EVONA

Stop assuming it's a talent shortage. Ask yourself these questions instead: -How long does it take for a hiring manager to say yes to an offer? We help you map your sign-off process before the search starts, so a "yes" doesn't depend on a hiring manager's inbox. -Is your job description realistic? We help you figure out what's realistic. Candidates rarely have heavy electrical-test, software, and RF experience all in one CV. -Is your technical test filtering for the best candidates, or filtering them out? We help you test for the skills you need without losing the best candidates. You don't need a four-hour technical test to do so. -Have you priced in the cost of relocating a whole family, instead of just their salary? We help you relocate candidates successfully across the US. -Is your outreach reaching candidates, or adding to the noise in their LinkedIn inbox? We go direct through a network of skilled candidates built over years. -Do you know which of your target skills has gotten scarce in the last six months? We track live market movement across the sector, so you're in the know too. For more on why "talent shortage" isn't always right diagnosis, read our blog post about the attention problem in space: https://bit.ly/4x5VpzA

Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) called our CEO, Tom Kelly, to talk about what SpaceX's IPO could mean for space jobs. Kelly says it could spark an "explosion of startups." Here's what that looks like with two of our own clients: 🚀 Voyager Technologies just picked up a $75 million tax credit to add 152 people to their team to help build Starlab, the planned successor to the International Space Station. 🚀 Vast is doubling their headcount to more than 600 people to build the world's first commercial crewed space station. Only a specialist in space recruitment knows the difference between someone who has integrated a satellite and someone who can actually build one. That's why EVONA exists: so jobs like these get filled by people who can actually do them. The space industry is too niche, they said. The 2,200 people we've placed across 300 companies suggest otherwise. In the last 8 years, we've placed a variety of roles including hardware and software engineers working on rockets, satellites and navigation systems. We've even placed an astronaut. Well done to our four Founders Tom Kelly Jack Madley Ryan Hill Richard Joyce who spotted an opportunity and, with laser focus, have evolved EVONA into what it is today. Here's the link for the full story: https://bit.ly/4xh63Ud

In space recruitment, as in life, attitude is everything. Off by even a little and the mission goes sideways. In aerospace terms, we're talking about which way something's pointed, relative to everything else. And the attitude is on point with Danny Hodson and Kaelan Harris. That's why we're announcing not one, but two promotions in the same week. Danny Hodson has officially been promoted from Senior Consultant to Principal Consultant.  Kaelan Harris has officially been promoted from Senior Principal Recruiter to Managing Principal. Here's what the team says about them: 🚀 On Danny: "one of the most humble, positive and genuinely nice people you could hope to work with. His energy is infectious, he's always on hand to help others, and he completely lives and breathes the EVONA values and culture." 🚀 On Kaelan: "Despite being one of the hardest-working people in the business and having his own targets to hit, he is always on hand to help someone else... And he does all of it without ego" They both stayed on track and showed up every day. Congratulations, Danny and Kaelan. Thoroughly deserved. Sam Lewis

In a startup environment, funding shifts and scope changes are expected. As more capital floods into the market and competition increases, engineers now have more power to move. That means companies need to work harder to keep the engineers they hired. Staying is not a given anymore, no matter how exciting your mission is. Take a company like Astranis, that builds satellites weighing only a few hundred kilograms, much smaller than traditional satellites. To date, their satellites have been providing broadband services. On August 13, they unveiled a new spacecraft called Perceptor. This marks their expansion beyond communications and into space domain awareness. While Astranis has previously secured defense contracts for military communications and GPS, Perceptor adapts their MicroGEO platform for continuous tracking and inspection. Broadband and space domain awareness aren't the same discipline. Engineers originally hired to build RF connectivity payloads or software are now tasked with optical tracking, sensing, and complex orbital maneuverability. And because this is not the role they signed up for, they need to cover new technical ground, fast. Whether the engineers stay or go will depend on how Astranis treats this pivot. Will this be a conversation with their engineers or purely an announcement? That's the difference between a team that grows with the mission and one that starts looking elsewhere. 

