Hire for Skills, Not for Industry

When you’re building a company, it’s tempting to think you need engineers who’ve worked in your specific industry. After all, they’ll know the lingo, the players, maybe even the quirks of compliance, right? Wrong. Hiring for industry-specific experience can cost you exceptional talent while providing little guarantee that your hire actually knows how to solve your problems.

Here’s the deal: software development is its own industry. A developer who worked in healthcare, finance, or retail wasn’t solving healthcare, finance, or retail problems—they were solving software problems. And those problems, whether they involve scaling databases, maintaining uptime, or ensuring compliance, don’t care about your industry.

The Risk of Proxy Hiring

Let’s break it down: hiring an engineer from your industry doesn’t mean they’ll have the skills you need. They might have spent their career maintaining a legacy system or running routine scripts. Their expertise in payment processing, for example, might not extend to PCI compliance—or even to modern development practices.

Instead of solving the problems you actually face, you’re hiring for a superficial alignment with your sector. It’s like hiring a chef because they’ve cooked in Italian restaurants, only to find out they’ve never made pasta from scratch.

What You Should Do Instead

Focus on what matters. Here’s the formula:

1. Define the Actual Skills You Need: Whether it’s API design, distributed systems, or compliance expertise, be specific. If the job requires a nuanced understanding of data sovereignty or a knack for crafting intuitive interfaces, say that.

2. Don’t Rely on Industry as a Shortcut: Assume nothing about a candidate’s skills based on where they’ve worked. An engineer with a background in fintech may know nothing about your payment platform. An e-commerce veteran may never have optimized a checkout flow.

3. Embrace Diversity of Experience: Engineers from outside your industry often bring fresh perspectives that your team lacks. That social media engineer might have insights on scalability your legacy systems desperately need.

4. Hire for Adaptability: The best engineers are quick learners. A curious, adaptable candidate can pick up domain knowledge far faster than a specialized candidate can learn better engineering practices.

The Anti-Pattern to Avoid

Don’t fall into the trap of proxy hiring. It’s lazy and dangerous. You’ll think you’re covering your bases when, in reality, you’re leaving glaring gaps. Imagine hiring a “seasoned fintech engineer” and finding out they’ve never worked with modern encryption standards. Or worse, hiring someone because they’ve worked at a big-name company, only to discover they contributed to none of the work you admired.

Industry-Specific Knowledge Isn’t Always Critical

If your role genuinely requires deep domain expertise—like understanding complex regulatory frameworks—then prioritize candidates with the skill, not the resume bullet point. But most of the time, this isn’t what you actually need.

Instead, look for engineers who excel at solving problems, abstracting complexities, and designing resilient systems. If they’ve done it before, they can do it again, regardless of the industry.

The Key Takeaway

Hiring is your chance to shape the future of your company. Don’t squander it on surface-level proxies like industry experience. A great engineer isn’t defined by the field they’ve worked in, but by their ability to adapt, innovate, and deliver.

Hire for what you truly need, not for what feels safe. Safe hires lead to mediocrity. Strategic hires lead to excellence.