The Trouble With Hiring Someone to Repeat Their Last Job

A vacancy opens up, and somebody suggests a candidate who has done that job at another company. The industry is familiar, the responsibilities look similar, and the candidate has experience to point to. On paper, that sounds reassuring.

It’s a reasonable place to begin a search. I worry when it becomes the whole search.

Someone can know the work well and still struggle with the way a new company operates. They have to learn who signs off a change, which teams carry the consequences and why a familiar solution may meet resistance. A job title tells you very little about that.

What the job title leaves out?

Take a manager moving from one company to another. At the former employer, sales could pass a customer request to engineering and get a decision that week. The new company may need operations, finance and support to weigh in before engineering begins.

The manager has solved a similar problem before. That experience should help them ask useful questions. But applying the old solution without understanding the new company’s constraints could leave them with a frustrated team and an unresolved customer request.

People joining from outside can also notice habits the existing team has learnt to accept. Sometimes a company needs technical knowledge it doesn’t have, and hiring a specialist is a sound choice. I’d still want to know how the person will learn the company around the job. Their previous title doesn’t do that work for them.

When recruitment becomes a reflex?

Suppose a company hires a specialist for an urgent opening. A few months later, another role appears. The search goes outside again because nobody internally has held that exact job. An employee who knows the company and could learn the role is never seriously considered.

After several such hires, the company may have fewer people who have had the chance to grow into new work. Managers keep looking for experience that their own staff have had little opportunity to build. We tell employees to develop, then judge them by the title they haven’t had the chance to earn.

An internal employee may know why an earlier proposal stalled and whose approval a new approach would need.

An internal applicant might need training or time in a new department. If the company lacks the skill the role requires, an outside specialist may be worth recruiting. I would want managers to consider both possibilities rather than assume a matching résumé settles the choice.

What people learn across teams?

A candidate who’s worked with different departments may see a problem that a narrower role leaves out. They might understand why a process that helps sales creates extra work for support, or why engineering can’t promise what a customer is asking for.

A meeting involving several departments may reveal a constraint one team had missed. It may end with no decision at all if nobody agrees on the next step.

When a candidate talks about working with another team, I’d ask what they had to learn about its work. I’d also want to hear about a disagreement that changed their decision. That tells me more than the number of departments listed on their résumé.

Interests outside work may give somebody another way to learn. But hobbies tell us little about their ability to do a particular job. A candidate may spend their time outside work caring for family, or simply prefer to keep their personal life private. I wouldn’t make that a hiring test.

Bring it into the interview

Start with the work the person will actually have to do. Ask internal and external candidates about a problem where they needed help from another function. Find out what changed in their approach after hearing from that team. If the job allows it, give them the same work-related exercise and agree in advance how the answers will be assessed.

An internal employee may still need an assignment across teams, help from a specialist or a staged move into the new role. They should know what is expected of them. Without that support, a manager risks mistaking a poorly planned transition for a lack of ability.

Before recruiting outside, we should want to see which internal candidates were considered and why their development plans wouldn’t fit the role.

When the hiring manager says, “This person has already done exactly what we need,” I’d ask what they will have to learn before that past experience becomes useful here.