SmallSat is next week. If you're hiring in space, here's who to find: Ryan Widdicombe will be there all week, with time open for hiring managers who want to talk through what's making space hiring hard right now, and what's working for the companies getting it right. SmallSat is one of the best weeks in the space calendar. Government, industry, and academia all end up in the same rooms in Salt Lake City, and a lot of the year's smaller conversations turn into real ones there. If you want to talk space talent, or just grab a coffee, drop us a message. Message Ryan to grab a slot. Click on this link for more details on the event:  https://smallsat.org/

$17.1B is missing from Golden Dome's 2027 budget.  Here's what that means for space hiring, in two scenarios: At the Space and Missile Defense Symposium on August 12, Gen. Michael Guetlein said this: "Golden Dome will stop with everything we've already built and delivered." That is, unless the funding they need comes through by the 1st of October, the deadline Guetlein has given Congress. This deadline coincides with the US government's fiscal year which runs from 1 October to September the next year. FY27 (fiscal year 2027) starts October 1. Golden Dome has $17.5B requested for that year, but only $400M of it sits in the normal defense budget. The other 97%, about $17.1B, depends on a second budget bill Congress hasn't passed yet. You don't need to follow US budget politics to know what that means for a program you're hiring into: everything hinges on what happens in the next seven weeks.

VC-backed startups move at one speed: fast, or they die. Samantha (McCan) Mullins spent her career recruiting at exactly that pace. Now she's bringing it to SPACE. For years, she's built sales and technical teams inside VC-backed startups, the kind of hiring where a slow process costs you the round, not just the candidate. EVONA works with no shortage of VC-backed startups ourselves. They just happen to be building satellites instead of software. Same investors, same pressure, same need to hire fast and hire right. Different payload. Samantha joins us to bring that exact playbook to Technical, Commercial, Operational & Executive recruitment across Space, Aerospace & Defense. She's not easing in either. She's already live on a Mission Architect/Radio Frequency Engineer search in Westminster, CO. In her words: "I spent my career learning how VC-backed teams hire under pressure - the runway, the milestones, the boards watching every seat you fill. Space startups run on the exact same clock. Same game, way cooler mission." "One of Tampa's best. Welcome to the team, Sam." Ryan Widdicombe 🚀 Welcome aboard, Sam. 

How competitive is your interview process? A guidance, navigation, and controls engineer, or a satellite RF specialist, gets called by every well-funded company chasing your same launch date. The list of people who've actually built these things before is short, so everyone's calling the same few names. Pay, culture, and an interesting mission is how you stand out as an employer. But it means nothing if you're slow to shortlist and stay silent for weeks. If you have 5 stars on Glassdoor but your interview process is slow, chances are you'll struggle to hire quickly. That's what happens when you have a great pitch and a bad customer experience. And you need to hire fast if you want the best candidates. Because if you think about it, your engineers are your first customers. They're one of the first ones you need to sell your mission to. A good pitch gets their attention, but how do you get them to stay? Fix the process, land the pitch.

You already know how to run an interview. Here's what you don't know yet: By Series A, most founders have sat on the other side of the table plenty of times. Interviewing isn't new to you. The market is. Do you know which company just poached three propulsion engineers from a competitor? Or which skill went from available to impossible in the last six months? A specialist talent partner does. It's their whole job. Working with one in space recruitment means you don't have to be the one who knows. You can get back to building your company instead. Swipe through for what that looks like in practice.

Today, Europe watches its first total solar eclipse since 1999. The moon's shadow sweeps across Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain and for two minutes, day turns to twilight. Moments like this remind us why we do what we do. Every mission, every launch, every discovery starts with the right people in the room. We've spent 8 years building the network that finds them. https://lnkd.in/erpdbYMs