Reposted. Again. It May Be Time to Reevaluate Your Resilience Hiring

One statistic from this week's hiring analysis immediately caught my attention. Nearly 60% of the active resilience roles we're currently tracking have already been reposted at least once. Even more telling, nearly one-third have now been reposted multiple times, and several have remained open for more than nine months.

At first glance, it would be easy to assume this simply reflects today's competitive hiring market. There is certainly some truth to that. But after more than 25 years specializing exclusively in resilience staffing, research, and market intelligence, I've found that repeated repostings often point to something much larger than candidate availability.  More often than not, they're a signal that the opportunity itself deserves another look.

Reposting Doesn't Automatically Improve Hiring Outcomes

Reposting certainly increases visibility, but visibility alone doesn't necessarily improve hiring outcomes. If the underlying role hasn't changed (scope, compensation, reporting structure, or expectations), reposting often produces the same results, only with a different posting date.

There's another factor organizations don't always consider. Experienced resilience professionals pay close attention to the market, and they notice when the same opportunity continues to appear month after month. While there may be perfectly legitimate reasons for an extended search, repeated repostings can begin to create questions. Is the compensation competitive? Has the organization changed direction? Is the reporting structure right?  Has the role expanded beyond what one person can reasonably manage?  Even when none of those assumptions are true, perception matters.

In a profession as connected as resilience, those perceptions rarely stay with a single candidate. Professionals exchange ideas through conferences, industry associations, certification programs, LinkedIn, and long-standing professional relationships. Before long, the market begins forming its own narrative about the opportunity, whether it's accurate or not.

That doesn't mean organizations should avoid reposting critical roles. It simply means that before relaunching the same search, it may be worth stepping back and asking a few important questions.

• Is the position scoped appropriately for today's resilience landscape?

• Does the compensation reflect the breadth and complexity of the responsibilities?

• Has the reporting structure evolved as resilience responsibilities have expanded?

• Are we asking one person to lead six or seven disciplines that were once managed separately or not previously included in the program?

Sometimes the best hiring decision isn't reposting the role.  It's taking a step back to evaluate whether the opportunity itself is aligned with today's resilience market.

Why Resilience Hiring Is Different

One reality that is often overlooked is that resilience remains a relatively small profession.  Most organizations employ dozens, or even hundreds, of accountants, project managers, HR professionals, software engineers, or finance specialists. By comparison, many organizations have only one resilience leader or a small team responsible for business continuity, operational resilience, crisis management, technology resilience, emergency management, cyber resilience, third-party resilience, and an ever-growing list of related responsibilities.  That creates a very different hiring dynamic than many organizations expect.  It naturally creates a much smaller talent pool, particularly as organizations continue expanding the scope of their resilience programs.

Unlike many larger professions, the resilience community is also remarkably interconnected. Professionals know one another through conferences, certification programs, industry associations, consulting engagements, and years of working together. Hiring experiences, both positive and negative, often travel much faster than organizations realize.

Another important consideration is that most resilience professionals aren't actively searching for jobs every day. According to our annual Compensation Study for Resilience Professionals, only 32% indicate they are either likely or very likely to pursue a new opportunity over the next year (initial 2026 results).  That means nearly seven out of ten professionals are either planning to stay where they are or would only consider the right opportunity if someone approached them directly with an amazing opportunity.

More Applicants Doesn't Always Mean More Qualified Candidates

Another misconception I encounter is that receiving hundreds of applications automatically means a role should be easy to fill.  Unfortunately, that's not always how specialized hiring works.

Business continuity and resilience remain highly specialized disciplines, and job descriptions often use broad terminology that attracts professionals from adjacent fields. A posting may receive significant application volume while the organization is actually seeking a very specific combination of resilience expertise, industry knowledge, regulatory experience, leadership capability, and technical skills.  Many applicants bring valuable experience.  The challenge is that application volume and candidate fit are rarely the same thing.

