This is Sirens, a new series brought to you by the Ladies of Bombshell, where we dissect the institutions of American power.

Join us as we sound the alarm on technology, governance, and national security issues, and maybe lure some men to their deaths.

I'm Erin Simpson.

I'm Lauren D. Young Shulman.

And I'm Radha Iingar Plum.

And we have a mini episode here today dedicated to a bit of professional development.

While there are many how-to guides on job searching and applying and interviewing, we thought

we'd flip the script a little bit and do a segment on how to hire. A lot of folks, kind of in our

part of the career ladder, are now managers or have been managers for a few years.

And I think that one of the best parts of being a manager is that you get to hire people.

But not everyone has a great experience, either as a hiring manager or as an applicant.

And so we wanted to take just a minute and talk about some of the good, bad, and ugly of hiring

in the broader federal and national security world.

So this conversation is meant to cover really a range of hiring experiences, both large and

small organizations, public and private sector.

But of course, there are differences in each of those

contexts, and we'll maybe have a little bit of opportunity to drill into that. But this is not

going to be a segment on exactly how to work through your Pentagon hiring process or your

specific nonprofit hiring effort. But instead, to get us to think about some, as we said, best practices. So to get us

started, Rada and Lauren, what are your, what's your favorite part of hiring? Do you have any

like hiring success stories that you'd like to share? Well, I can start, which is I will give you

two examples, one in the government and one in the private sector. And I'll start

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