Comprehensive hiring guides, talent acquisition strategies, and workforce planning resources for employers — covering everything from sourcing and screening to offer negotiation and onboarding across IT, engineering, and finance roles.
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 CIO interview questions in 2026 should test budget defense, AI value realization, board communication, and one real incident the candidate owned. Vision questions are theater. Every serious finalist has rehearsed that answer twice this month. The published lists all ask some version of the same five things. … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 Automation engineer interviews in 2026 should test startup behavior, safety judgment, and OT network sense. PLC trivia is free. Anybody can memorize scan cycle mechanics in a weekend, and the plants that screen on it keep hiring people who cannot run a commissioning. I run delivery at KORE1 and … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Hiring an automation engineer starts with deciding who the seat reports to, because that one choice sets the platform experience, the pay band, and which candidates ever apply. Plant floor, engineering group, or IT. Three genuinely different jobs wear the title, and every published salary figure blends … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Hire a SCADA engineer by screening for who owns the path into the control network, not who can build an HMI screen, because remote access is where these systems fail in 2026. Base pay clusters near $123,000 across every major aggregator, and a properly scoped search closes … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 An AI/ML org chart works when the ratios do: roughly one platform engineer per three modelers, one data engineer per two, and no more than eight people reporting into any single lead. Argue about the rest of it all you want. Those three numbers hold, and the … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 An engineering org chart runs on six staffing ratios, and only one of them has real research behind it. That one is span of control, and it lands near six engineers per manager. Everything else on the chart is convention borrowed from a company that looked nothing … Read more
The top embedded systems recruiting firms for 2026 are KORE1, PRA USA, SPECTRAFORCE, Net2Source, Hunter Recruiting, EV.Careers, and TRIAD Engineering Corp. These firms were ranked using the Placement Authority Score, a 7-factor methodology weighted heavily toward recruiter reputation and embedded-specific industry depth. KORE1 ranks first for its combination of active engineering bench, W-2 staffing model, … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 Agile coaches in the United States earn $96,500 to $198,500 in 2026, and scope sets the band far more than years of experience do. Team-level coaches cluster near $110,000. Enterprise transformation coaches clear $200,000. The title by itself tells you almost nothing about the number you should … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 An application security engineer secures the code your own company writes, and in 2026 that means owning dependencies and build pipelines as much as reviewing source, because supply chain failures now rank third on the OWASP Top 10. Pay lands between $150,000 and $200,000 for most mid-to-senior … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 An automation engineer job description has to name the control platform, say whether the work is new build or retrofit, publish the travel load, and state which safety standard governs the line. Leave those four out and the posting fits a test automation developer, a robot integrator, … Read more