That often creates another unintended consequence. Hiring managers understandably see hundreds of applications arriving and assume the right candidate is somewhere within that stack. In reality, reviewing a large volume of resumes often delays the realization that very few candidates truly align with the technical, regulatory, industry, and leadership experience the role requires.  Internal recruiting teams spend weeks, or sometimes months, reviewing resumes before realizing that only a small percentage truly align with the organization's requirements.

Why Searches Stall

While every search is unique, several themes consistently emerge when resilience roles remain open or require multiple repostings.

Across hundreds of searches, I consistently see five themes emerge:

• Compensation that hasn't kept pace with today's market or the expanded scope of responsibilities.

• Job descriptions that don't accurately reflect the expertise being sought. A role may be advertised as Business Continuity when the organization is really seeking someone with deep Operational Resilience or Technology Resilience experience.

• Misalignment between title and expectations. A position may be posted as a senior manager while the responsibilities are better suited to an experienced coordinator, or the opposite.

• The continued evolution of the profession. Organizations increasingly expect one leader to oversee business continuity, crisis management, cyber resilience, supplier resilience, operational resilience, emergency management, and additional disciplines. As expectations expand, the available talent pool naturally becomes more specialized.

• Hiring approaches that aren't designed for niche professions. Internal recruiting teams do an excellent job supporting a wide range of corporate hiring initiatives. Resilience, however, often requires specialized market knowledge, terminology, professional networks, and benchmarking data that differ significantly from broader recruiting efforts. Sometimes the right answer is partnering with a specialist, whether that's to validate the role before the search begins, benchmark the opportunity against today's market, or help identify candidates who may never actively apply.

In my experience, prolonged searches are rarely caused by a single issue.  More often, they're the result of two or three of these factors occurring at the same time.

Every Reposting Is an Opportunity to Reevaluate

One of the greatest advantages of reposting a role is that it creates an opportunity.  Instead of immediately launching the same search again, organizations have an opportunity to ask:

• Has our program evolved?

• Has the market changed?

• Is this still the right role?

• Is the compensation competitive?

• Are we hiring for today's resilience profession, or yesterday's?

Those conversations often produce better hiring outcomes than another repost alone.

Market Intelligence Before Market Activity

Every repost creates an opportunity to ask a better question.  Instead of, "How do we attract more candidates?" perhaps the question should be, "Is this role positioned to attract the right candidates?"  That may mean benchmarking compensation, refining the job description, evaluating reporting structures, reassessing staffing models, or determining whether the scope of responsibilities has outgrown a single position.  Those conversations often have a greater impact on hiring outcomes than reposting the same position again.  Better market intelligence leads to better hiring decisions. Better hiring decisions build stronger resilience programs.

Ready to Start the Conversation?

If this week's market intelligence prompted you to think differently about an open resilience role, perhaps it's time to take a fresh look before reposting it again.  Sometimes a few objective adjustments made before a search begins can significantly improve hiring outcomes.

Whether you're planning to expand your resilience team, struggling to fill a critical role, wondering whether compensation is competitive, refining a job description, or simply looking for an objective assessment before relaunching a search, we'd welcome the opportunity to learn more about your objectives.

Schedule a complimentary discovery conversation to discuss your resilience staffing strategy: https://calendly.com/cheyene/strategic-staffing-advisory-solutions-discovery

Explore how our benchmarking and market intelligence services can help you validate compensation, staffing strategies, reporting structures, job descriptions, and hiring approaches before launching or relaunching your next resilience search: https://calendly.com/cheyene/executive-benchmarking-strategic-insights-discussion

About Resilience360 Advisory

For more than 25 years, Resilience360 Advisory has supported hundreds of organizations and thousands of resilience professionals through specialized staffing, executive benchmarking, compensation analysis, organizational design, research analytics, and strategic advisory services. Our expertise spans business continuity, operational resilience, disaster recovery, crisis management, security, emergency management, cyber resilience, third-party and supplier resilience, and enterprise risk. By combining one of the world's largest resilience networks with decades of market intelligence, we help organizations build stronger programs by making informed decisions about people, structure, and strategy.