Incident Response

Staffing and Training

Although the size of each team is going to vary depending on its services and its available funding, there are some staffing issues that all teams should understand. It is of paramount importance that every team member have a positive, customer service-oriented attitude. This may sound like a cliché, but it’s important to the success of any service-oriented organization. When it comes to a supplier who provides emergency services, it is even more essential. Always give customers more than they expect. Great care should be taken in selecting the right staff members.

One of the reasons that the Carnegie Mellon CERT/CC organization was successful in pioneering the incident response profession is that it spent a great deal of time selecting its personnel. Here’s how an actual interview was conducted in 1988 when the CERT/CC was recruiting its technical staff. The process consisted of nine back-to-back interviews with various managers and senior technical staff. Both hiring managers and interviewees found it to be a grueling day. However, we grew to appreciate the great effort placed in selecting staff members. Each of the key staff managing, supervising, or working with a prospective employee had the opportunity to interview the applicant. In some cases, multiple days of interviewing were called for. And, in each case, every interviewer’s responses were collected and considered in the hiring decision; everyone had a say in the process. In the after-interview ...