Hire AE’s outside your industry

When hiring a candidate for any role within SaaS, too often we see CEO’s insist on finding candidates that have previous relevant sector experience. That could be a mistake. In our view it’s far more important to take the most skilled candidate at what you’re hiring for (sales, marketing, CS, dev, etc), even if it means you have to hire a candidate outside your sector. There are few reasons:

Sector experience requirements mean you’re looking for unicorns. Individuals that have excellent sector experience and excellent skills are the ‘unicorns’ of hiring. Suppose you’re hiring for an Account Executive. If you require the candidate to have relevant sector experience, you’ll end up with someone with that experience you’re looking for, but it’s unlikely they’re also the best of all the candidates at selling. That’s too high a bar. It’s unrealistic to think you can optimize for both sector experience and skills, and since it’s far easier to teach the former than the latter (if you think the candidate cant figure out your sector, that’s a bigger problem), optimize for skills and ability.

Hiring unicorns elongates time-to-hire. Candidates with the best skillset and significant sector experience are hard to find, so finding them naturally takes longer. Elongating your time-to-hire of course means an empty role you need, which hurts the business.

Unicorns are hard to fire. Since you spent so much time looking for your unicorn, if they underperform, you’ll end up holding on to them longer simply because you’re trying to avoid buyer’s remorse.

An outsider’s perspective. Skilled individuals that have experiences outside your sector will bring a different perspective or approach to problems. These different approaches may end up being very valuable, especially because your competitors wont be implementing them.

There is a lot of great talent out there right now, but there are never many unicorns in hiring. Take the most talented individual you can, even if it means you’re hiring outside of your sector (obviously they need to be in SaaS though). Talented people can get up to speed on your industry easily, and long term you’ll be much better off.

Thank you for reading. Visit us at blossomstreetventures.com for more articles and SaaS data. Email the author at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com.