The Industry Expertise Trap

Or: why hiring for functional roles within your own sector often backfires

"We need someone who knows the industry."

I have heard this line in more hiring conversations than I can count. It is one of the most common reasons a strong candidate gets ruled out early. And in my experience, it is also one of the laziest.

Not always. There are roles where deep sector knowledge genuinely matters. A regulatory affairs lead in pharmaceuticals. A compliance officer in financial services. The kind of position where you are navigating a specific legal or technical framework that takes years to learn and cannot be picked up on the job.

But most roles are not that.

Most roles, particularly in marketing, HR, finance, operations, are fundamentally about capability, judgment, and the ability to think clearly under pressure. The sector is context. It matters. But it is not the skill.

And yet hiring panels default to industry experience as a filter, over and over, because it feels safer. Someone who has done the job before, in a similar company, with a similar customer base, feels like a lower risk than someone coming from a completely different world.

The problem is that the perceived safety is often an illusion. And the cost of that illusion is higher than most organisations realise.

When fresh eyes beat deep expertise

I worked with a candidate last year who had spent fifteen years in consumer packaged goods marketing. Mass-market brands, fast-moving innovation cycles, relentless focus on customer insight and retail execution. She applied for a senior marketing role at a pharmaceutical company. On paper, a stretch. In practice, exactly what the business needed.

The company was looking for someone who could bring a different approach to patient engagement. They wanted fresh thinking on how to build brand affinity in a way that felt human, not corporate. Someone who understood how to speak to people, not just healthcare professionals.

She got the role. And within eighteen months, the patient engagement work she led became the reference case the rest of the division was trying to copy.

That does not happen if the brief is "we need someone who has done pharmaceutical marketing before."

What transfers and what does not

Here is what I have observed across twenty-plus years in HR leadership and now coaching clients through career pivots.

Functional expertise transfers. Industry knowledge does not always need to.

A finance director who has run month-end close, built forecasting models, and presented to boards at a technology company can do exactly the same thing at a manufacturing company. The principles are identical. The sector detail can be learned in three months.

A head of people who has led restructuring, built leadership pipelines, and navigated complex employee relations at a logistics firm can do that work at a professional services firm. The organisational dynamics are different. The craft is the same.

A marketing director who understands brand positioning, customer insight, and go-to-market strategy in retail can bring all of that into B2B SaaS. In fact, someone coming from consumer-facing work often brings exactly the kind of customer empathy that B2B companies struggle to embed.

The sector provides the frame. The functional capability does the work. Confusing the two is how you end up hiring people who know the industry inside out and bring absolutely nothing new to it.

The real cost of hiring for sameness

There is a particular kind of stagnation that happens when everyone in a function has come from the same industry background. The thinking becomes circular. The same assumptions get reinforced. The same ideas get recycled. No one questions the way things have always been done, because everyone learned the same way of doing them.

I have seen this most clearly in marketing, but it applies everywhere. The pharma marketing team that only hires from pharma and wonders why their campaigns all look like everyone else's. The financial services HR function that only recruits from financial services and cannot work out why their talent programmes feel generic.

Homogeneity of background produces homogeneity of thought. And in competitive markets, that is expensive.

The candidate who comes from outside the sector does not carry those assumptions. They ask the questions that everyone inside stopped asking five years ago. They bring models and approaches that worked elsewhere and might, with adaptation, work here. They are not better because they know less. They are better because they are not constrained by what the industry has already decided is possible.

What actually matters

If the goal is to hire someone who can do the job well, the questions worth asking are these.

Can they think clearly about the problem in front of them?

Do they understand the fundamentals of the function deeply enough that the sector becomes a variable, not a barrier?

Can they learn fast?

Do they bring a perspective that challenges the room, rather than confirming it?

Are they curious enough to ask why things are done a certain way, rather than assuming the existing model is the only one?

These are harder questions to assess than "have they worked in our industry before." But they are the ones that actually predict performance.

The hire who worked at three competitors and thinks exactly like everyone already in the business is not necessarily a safer bet than the hire who worked somewhere completely different and sees the problem fresh.

Where industry knowledge genuinely matters

I am not arguing that sector experience is irrelevant in every case.

A chief scientific officer needs to understand the science. A head of regulatory affairs needs to know the regulations. A sector specialist in investment banking needs to know the sector.

The roles where you are operating inside a highly technical or legally complex framework are real. And for those roles, hiring someone without the specific expertise is a genuine risk.

But those roles are not most roles. And even in technical functions, there is often more transferability than hiring managers assume. The biotech scientist who moves into medical devices. The banking regulator who moves into insurance. The core capability is portable. The context shifts.

The mistake is treating every role as if it requires that level of specificity, when most of what makes someone good at their job has nothing to do with which industry they learned it in.

The pivot question

For candidates considering a sector change, the question is not whether your skills transfer. In most functional roles, they do.

The question is whether you can articulate why the move makes sense. Not defensively. Clearly.

What are you bringing from your current sector that the new one needs? What have you learned that applies directly, even if the context is different? Why does this particular industry interest you now, and what are you prepared to learn fast to make the transition work?

The hiring manager who rules you out because you have not worked in their sector before is making a choice. But so are the ones who see the value in exactly that difference.

Find the latter. They are out there, and the organisations they work for tend to be the ones actually moving.