Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / Why You Should Interview Candidates Outside Your Industry
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to start with a story about a regional bank in Ohio. Luna: I'm listening. Lucas: So, this bank needed to fill a mid-level loan officer position. Standard role—analyzing creditworthiness, structuring small business loans, managing a portfolio. The HR team ran the usual search: finance degrees, two to five years of banking experience, loan origination background. Luna: Pretty standard requirements. Lucas: Right. But they were getting lukewarm candidates. So the hiring manager, a woman named Sarah, decided to look outside the box. She had a hunch that someone who's managed a busy restaurant might actually have the core skills. Quick math under pressure, managing cash flow, dealing with demanding customers, multitasking. Luna: And she actually hired a restaurant manager? Lucas: She did. A woman named Monica who had run a high-volume diner for seven years. No finance background, no degree in business. But she had handled daily revenue reconciliation, staff scheduling, inventory ordering—and she'd built relationships with regulars that kept the place profitable. Luna: So did it work out? Lucas: Monica turned out to be one of the top-performing loan officers in her cohort within eighteen months. Her loan portfolio had a lower delinquency rate than the average for people with banking backgrounds. And her small business clients loved her—she understood the operational struggles they faced because she'd lived them. Luna: That's a great case. But I think a lot of hiring managers would've thrown her resume in the trash. The industry experience filter is so ingrained. Lucas: It really is. And I think it's one of the most overlooked biases in hiring. We assume that someone who's done the same job in the same industry will hit the ground running. But that's often a false comfort. Industry experience can come with ingrained assumptions about how things should be done—assumptions that might not be optimal. Luna: So you're saying someone from a completely different field might actually bring fresh perspectives that improve performance. Lucas: Exactly. There's research from Harvard Business Review that looked at hiring across industries. They found that people who switched industries actually had higher innovation scores and were more likely to suggest process improvements in their first year compared to industry veterans. Because they weren't constrained by 'that's how we've always done it.' Luna: But I imagine there's a learning curve. Monica didn't know the regulatory requirements for lending, right? Lucas: True, and that's the trade-off. She had to spend her first few weeks learning compliance basics—something a banking hire would have already known. But Sarah, the hiring manager, told me that Monica's ability to learn quickly and her existing discipline more than made up for it. She passed the internal certification exam faster than the average trainee. Luna: So what's the key when you're evaluating a candidate from a different industry? How do you know if the skills will transfer? Lucas: I think you need to look past the job title and focus on the underlying competencies. For Monica, it was things like: managing cash flow in a high-volume environment, which is directly analogous to managing loan repayments. Or client relationship management—she had a book of regulars who trusted her. That's the same skill a loan officer uses to retain borrowers. Luna: So you're essentially looking for the abstract structure of the work, not the surface details. Lucas: Exactly. One framework I like is to map the candidate's past responsibilities to the job's core tasks on a one-to-one basis. If the job requires data analysis, look for any role where they had to interpret numbers—even if it's a retail manager analyzing sales trends. If it requires negotiation, look for vendor negotiations or even customer complaints handling. Luna: I've seen this work in reverse too. A friend of mine worked at a tech startup and then moved to a manufacturing company. She said her tech background helped them automate processes that had been manual for decades. Lucas: That's the cognitive diversity angle we've touched on before. People from different industries bring different problem-solving frameworks. A software engineer might think in systems and loops; a chef thinks in sequences and timing. Both can be valuable for the same operations role, just from different angles. Luna: But there's also risk. What if the industry gap is too large? I mean, would you hire a pastry chef to be a surgeon? Probably not. Lucas: Sure, and I'm not saying you should ignore domain knowledge entirely. For highly technical roles—like a pharmaceutical researcher or an aerospace engineer—industry experience is often non-negotiable because the knowledge base is deep and specialized. But for many business roles—sales, operations, project management, even some finance functions—the core skills are more portable than we think. Luna: So how do you actually screen for that in an interview? You can't just ask 'what did you do at your last job' and hope to spot the transferable stuff. Lucas: Right, you need to reframe the questions. Instead of asking about specific industry knowledge, ask behavioral questions that reveal how they approached problems. For example: 'Tell me about a time you had to analyze a complex situation with incomplete information. How did you decide what to do?' That question works regardless of the industry context. Luna: And you're looking for the structure of their thinking, not the content. Lucas: Exactly. Another technique is to give them a hypothetical that's specific to your industry but doesn't require prior knowledge. Present a simplified version of a real problem your team faces and see how they approach it. The raw reasoning ability often tells you more than a rehearsed answer from someone who's been in the industry for years. Luna: That's a good way to level the playing field. I also think there's a diversity benefit here. If you only hire from your own industry, you're cloning the same perspectives over and over. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's a problem for innovation. A team of people who all came up through the same industry, same schools, same networks—they'll tend to converge on the same solutions. Bringing in an outsider can break that pattern. And it's not just about cognitive diversity—it's also about demographic diversity. Industries often have demographic skews, so hiring from outside can help correct for that. Luna: Right. If the restaurant industry has a different demographic mix than banking, you might inadvertently increase diversity by hiring that restaurant manager. Lucas: Exactly. But I want to be careful here—I'm not saying hire someone just because they're from a different industry regardless of fit. The point is to evaluate them on the actual skills, not dismiss them based on the industry label. Luna: So what's the concrete recommendation for a hiring manager listening right now? Lucas: Next time you have an open role, force yourself to look at resumes from outside your industry. Don't filter by 'relevant experience' at the first pass. Read the resumes of people who have done something completely different. Ask yourself: if this person had the right training, would their core skills make them exceptional? And then interview them with that question in mind. Luna: I like that. It's a small shift that could open up a whole new talent pool. Lucas: And I think that's the kind of conversation we try to have on this show—practical, evidence-based, and aimed at helping you make better hiring decisions. Which reminds me, a quick note about the show itself. Luna: Sure, go ahead. Lucas: If these conversations have helped you think differently about your own hiring processes, or if you've used an idea from the show and it worked, that's exactly why we do this. We keep the show completely ad-free—no sponsor reads, no commercials, no interruptions. That's a deliberate choice. And if you want to support that choice, the simplest way is to head to buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small gesture but it means we can keep the content focused on what matters—no selling you anything, just sharing what we've learned. Lucas: Exactly. And back to the topic—I want to share one more data point. There's a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that looked at the career trajectories of workers who changed industries. They found that those who moved to a completely different sector actually had faster wage growth over the next five years compared to those who stayed in the same industry. Luna: Interesting. So the move itself might signal something about adaptability or ambition. Lucas: Or it could be that they're applying their skills in a less saturated market where their unique perspective is more valuable. Either way, it suggests that industry switching isn't a negative signal—it might actually be a positive one. Luna: So for the hiring manager, it's not just about being open-minded—it's about recognizing that a candidate who's done something different might bring a competitive advantage. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's the takeaway. The next time you see a resume with no relevant industry experience, don't toss it. Read it carefully. You might find your next Monica. Luna: And if you do, let us know. We'd love to feature that story in a future episode. Lucas: Absolutely. That's all for this episode of Hiring & Firing. I'm Lucas. Luna: And I'm Luna. Lucas: See you next time.