séan and RED SKY focus on the long view, not just the immediate needs or openings they have. They recently spent hours selflessly advising me on a C-Level executive job search for myself, and their feedback was invaluable and freely offered. Classy move, frankly, and I will always appreciate the way they operate.
Retention is the number that separates a filled seat from a solved problem. A search run twice costs the second fee, the vacancy, and the credibility of the person who signed off on the first hire. Read how we protect against that in cybersecurity executive placement, or see the current thinking in RED SKY insights.
Start here
Two ways in, and a real person at the end of both.
There is a role open that cannot stay open
Tell us the role, the constraint, and the deadline. A senior partner takes the briefing directly, not a coordinator, and comes back with an honest read on what the market will produce and how quickly.
Start a searchA move worth making, handled properly
Security and IT professionals get plenty of recruiter noise and very little advocacy. RED SKY works a small number of mandates at a time, which means honest conversations about fit, compensation, and whether a role is actually a step forward.
Explore careers with RED SKY clientsIn Their Words
What it's like to work with RED SKY. And what it's like to work here.
Feedback from enterprise security leaders, technology executives, and the people inside RED SKY.
RED SKY is in the company of very few in a crowded cybersecurity and IT industry. Truly flush with innovators and problem solvers, with one of the highest client-centric levels of care that I have ever witnessed. They truly listen, then take action and get results.
The process was streamlined. You understood our business needs, partnered with us, and you delivered top executive and non-executive level talent. I've worked with staffing firms all over North America; you've certainly demonstrated that you're a leader.
It was apparent he cared both about the company and the people whose position he was filling, all the time working hard to make sure the applicant has all the info to put their best foot forward. This is truly the way to place people in positions to succeed.
Everyone here is great. We work hard, but we laugh a lot and have fun. The money combined with the company culture is what will make me stay here for years to come.
Listened to our needs, was fair and ethical in our business dealings, and found us extremely qualified candidates. Personable, professional, and someone who gets the job done using creative approaches when traditional ways are not working.
I have had a great working relationship with RED SKY for many years. They take the time to understand my requirements and find people who meet my needs quickly. Always responsive. I would highly recommend them for your staffing needs.
A driven leader going beyond expectations in finding folks to meet project and staffing needs. Took the time to understand my needs and then leveraged the resources of RED SKY Consulting to assist and get fantastic results.
The ability to make great money, progress in your career, get training, and have work life balance is here. The people are fun, very friendly, and we work in a collaborative team environment. The culture and values are solid.
Always professional, responsive, and more importantly there with the solutions we need, when we need them. They've been a great asset for me in the last two companies I have worked for and I will undoubtedly lean on them in the future.
You know when you receive the candidate information, they will be the highest quality and best fit possible. I used them to find my security architect and could not have found a more perfect candidate.
RED SKY has a deep network of highly skilled individuals even in the tightest of markets. RED SKY does impeccably what I need a partner to do: solve problems.
All of us work harmoniously with each other, and you can be sure that help will come if you need it. Sometimes you don't even need to ask.
Hover to pause. Quotes are trimmed for length.
Read the full client record