Current organizations need to evolve to stay ahead in today’s competitive world, and implementing new leadership promotes exciting opportunities for development.
Besides the fresh perspectives, limited talent pools are fueling the need to search for great talent through industries. Cross-industry hiring is also a necessity in young emerging sectors such as FoodTech. It is also important for some areas suffering from talent shortages, such as Cyber Security, where there are currently one million unfilled jobs. More reason to invest in upskilling in their talent strategies. Upskilling is about preparing people for a technology-based future and making them relevant for the future of their lives and their companies.
Competitive marketplaces requiring creative leadership, talent shortages, new technologies and increasingly challenging skill sets mean cross-industry recruiting is on the increase.
Several of our clients have already started to hire executives from not only outside their business but outside their sector to offer fresh insights and promote new thinking.
Read along to fully understand how to get your cross-industry recruitment strategy going.
Benefits of cross-industry hiring
Here are some of the principal advantages of cross-industry hiring:
- It encourages innovation – someone who sees the business from a different perspective can provide a much-needed, new standpoint on how things are done.
- It creates a competitive advantage – cross-sector talent provides an injection of new ideas and fresh approaches; input that contributes essential differentiators in a fiercely competitive market place.
- It changes the team’s mindset – hiring someone from another industry will reset the way a team works. If everyone has similar backgrounds, businesses will expect to see similar results.
- It accelerates execution – despite steering the ship, executive teams may be caught in the weeds. Cross-industry hires and the strategic insight they provide will give leadership teams the boost they need to push ahead with important efforts.
- It provides a wider pool of talent – by tapping a broader scope, hiring managers will no longer miss out on great people
- It adds diversity to the workplace – it is well known that diversity and inclusion allow an agile workplace. Diversity also refers to competences and educational history.
How to execute cross-industry recruitment
Cross-sector recruiting involves a particular approach to recruiting, interviewing and onboarding applicants.
Examples of cross-industry recruitment
At Catenon we’ve done cross-recruitment before for firms such as William-Sonoma, Saks Fifth Avenue, Panasonic, PepsiCo and Burger King among others.
As business conditions and market dynamics become more complex, so do the needs of human resources, suggesting that the most appropriate solution may not always be to recruit from within. In our experience, executives who work in high-level positions are successful for their related expertise and strong performance, not simply for their industry background. As a result, more companies are considering hiring seasoned executives from other industries.
