Daryl Daley, CD - Recruiter

IT Recruiter

Intelligent Minds Search Consultants

What I Deliver
For Companies
🔍 Smarter Hiring, Better Results
Exclusive partnerships with me mean curated, vetted candidates ready to make an impact. I prioritize quality over speed, ensuring hires align with your goals.

🌐 Deeper Talent Access
I leverage headhunting and networking to uncover top-tier talent, including those not actively job searching.

📈 Simplified Hiring
Eliminate inbox floods of mismatched resumes. My streamlined approach saves time and ensures precision, without disputes over candidate ownership.

🤝 Exceptional Candidate Experience
A seamless recruiting process enhances your brand, engages top talent, and avoids candidate dropouts caused by confusion.

🔒 Confidential Searches
Discretion is key for sensitive roles. I ensure privacy while delivering exceptional results.

For Professionals
🚀 Your Career, Elevated
Your career isn’t just a path—it’s your story. I help you land roles that excite you by refining your strategy and showcasing your unique value.

🌟 What You’ll Achieve:

Increased Visibility: Transform your resume and LinkedIn into recruiter magnets.
Strategic Job Search: Focus on roles that align with your skills and goals.
Interview Confidence: Present compelling stories that make you the obvious choice.
Stronger Offers: Secure compensation that reflects your worth.
🔗 Dual Expertise Advantage
As both a recruiter and career coach, I provide insider knowledge to help you stand out and succeed.

Why Work With Me?
With over 30 years in recruiting and career coaching, I’ve built a reputation for delivering measurable results. Whether you’re building your team or advancing your career, I bring tailored strategies and proven expertise to every partnership.

📩 Looking to hire top talent or advance your career? Message me today.

Let’s build your high-performing team—or your dream career—together.

Tech Recruiter | Builder of High-Performance Teams | Career Coach

Canadian Forces

Canadian Forces Intelligence Officer: held a number of leadership, management and technical positions. Managed teams of up-to 38 Intelligence Operators (IntOps)

Positions included:
• Regimental Intelligence Officer & Troop Leader at 21 Electronic Warfare Regiment:  Managed and lead 34 highly specialized troops (Intelligence Operators)
• ASIC (All-Source Intelligence Center) Senior Analyst:  Managed intelligence requirements, leading 4 specialized intelligence sections performing unique functions
• Responsible for fusing all-source intelligence, including SIGINT, to produce electronic warfare (EW) associated products that were disseminated to various levels. 
• Squadron Operations Officer; an organization comprised of 100 Communication Research Operators, Signalers and Intelligence Operators.  Responsible for the planning and execution of all Squadron Operations including EW Field Exercises, Squadron training, day to day operations in addition to planning and running multiple Canadian Forces courses;
• Course Officer at CFSCE (Canadian Forces School of Communications & Electronics) for the Land Electronic Warfare Analyst Course (Intelligence Course to work within the EW / SIGINT Ecosystem)
•  SIGINT Officer and Information Operations Officer qualified.  PSYOPS Officer.

Principal Duties:

• Collected, analyzed and fused multiple intelligence sources at the operational level and produced oral and written intelligence products to support the multiple Commanders in charge of operations.
• Established and monitored indications and warning regime covering specific threat areas, provided daily updates to senior staff and produced and disseminated associated written threat assessment products.
• Produced and maintained "Targeting packages" and delivered brief's to the Targeting Board for Commanders resolution

Intelligence Officer

Canadian Armed Forces | Forces armées canadiennes

Responsible for a crew of 3 conducting battlefield reconnaissance of enemy movements, terrain, threats, and hazards ahead of the main battle group and relaying that information back to higher command.

MCpl - Queens York Rangers - Armoured Crew Commander & Patrol Commander

Various Recruiting Firms

3rd Party Recruiter / Headhunter for Toronto based firms who rely on technology to enable their success.  I help my clients find their IT Talent teams to ensure they have control of where their technology is taking their business.

