You didn’t build a space company for your lead engineer to sit in interviews all day. The obvious cost of a slow hiring process is the fee, the job board spend, the weeks on the calendar. The real cost is the opportunity cost: the person who should be building your proof of concept is sitting across a table instead.
You need a specialist in space recruitment. Here’s why:
Specialists vs. Generalist Recruiters
Hiring for technical know-how in space is much harder than technical recruiting in other industries, and your TA team will feel it. The average space-sector role takes about 10 weeks to fill, per the UK Space Sector Skills Survey 2023. And it’s not getting any easier. Working with specialists dedicated to the space industry can bring that down. At Evona, we’ve brought that figure down to 6 weeks.
Internal teams are generalist by necessity because most early-stage companies can’t justify more than one or two internal recruiters. Their priority is whatever’s open that week: engineering today, finance next month, ops after that.
Compare that to a specialist desk in the space industry. They do one thing, all day: recruit for space. They’ve spent years building a pool of passive talent ready to pick up their call. A recruiter working across multiple disciplines doesn’t have the bandwidth to build deep networks. They work reactively instead, starting from scratch with every new role. That costs time, and by extension money, that space companies can’t afford to lose.
Technical Vocabulary
Judging how well someone understands propulsion systems or AIT work is the engineer’s job, not a recruiter’s. That’s true no matter who’s in charge of the search. A generalist recruiter running a propulsion search might not know what an AIT engineer does, or why satellite integration experience doesn’t mean someone can build a satellite from scratch.
And without the technical vocabulary to know a weaker candidate from a stronger one, your lead engineer spends more time in interviews than they need to. A recruiter who understands space has the language to translate between the engineer who’s interested in the job and the one who needs it filled.
The Capacity Problem
A specialist desk embedded in space can put a whole team on a single skill set. If a client needs thirty propulsion engineers in a quarter, several recruiters work that search together to make it happen. One or two internal recruiters covering every department at once don’t have that option, no matter how good they are.
Space Recruitment Is Harder Than Other Engineering Sectors
We’ve mentioned a few reasons why space roles take longer to fill than most technical searches. But space is also different from other engineering sectors in a few specific ways.
The Mid-Career Experience Gap in Space Engineering
Space startups are securing funding and growing faster than the industry can produce the talent to staff them. The number of companies raising early-stage funding in the space economy has more than doubled since 2016, per Space Capital’s Space IQ report. There simply aren’t enough mid-level engineers who’ve seen a program through from start to finish, and for a startup to succeed, that’s the experience sweet spot.
These candidates aren’t out there applying for jobs. They don’t have to. They move based on trusted relationships and opportunities passed along the grapevine. That’s where an experienced space recruiter’s network can help, and where your TA team could really struggle.
And mid-career candidates won’t move for just any role either. Recruiters experienced in the space industry have seen enough to tell you what it takes to stand out as an employer of choice. They know what it takes to compete for that candidate, and how to close someone already weighing two or three other offers.
Security Clearance and ITAR Requirements
Because most clients in the space industry are government entities, the need for candidates who are already security cleared, combined with ITAR requirements, adds another layer of complexity.
Cleared candidates are already scarce, and competition is increasing. Add ITAR and export-control rules on top, and they rule out large parts of the general talent pool before a search even starts.
Geographic Concentration of Space Talent
Space talent clusters in a handful of hubs. For example, Colorado alone employs more than 55,000 people directly in aerospace and ranks first in the nation for aerospace employment per capita. A hiring surge in one of these hubs pits every employer there against the same small local pool, unless you find someone willing to relocate.
Relocation isn’t new in this industry, but it’s less avoidable than in most. A software company facing a tough local market can make the role remote. In Space, that won’t work because physical hardware, test campaigns, and secure facilities keep the job tied to one site. That means a hiring surge in one of these hubs pits every employer there against the same small local pool, unless you find someone willing to relocate. A relocation process needs to be handled with gloves to make sure everything goes to plan. That’s part and parcel of recruiting in the space industry, and we advise candidates on it daily.
Compressed Program Timelines
Commercial satellite programs now typically move from contract start to launch in 2 to 3 years, against a US government average of more than 10 years for complex space systems. That means missing the hiring window on a two-year program means liftoff never happens.
A Specialist Recruiter Means Time Back for Your TA Team
A TA function still has a place in an early-stage space company that a specialist desk can’t replace. They understand the company’s culture, its full hiring needs across every department, and the day-to-day relationship with each hiring manager. Your internal TA team can make the case for what makes your company worth joining, the culture, and the mission you’re on.
The space industry has real hiring challenges, but you don’t have to solve them with your internal team alone. Specialists who have helped space startups scale from seed to Series C bring a network of security-cleared, passive engineers and enough dedicated people to work the hardest searches. That’s the gap a specialist desk fills, so your TA team can focus on everything only they can do.