Four decades of scholarly attempts to uncover terrorists’ socio-demographic and psychological traits have proven largely inconclusive. A review of the scholarship would suggest that almost anyone can become a terrorist and provides no consensus on why individuals join terrorist groups. In the current study we examine the challenges that hindered the search for a single terrorist “profile.” Utilizing a unique dataset which includes the social, organizational, and socio-demographic traits of 350 members of terrorist networks, we offer an alternative conceptualization of the terrorist profile. Rather than socio-demographic characteristics, this approach posits social and organizational requirements of the network as the dependent variable, offering an escape from some of the conceptual traps that have long limited our understanding of terrorist recruitment.