★ Senior Tech Recruiter ★ Career Coach ★ | Building Elite Teams | Crafting Tech Careers | Connecting Talent with Opportunity | Mastering the Art of Tech Recruitment and Career Fulfillment |

Building Elite Teams. Transforming Careers. Solving Hiring Challenges (Without the Caffeine Overload).

Great! You’re here! 

Whether you’re hiring top talent or looking for your next big career move, I’m here to help.

Hi, I’m Daryl, a Senior Tech Recruiter, Career Coach, and Executive Search Specialist—your trusted guide for hiring the right talent and unlocking career potential.

With 30+ years of experience, I’ve helped companies across tech, cybersecurity, and consulting industries secure top talent while empowering professionals to land impactful roles. Whether you’re hiring for mission-critical positions or ready to take control of your career, I deliver proven strategies, tailored guidance, and real results.

For Companies
Hiring top talent doesn’t have to feel like a never-ending search.

🔍 My Expertise:

Key Talent Recruitment: Recruiting for high-impact technical, cybersecurity, and consulting roles across mid-level and senior leadership.
Executive Search: Helping organizations secure the leadership they need to innovate and thrive.
Results-Focused Strategies: Delivering candidates who hit the ground running, make an impact, and stay for the long term.

📈 The result? Faster hiring, better candidates, and stronger teams built to succeed.

For Professionals
Your next big career move isn’t hiding—it’s waiting for the right strategy.

As a career coach, I’ve guided over 10,000 job seekers to stand out, land interviews, and negotiate offers with confidence.

🚀 What My Clients Achieve:

An immediate increase in inbound interest from recruiters and hiring managers.
More traction with resumes, leading to interviews and offers.
A targeted, strategic job search that eliminates “rage applying” and focuses on roles that align with their goals.
Confidence in interviews, with compelling stories that showcase their unique value.
Stronger negotiating power, resulting in offers they’re excited to accept.

Why Work With Me?
Proven Expertise: 30+ years in tech recruiting and career coaching means I’ve seen it all—and solved it all.
Personalized Approach: No cookie-cutter templates—everything is tailored to your unique needs.
Real Results: Whether it’s building a high-performing team or landing a dream role, my strategies deliver measurable success.

Let’s Connect
Your next hire—or career breakthrough—is just a conversation away.

📩 Message me on LinkedIn
📅 Schedule a Call:
🌐 Explore Resources: 

Whether you’re building your team or your future, let’s make it happen—and maybe even enjoy the process along the way.

Tech Recruiter - Acquirer of High Performance Talent

RESULTS I DELIVER
• Better quality search results. If you are pitting one firm against another, they will race against each other (for a brief while) to get resumes to you as quickly as possible. Because of the imposed urgency, you are likely to see a number of unqualified resumes. Non-exclusive recruiters often hope to get lucky and hit a match, rather than putting in the effort to screen properly.

•  Deeper and broader search. Committing to one recruiter will allow that recruiter to spend the time to network and headhunt to uncover the very best candidate for your requirements, rather than just pulling resumes out of a database.

•  Less work for the hiring manager. If you are working with multiple search firms, you will get a lot more resumes than you would working with just one recruiter. However, many of those resumes will not match your hiring needs, which just makes more work for the hiring manager. Not to mention time spent sorting out candidate ownership disputes between multiple firms.

•  Better candidate experience. Have you ever received the same resume from more than one recruiter? It can make your company look unprofessional if more than one recruiter interviews a candidate about the same job. And you may see some great candidates back out of the process entirely when multiple firms are involved.

•  Confidentiality. For a confidential search, working with more than one recruiting firm makes no sense. It will be impossible for a recruiter to keep the company name confidential if there are multiple search firms involved.

Daryl Daley

Getting laid off once hurts.
Getting laid off three times in five years rewires how you see yourself.
Most people won't say this out loud.

