There’s a candidate you passed on recently. Maybe it was last month, maybe six months ago. You remember them because they were sharp, prepared, asked good questions, and clearly understood the problem your team was trying to solve. But the resume didn’t quite match. They hadn’t worked in your industry before. And when it came down to the final decision, you went with the safer choice, someone who already knew the space.
This article is going to ask you to think about that decision one more time.
Not to make you feel bad about it. Hiring is hard, the stakes are real, and the instinct to go with someone who already knows your world is completely understandable. It just isn’t always right. And I think if you sit with what I’m about to share, you might find yourself looking at the next candidate list a little differently.
I know this because I’ve been that candidate.
About a year ago, a health company was looking for a Product Operations leader. Their digital and product teams had been working in silos for years, separate groups doing separate things without much coordination, and they wanted to bring everything together under one roof and actually build something cohesive. It was exactly the kind of problem I know how to solve. I went through several rounds of interviews, and I went in prepared. Not just generally prepared, but specifically prepared. I spent real time getting up to speed on HIPAA requirements, not because I was unfamiliar with them but because I wanted to speak to the specific rules and their definitions without hesitating. I wanted the people across the table to know I’d done the work before I walked in.
In the end, they went with someone else. He wasn’t less skilled than me, to be clear about that. He was solid. His biggest advantage was that he’d worked for a competitor. That was the deciding factor.
I found out later through the person who recommended me that the transition took a little longer than the company had hoped. I mention that not as an “I told you so” but more as a gentle reminder that a resume from the right industry doesn’t come with a performance warranty.
Here’s what I’d ask a hiring manager to sit with when they read that story. The candidate they passed on had done real, specific preparation for an industry he hadn’t come from, completely unprompted, because that’s how he operates when something matters. He went and learned regulatory language because the job required understanding it, and he takes that kind of thing seriously. That’s not a liability. That’s a signal. It tells you exactly how that person is going to behave on day one, day thirty, and day ninety when they hit something unfamiliar: they’re going to go learn it.
The insider candidate doesn’t have to do that kind of preparation because they already know the vocabulary. That’s genuinely useful. But it also means you never get to see that signal. You never find out whether they’d do the work if they had to, because they’ve never had to. And in a role like product ops, where the job is constantly running into things nobody’s figured out yet, knowing how someone behaves when they don’t have the answer is actually pretty important.
The thing most hiring managers are screening for when they put “industry experience required” on a job description is familiarity. Not the ability to build something new. Not the ability to change how a team operates. Not the ability to look at a broken process and know exactly where to cut. Just the comfort of someone who already knows the words. And comfort and capability are not the same thing. Nearly 64% of employers have already shifted toward skills-based hiring because they’ve seen what happens when they screen for background instead of ability. In execution roles, which product ops absolutely is, people hired for demonstrated skills consistently outperform people hired for credential matching. The market has already started moving. Some hiring managers just haven’t caught up yet.
The flip side of the healthcare story is worth telling too, because this isn’t a piece about rejection. It’s about what’s actually possible when a company decides to look past the familiar.
I recently went through several rounds of interviews with a manufacturing company in the transportation industry. About as far from my media and streaming background as you can get without leaving the planet. I went deep with that team across multiple conversations, real dialogue about what they were trying to build, what wasn’t working, and how I’d approach it. At one point, one of the managers said something I haven’t forgotten. He told me that the company had recently brought someone onto the executive team from completely outside their industry, and that person had been asking questions nobody inside the organization had thought to ask in years. Questions that seemed obvious in hindsight but had gone unasked because everyone already “knew” the answer. That experience had changed how they thought about hiring.
We didn’t close the deal in the end. The role evolved during the process in ways that didn’t make sense for either of us, and I walked away. But I walked away with an offer from a company in an industry I’d never worked in, because they’d figured out something a lot of companies haven’t yet: sometimes the person who doesn’t know how you’ve always done it is exactly the person you need.
I’ve seen this same thing play out in the consulting work I do. A home services company that was convinced its competition had a sophisticated AI operation turned out to be comparing itself to a single chatbot. Within weeks we had automated lead generation running and an AI receptionist handling intake, and the business moved faster than it had in years. A twenty-year-old accounting firm, fully manual in almost every process, is now on track to be paperless by the 2027 tax season after we selected the right system, built the migration plan, and I went through formal platform training because the job required it and I wasn’t going to outsource that to guesswork. A manufacturer that makes display furniture and retail cases had contract information that used to take one to five days to surface. Two people, two weeks, one MVP, and the same information now takes minutes. None of those businesses needed someone who came from their industry. They needed someone who knew how to find the real problem and build toward the real fix.
That’s what product ops is. The industry is context. The skill is the thing that travels.
Now, I want to name something directly, because I think it’s worth being honest about. The hesitation hiring managers feel about bringing in someone from outside the industry isn’t always really about the candidate. Sometimes it’s about the decision itself. If you hire someone who came from the right background and it doesn’t work out, that’s just a tough break. If you hire someone from outside and it doesn’t work out, you have to explain why you made that call. That’s a real dynamic and pretending it isn’t exists would be patronizing. But it also means a lot of genuinely strong candidates get filtered out not because they can’t do the job, but because the hiring manager is managing their own exposure. And the cost of that decision gets absorbed quietly, into a slower team, a less innovative product, a problem that sits on the whiteboard for another year.
The hire that looks safer isn’t always the safer hire. It just comes with a more comfortable story attached to it.
I’m the candidate in this article. I came from media and streaming, an environment that tells you loudly and immediately when something doesn’t work, and I’ve spent the last several years walking into industries that have nothing to do with that world, learning them fast, and building things that hold up. Some companies took the chance. Some didn’t. The ones that did got something the industry-experienced hire probably wouldn’t have given them: a set of eyes on problems that had stopped feeling like problems, and someone willing to go learn whatever the job required next.
If you’ve got a candidate on your list right now who doesn’t quite match on paper, I’d ask you to take one more look before you move on. The resume that doesn’t line up with your industry might be hiding the most interesting person in the stack.
And if you want to think through what it looks like to bring that kind of thinking into your team, come find me at cesarmoreno.ai. Book a call or send a note. A real person will answer, I promise. If this one hit close to home, share it with someone who’s in the middle of a hiring decision right now and tag me at @cesarmorenoai. And if you want to keep going on questions like this one, I dig into them regularly at my linkedin page or cesarmoreno.ai.