Jer Langhans
Founder, Paired Sourcing
We say we value potential, adaptability, and diverse experience. Then a requisition opens, and the search begins with a familiar question: who is already doing this exact job somewhere else?
Same title, same industry, similar company, similar responsibilities. Ideally, the person is doing essentially the same work for a competitor. That makes the résumé easier to understand, but it can also cause us to overlook people whose experience is less familiar and highly relevant.
Exact experience is useful evidence
I understand why hiring teams gravitate toward recognizable backgrounds. Hiring involves uncertainty. Someone who has already held the title and performed similar work gives the team fewer dots to connect.
Previous experience matters. Some roles have technical, regulatory, leadership, or operational requirements that genuinely demand it. The question is whether every requirement on the profile deserves that same treatment.
Having done a job before provides evidence that someone could do it again. It doesn’t automatically establish that they’re the strongest person for the work ahead. And a candidate who hasn’t held the exact title may still have a track record that deserves attention.
Look for transferable capability
Think about the transitions that build a career. An individual contributor becomes a manager. A recruiter moves into talent acquisition leadership. Someone crosses industries and discovers that their skills travel further than a résumé filter suggested.
At some point, someone had to examine the evidence and recognize what that person could do next.
That requires more care than simply saying “hire for potential.” Potential without evidence is a guess. Transferable capability means understanding the work well enough to recognize relevant experience, even when it comes in an unfamiliar package.
Useful questions include:
What problems has this person solved that resemble the problems this role needs to address?
What evidence shows they can work at the required complexity and scale?
How have they handled unfamiliar responsibilities before?
Which requirements demand prior experience, and which could reasonably be learned?
Those questions keep the standard connected to the actual work. They also make it easier to explain why an adjacent candidate belongs in the conversation.
Sourcing can reveal a wider market
A hiring manager’s initial profile gives the search a starting point. Research can then reveal how other companies organize the function, where titles mean different things, and which less obvious career paths lead to relevant experience.
Sometimes that research reinforces the original profile. Sometimes it uncovers a talent pool the team hadn’t considered.
That’s an important contribution of sourcing: helping an internal recruiting team understand the market and see possibilities beyond the first specification. The team still owns assessment and hiring decisions, with a better-informed candidate pipeline to work from.
Give better questions to your tools
Recruiting technology can help uncover adjacent experience across titles, skills, responsibilities, and career paths. But the instructions matter.
“Find people who resemble this profile” can keep returning familiar backgrounds. Asking where people have solved comparable problems creates room to investigate further. Either way, people still need to check the evidence and decide whether the connection holds up.
As tools make familiar candidates easier to discover, the judgment required to recognize less obvious candidates remains valuable.
Every first-time leader was once someone who hadn’t held that leadership title. Someone looked at their experience and decided they were ready for the next step. A good search should leave room to recognize that readiness.
Experience matters enormously. We should be precise about the experience the work requires, so we don’t mistake an unfamiliar background for an unqualified person.
Sometimes the best candidate is the person who’s ready to do the job next.
Adapted from “Stop Hiring People Who Have Already Had the Job,” published by Paired Sourcing on LinkedIn, September 15, 2026.