NortonLifeLock is the consumer cyber safety business behind the Norton and LifeLock brands. Since 2022 it has operated as part of Gen Digital, which is co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague.
Aisling McWeeney, a Principal Talent Acquisition Partner, owns some of the company’s hardest engineering searches. One of them had been open for 6 months. She had worked it with at least 12 or 13 vendors, and none had produced a hire.
A Java automation framework, built from scratch
The hiring team needed an engineer who could build a Java automation framework from the ground up. That requirement narrowed the market quickly.
Strong Java talent is hard to find, and most automation engineers work inside a framework someone else designed. Many have maintained one or written tests on top of one. Very few have designed and built one from scratch.
Designing the framework is a different job from writing tests for it. The engineer decides how tests are structured and reused, how they run in the build pipeline and how results reach developers. Those decisions set how quickly every other engineer on the team can test and ship, long after the framework is written.
So many résumés looked right and still missed. A candidate could list Java and years of automation work without ever having owned the design of a framework.
One candidate, and he got the job
TekRecruiter focused the search on engineers who had built a Java automation framework, not only used one, and presented a single candidate rather than a stack of résumés.
The screening went past the tools on the résumé. TekRecruiter asks senior engineers to walk through systems they have built and the design decisions behind them. For this role, that meant hearing how a candidate had designed a framework of his own.
The engineer went through NortonLifeLock’s interview process and was hired in January 2026, ending a search that a dozen vendors had not been able to fill.
TekRecruiter sent one candidate, and he got the job.
20+ engineering roles since
The Java hire changed how Aisling works with TekRecruiter. Since January 2026, TekRecruiter has filled more than 20 roles across other NortonLifeLock teams, from software engineers to DevOps and cloud engineers.
None of those searches has been as hard as the Java automation framework role.
Since then, while following all our proper processes, I reach out to TekRecruiter whenever we can use agencies, and they have delivered on our toughest senior software engineering roles every time.
