EVONA

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

You built something worth quitting a job for. A mission the right engineers can get excited about. Most founders save that energy for investors, and forget they need to sell it to prospective employees too. Your best hire has other offers. And what you say about the mission decides which one they take. Here's what we see in an interview: a founder walks a potential hire through the roadmap, the funding, the roles. They assume they have read the website, or the recruiter already covered it. Tick, that's covered. But knowing the facts isn't the same as feeling invested. That takes hearing it from the founder, hearing YOUR story first hand, not reading it on the website. $31.6 billion went into 129 space companies last quarter alone. 129 companies hiring for the same ten job titles. That means your best hire this week is someone else's best employee too.

Founders: the trapped-engineer retention plan is dead.   For years, a frustrated engineer often stayed anyway. There were only so many places to go, and moving felt like a gamble. That friction is gone.   2025 was a record year for space investment: $55.3 billion into startups, according to Space Capital. Every one of those funded companies needs propulsion, GNC, avionics and flight software engineers, and they're all hiring from the same pool.   So the engineer who used to feel stuck now has recruiters in their inbox and exciting companies on their radar.   Now, your best engineers aren't worried about losing their job. They're deciding whether staying is still the right move.   Keeping your best engineers happy comes down to a few things:  - regular conversations about growth and what matters to them - honesty about changes to the mission and timelines - pay and recognition that keeps pace with what you're asking of them today What are you doing to keep yours?

In the first half of 2026, our team sent 17% fewer resumes to clients.   In the same period, interviews were up by 26% and placements nearly doubled. That's not a contradiction, but it's what precision looks like for our team.   - Our time to fill improved by 21%. - Resumes per placement dropped by more than half.  - We were sending 57% less resumes per placement.   This is what happens when a recruiter knows the market well enough to send the right candidates, not the most candidates.   We don't cover every market, we know one market deeply: Space. Our commitment to this sector creates the depth, and the depth is what creates these results.   #WhereSpaceFindsItsPeople

If there's one thing our recruiters agree on, regardless of the role, it's this: in a space startup, the success of your company hinges on one thing: culture fit. Ryan Widdicombe has worked with founders from Seed through Series A and beyond. We asked him what goes wrong most when startups start scaling. And it's rarely the tech. Here's the mistake he sees most: "We get clients who want to hire someone from SpaceX, because it gives investors confidence. But SpaceX, or companies that size, aren't always the best fit for a startup. They need someone with a startup mentality first." His advice: hire for mindset over skill, within reason. Sam Lewis, our Head of Delivery, sees the same thing on the commercial side. He confirms that the right commercial hire is often more junior than founders expect, because they haven't been shaped by a prime's playbook yet. The same logic applies almost everywhere at this stage. The best hire isn't always the most experienced name in the pile. And that’s where the magic lies.

The Space Force just tripled the ceiling on its national security launch contract from $5.6 billion to $17 billion. SpaceX has already moved on it - picking up $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions out of Vandenberg, all flying by the end of 2027. 170 launches over the next decade - seven providers competing for the work. SpaceX has already taken $7 billion in Pentagon contracts this year alone. 170 missions don't fly without people. Every provider needs them, and they're all hiring from the same talent pool. The timelines are locked in, and the hiring pressure is already building.

There's never been a better time to build a career in space. We recently reported $7.95B flowing into space companies in Q1 alone. But more than 80% of the roles we place at EVONA come with some kind of on-site requirement. And where you end up depends on the job you do. We asked Kaelan Harris, one of our recruiters, to map the country's space hubs by specialty. Here's what he said: ↓

Our theme this month is 'World Class Restaurant'. It's all about owning your station and being consistent in it. In true EVONA fashion, we had to bring it to life 🧑🍳. Chef hats, an EVONA quiz, team games, and points on the board all week. And yes, it got competitive. People return to restaurants because of the consistency, and the standard is high no matter when you go. The same applies to our team. Consistency is one of our core values here, and it's what got us to where we are today. 2000+ candidates placed. 300+ companies scaled. 12 companies to IPO. #WhereSpaceFindsItsPeople