So I will.
The modern job market is a washing machine.
It spins you, snaps a few buttons off, and pretends you should come out "grateful" for the experience.

But the truth is simple.
It's not your skills.
It's not your effort.
It's not your value.

It's volatility.
It's overhiring.
It's leadership panic.

And it's systems built on quarterly fear.
And the people who get chewed up the most?
The quiet high-performers.
The ones who assume good work protects them from chaos.

But this era doesn't reward quiet.
It rewards clarity.
Direction.
Positioning.
A career built like a portfolio instead of a ladder someone else controls.

If you've been hit more than once, stop asking "What's wrong with me?"
Start asking "What do I want to build next?"

Your next move shouldn't be reactive.
It should be intentional.

Built around who you're becoming, not what the market just did to you.

If you want help designing that, message me.
You don't have to rebuild alone.

★ Senior Tech & Cybersecurity Recruiter ★ Career Coach ★ 30+ Years Driving Elite Technical & Executive Hires ★ Helping Companies Solve Hard-to-Fill Roles ★ We’re Always Hiring Top Talent! ★

You're not being ignored.
You're being gaslit by a job posting.

Ghost jobs aren't just frustrating. They're career trauma in disguise.

If you've ever applied to a role that never existed, you know the cycle.
You apply. You wait. You get ghosted by a job that never existed.

And then the part nobody talks about…
You start blaming yourself for a job that was never real.

There's a deeper damage here.
It damages your confidence. Makes you question your worth. Convinces you the problem is you.

Thousands of job seekers think they're being "ignored."
But what's actually happening is worse.

They're participating in a hiring pipeline that was never connected to a real outcome.
Budget freezes.
Evergreen reqs.
"Building a bench."
Roles posted to prove someone is "working on it."

Broken systems create broken self-belief.
That's the real danger.

If this is you, let me say this clearly:
You can't build momentum chasing jobs that don't exist.
Your worth isn't measured by silence from a fake job posting.
If you need a real strategy, message me.

And to the recruiters doing this? You're not "building a bench." You're breaking people.  Do better.

Every Monday, someone gives career advice they have no business giving.

“Just network more.”
“Just show passion.”
“Just stay positive.”

It’s amazing how confident people get when they’re not the ones applying.

My Thoughts:
Bad advice isn’t harmless.
It wastes time.
It kills confidence.
It sends good people in the wrong direction.
Hiring managers feel it.
Candidates feel it.
 
Everyone’s exhausted by the noise.
Cut the nonsense.

Listen to people who’ve actually done the work.  People in the industry.  Recruiters who review resumes, select candidates to interview, interviews them, gets feedback, gives feedback, extends offers and hire people.  Career Coaches who are in the hiring game, not just a side hustle.

If you want real guidance, not recycled clichés, follow me.

A clear mind makes better moves than a loud crowd ever will.

Experience inflation is killing careers. 
And it’s complete bullshit.

Companies are quietly turning normal jobs into Olympic trials.
 
Roles that needed 3–5 years now demand 8–10.
Junior jobs suddenly need “senior-level ownership.”
Tools that didn’t exist 18 months ago now require “mastery.”

This isn’t raising the bar.
It’s raising the drawbridge.
And it’s destroying confidence in an already brutal market.

Most leaders won’t admit this, but experience inflation is fear in disguise.
They’re terrified of hiring the “wrong person,” so they build job descriptions that only a unicorn with insomnia could satisfy.

And then they wonder why roles stay open for six months.

If a job needs 10 years for work that realistically takes 5, it’s not a talent shortage.  It’s a leadership shortage.

Here’s how to fix it:
 • Cut requirements not tied to revenue or risk
 • Hire for trajectory, not tenure
 • Build a 60–90 day learning runway
 • Hold hiring managers accountable for every inflated requirement

And if you’re job searching right now:
Ignore the years. Apply for capability.
Years are the laziest proxy for skill ever invented.

If companies want high-performing teams in 2026, they need to stop chasing mythical unicorns and start hiring actual humans who can learn fast, think clearly, and deliver real value.

