Recruitment companies speak a lot about diversity, but providing diversity of experience is kind of the antithesis of what we do. We’re paid to headhunt candidates who do the same or very similar roles at competitors 95% of the time. The majority of the time, the candidate who will have the lowest time to productivity is who is chosen.
Whilst most of my clients require some Capital Markets experience for non-tech roles, there have been a number of instances where I have had opportunities for people to move industry, skillset, level or function. Some recent examples were:
Middle Office Analyst --> Product Analyst
Quant Risk --> Product Manager
Management Consultant --> Tech Sales
New Business Sales --> Account Manager
Trading --> Tech Sales
There are a few reasons why not recruiting from a direct competitor or recruiting a different skillset from a competitor would work for you and your company.
1) Budget – if you can’t attract top 50th percentile talent from competitors with your budget, then you might want to explore alternative talent pools.
2) You have a skills/knowledge gap in your team that you want to plug - so subject matter expertise in a particular area matters more than hiring someone doing a similar role at a competitor.
3) Already gone through a lot of your talent pool – some of the companies I work with have scaled teams from 1 to 25 in 18 months. In that time they would have interviewed 200+ people a lot doing similar roles from competitors, the talent pool is finite and at some point you need to assess other options.
4) Advancement – hiring from an industry that is more advanced in an area than where your industry is currently. Most commonly this would be hiring from BigTech / MAANG type firms.
5) Brand – particularly for senior hires, making a marquee hire from a well known firm or a firm who aren’t a direct competitor but are in a market where you want to take your business can help drive brand awareness and show you mean business about growing.
If you’re going to explore alternative talent pools, you’ll need to speak to an experienced & specialised recruiter or recruiter(s) to sense test your ideas and understand if anyone else has succeeded, or indeed failed with what you’re proposing. Or better yet, get the recruiter to suggest to you where else you can find applicable skills.
this resonated with you, drop me a message and we can discuss the size of your immediate Talent Pool and adjacent Talent Pools.
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