Is Industry Experience a Necessity?

Filling open positions is harder than ever, and just like we all love open-minded job seekers, it’s important that hiring managers stay open-minded as well. Hiring candidates with industry experience is usually ideal, but is it always necessary?

If you find your company is struggling to fill your open positions, it will help to open up your search to candidates outside of your industry. Here are three things to think about when deciding if industry experience should remain a requirement on your job description.

Strong Skill Set and Qualities are Priority

If you get too hung up on finding a candidate who has industry experience, you may start to ignore what is actually important. Having the industry experience on their resume does not mean that they have the skills and qualities to succeed with your company. The candidate may have everything you are looking for except for the industry experience, and those candidates are worth meeting. Teaching a newbie the industry lingo isn’t as time consuming as one would think, while many qualities of a committed worker simply cannot be taught.

New Blood = New Ideas

If you continue to require the same experience and educational background from each of your new hires, they will all have very similar ideas and perspectives. This is especially problematic if you aren’t impressed with your current employees, but continue to look for the same exact background. A fresh perspective from someone who is unfamiliar with the industry is just what every company needs to spark new, fresh ideas. The same employee backgrounds will continue to give you the same results!

Faster Fill Times and Bigger Talent Pool

If there is an open hole on your team causing you and your coworkers a lot of stress, you are going to want to fill the open position sooner rather than later. If you want a quicker fill, try dropping your industry requirement. Doing so will also immensely expand your candidate pool, attracting perfectly capable candidates outside of your industry that wouldn’t have applied before.

We may start sounding like a broken record at this point, but hiring has continuously been difficult this year. KRG is constantly coming up with creative solutions to fill open positions for companies in the Buffalo area. If you find that your company could use help finding new staff, we would love to help!

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