Question for you:
What’s the most ridiculous “experience requirement” you’ve seen this year?

We just passed 2008 layoff levels. 
It's not even December.
Nobody wants to talk about what that really means

People are scared sh*tless and pretending they're not.

Nobody wants to say out loud:
Employment has become a form of stability most people can’t count on anymore.

Every week I talk to brilliant professionals who are terrified to check their inbox.

They’re doing everything right.
They’re still getting blindsided.
Not because they’re unskilled.
Because the market is unstable and the rules keep shifting.

Being grateful to have a job isn’t desperation.
It’s realism.

And realism is how you stay grounded when the ground keeps moving.

If you’re in transition, you’re not broken.

You’re navigating a system that’s forgotten the human cost of constant disruption.

If you’re leading teams, this is your reminder:
Your people aren’t “lucky” to be employed.
They’re trusting you with the one form of stability they have left.

We can’t pretend this is normal.
But we can choose how we respond to it.

What’s keeping YOU steady right now?

From Calais, France - wishing all my American friends the Happiest of Thanksgivings.

Your Biggest Hiring Problem Has a Name, 
a Title, and a Seat on Your Interview Panel

Companies aren’t losing talent to competitors.
They’re losing talent to their own interviewers.

A single person on a panel can tank your entire pipeline.

And it happens far more often than leaders realize.
It’s not the market.
It’s not the comp.
It’s not a talent shortage.

It’s Steve from engineering who treats every interview like an interrogation.
It’s Sarah from operations who shows up late and unprepared.
It’s the manager who spends half the interview complaining about burnout and overtime.

These people are not “demanding high standards.”
They are quietly destroying your ability to hire.

I’ve watched it for three decades.
A great candidate moves through the process confident and excited.
Then they meet that one person.
The one who rolls their eyes.
The one who didn’t read the resume.
The one who makes them feel unwelcome, inadequate, or like an inconvenience.

And suddenly the candidate withdraws.

They’ll give you a polite line about timing or fit.
But I know what really happened.
Someone on your team scared them off.

Here’s the truth most companies avoid.
Every person in an interview is selling your culture.
Not just the recruiter.
Not just the hiring manager.
Everyone.

That engineer who dismisses questions signals that collaboration is pretend.
That manager venting about stress signals a burnout culture.
That interviewer who clearly doesn’t care signals that the company doesn’t either.

You can offer top dollar.
You can have a mission that changes lives.
 
None of it matters if the people representing you are miserable or hostile.

If someone on your team cannot show candidates respect, clarity, and basic professionalism, they should not be in interviews.

Because if this keeps happening, your hiring problem isn’t the talent pool. 
It’s who you’re letting represent you.

Sometimes the hardest seasons still move you forward.

Careers don’t break in one moment.
They break slowly.
One setback.
One rejection.
One bad manager at a time.

But the same is true for rebuilding.
One decision.
One opportunity.
One honest conversation.

Progress doesn’t need to be dramatic to be real.

If you’re in a tough chapter right now, keep going.
Hard isn’t the enemy.
Staying stuck is.

Keep going.
This is the way.

Precision Castparts

Planned and deployed initial PKI and HSMs for smartcards, internal TLS, and code signing.  Recently deployed newer geo-redundant HSM cluster after previous HSM EOL (at a huge cost savings vs initial cluster).  Evaluate and manage deployment of OT/ICS IDS infrastructure and network segmentation across nearly a hundred physical sites.  Re-implement vulnerability management solution and establish competitive inter-division KPI tracking.  CASB/Zero Trust Private Access product evaluation and company-wide deployment.  Occasional SOC analyst, company CTF champion! ;-)

Senior Security Engineer

Dejero

DevOps role; according to my manager, I "Played a key role on the IT Infrastructure team, helping to put the systems in place to support LIVE+ Control and bring Dejero's cloud infrastructure and internal IT systems to the next level."  Great company, amazing team!

