Industry experience required for HR jobs

When does experience in one business sector cease to be an advantage but instead become a burden? When do the skills and knowledge that you’ve acquired about one type of business disqualify you from ever moving to another?

We’ve all seen the job ads that state suitable candidates must have experience of one sector or another, and to a certain extent that’s a sensible place to start, but the degree to which this requirement is implemented creates the risk that the business sector you find yourself in when you first start work is possibly the only sector you’ll ever work in.

If you happen to get your first job in retail for instance, after some years the chances are high that you’ll be seen by recruiters as a ‘retail specialist’.  Never mind that you might have a range of transferable skills including things like budgeting, managing a team, doing presentations and so on - you will be defined only by the sector in which these skills were learnt and applied.  If you wanted to move into, say, manufacturing, then these skills may count for nothing because you don’t have ‘sector experience’.

And it gets worse - I knew someone who worked in retail banking but when she applied for a job in commercial banking was told she wouldn’t be considered because she didn’t have ‘sector experience’. But hang on, aren’t commercial and retail banks in the same sector?  To the rest of us maybe but not in the world of corporate recruitment.

These requirements are often set by fervently conservative management who believe that the best choice for someone who has left is to find an almost exact copy.  This ensures continuity, easy assimilation and acceptance, and reduces the time and cost of developing a new hire’s knowledge of the nuances of your industry. 

If you’re a recruiter working in-house or externally, where is the value in trying to find candidates from outside the narrow brief when the client will think you mad for doing so? These views from management are often not challenged either by HR Business Partners, and they in turn continue to perpetuate the myth that sector experience is essential, as they apply that same criteria for new hires for within their own HR function!

Applying transferable skills for executive hires

Investment banking, pharma, life sciences, biotech, and retail are arguably the biggest culprits for having business and HR leaders who are uncomfortable in applying transferable skills, and insist regularly insist on sector experience. “We have unique needs in our industry” is a frequent justification along with “our business leaders will only listen to someone who knows our industry first hand”.

Perhaps when economic times are tough and there is an oversupply of candidates you can understand the logic of hiring from a familiar pool.  But this cuts the options for innovation, different thinking and ideas from other sectors. It significantly cuts the size of the talent pool you can hire from and simply recycles the same old approaches to business and to HR. Personally, I’d rather avoid hiring from an average performance company in our industry with the need to unpick accrued bad habits and regurgitated knowledge; and instead secure talent from an organisation known for best practice and future of work thought leadership that will challenge our status quo and push us to learn and adapt further. We can train for technical skills and industry knowledge, but we cannot train to instill curiosity, values, ethics, or innovation.

Curiously, the only jobs in most corporations that often go to complete outsiders are the very top jobs, precisely because they need innovation and different thinking at that level.  There are countless examples of the chief executive being appointed from outside the hiring sector, often to the great advantage of the organisation.  

So what should recruiters and HR departments do in the face of this demand for conformity from business leaders?  It’s tough to argue with the client when the customer is supposed to always be right.  However there is merit in testing the water from time to time and adding in one or two ‘different candidates’ into the mix.  You must discuss these “wild card” candidates in detail with the hiring manager, identifying the skills and experience that make these candidates worth considering and accept that changing management perceptions might take some time.  I hear you asking, what’s in it for you, and why should you bother?  Very simply, if your organisation can benefit from innovation in other sectors that would have an impact on the bottom line of your company, then it’s to everyone’s advantage.

Transferable skills exist right across the HR function

It is also long past time when HR teams around the world need to practice what they preach when it comes to hiring for its own. We gain no credibility in espousing transferable skills to business leaders, when we don’t have the faith to apply these into our own functional area. Read through 50 job descriptions for HR Business Partners and you’ll quickly find commonality to the technical and soft skill competencies required. The same for job ads for Compensation & Benefits leaders, Employment Law experts, Learning & Development specialists and so on. At the very least, we could trade the sector experience requirement, for an expectation that the types of work forces that have been supported historically are similar to those to be supported in a new role.

A HR leader who has supported globally scarce engineers should quickly figure out how to best support scientists. A HR leader who has supported staff in chemical manufacturing plants should segue easily to supporting consumer goods manufacturing employees. A HR leader who has come from a dynamic and innovative B2C tech sector company should add some fantastic value to a retail organisation. So long as you’re securing great core technical skills, emotional intelligence, and potential for culture fit, the rest can be learnt quickly by high performance HR operatives.

Certainly nothing is likely to change if you keep replacing like for like.  There is then that very familiar definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different outcome.