Senior Network and Systems Administrator

Precision Castparts - Aerostructures Division

Management role for the IT staff of 4 Canadian PCC Aerostructures sites and one site in France.
Providing technical assistance to each site where gaps exist in the local skillsets. Completed
multiple domain migrations and SOX/IT standards integration for acquired companies. Performed role 8 months prior to promotion unofficially, as well as being the lead technical Cybersecurity contact for the Aerostructures division. Coordinated deployment of several new cybersecurity products and standards across division and lead incident response. Hired and trained permanent Cybersecurity analyst in March 2014.

Regional IT Manager - Canada, France

Centra Industries Inc

Performed all System Administrator duties. Deployed Asterisk based VOIP system to replace
aging AVAYA system, replaced PRI circuit with SIP trunking, cut telecom costs substantially while improving reliability and featureset. Implemented plantwide card control access. Deployed additional NetApp based SAN and expanded Citrix Xenserver environment. Reimplemented HP ProCurve infrastructure to improve network performance. Coordinated installation of 10gbit underroad fibre and set up 100mbit wireless backup for plant expansion into new building.

Systems Administrator

Plextec Inc

Providing IT support for a variety of primarily Windows Server environments. Migration to VOIP
telephone systems for several large manufacturing and insurance customers, many of which had a variety of industry specific customizations implemented. Utilized my experience in VLANs, virtualization, SANs and VPNs to create secure hosted Windows Remote Desktop/Terminal Services environments. Leveraged open source products in several instances to manage costs for customers. Key contribution to Plextec was to convince management to change the business model from breakfix to recurring revenue IaaS/PaaS. This has significantly impacted the business in a positive way; Plextec has since experienced substantial growth.

VOIP/Network Engineer

Self Employed

Operated an ISP (one of the first in SW Ontario) from October 1994 until 2010.  Designed architecture and managed deployment of multiple Internet access and hosting technologies including: Dialup (analog and ISDN PRI based access), Fixed Wireless (utilizing Breezecom, Ubiquiti, and other custom/proprietary 802.11 based technologies modified for long distance outdoor use) covering a large swath of rural SW Ontario, SDSL in two small towns using local telco dry loops (became familiar with deploying and maintaining Lucent DSLAMs), and province-wide ADSL (utilizing incumbent telecom provider's gateway access service through L2TP tunnels terminating on a customized platform deployed on my own hardware).  Simultaenously operated a small computer shop until 2008 offering home and small business computer sales and service as well as IT support.

Independent ISP and Computer Shop owner/operator

With an IT career spanning decades, I bring a wealth of hands-on leadership and creative problem solving experience in Cybersecurity, Cloud, Advanced Networking, and Linux/core infrastructure. I'm passionate about protecting systems and data, designing resilient architectures, and driving innovative solutions in mixed cloud/IT/OT/legacy environments.  

Currently serving as a Senior Cybersecurity Engineer for over 9 years in the critical manufacturing sector, I hold top industry certifications including CISSP, CCSP, and AWS Certified Solutions Architect. In addition to my professional work, I actively experiment with self-hosted AI models, legacy application/environment containment, an ever-evolving open source "enterprise IT alternatives" stack, and deploy and maintain various other homelab projects, continuously expanding my technical horizon.

Beyond tech, I’m engaged in my community as the vice-chair of the Perth East Public Library board. I'm an avid non-fiction reader and aspiring polyglot. I enjoy travel and camping with my family, cycling the G2G trail, and amateur radio. My entrepreneurial roots, including launching and running one of the first ISPs in southern Ontario, have honed my leadership, business acumen, and problem-solving skills.

Always eager to connect with forward-thinking professionals and explore opportunities to lead, innovate, and make a meaningful impact.

Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, wife, family, fellow parishioners, neighbours or pets.

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Daryl Daley

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The Battle

Daryl Daley

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Daryl Daley's LinkedIn Performance

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