Hiring for unfamiliar roles can be daunting. Who you bring onto your team directly impacts your business’s success, so venturing beyond your expertise can have you wondering if you’re biting off more than you can chew.

How do you assess candidates effectively? Will you end up with the right hire? Inevitably, self-doubt creeps in. But don’t let the fear of the unknown prevent progress.

The truth is, hiring for a new role like your first software developer or UX designer does require some extra effort on your part. But with the right preparation and support, you can approach your business’s growth with confidence and excitement.

In this blog post I’ll share three key tips to set you up for hiring success, even in unfamiliar spaces. We’ll explore:

• Doing your research – Get clear on your hiring needs
• Considering who you know – Leverage your network or seek external expertise
• Trusting your gut – Listen to your instincts, dial up your BS radar

By being prepared, you can hire great talent in any domain, regardless of how familiar or unfamiliar you are with it.

The result? A new hire that’s aligned with your business goals, culture and team needs. Let’s dig in!

Tip No. 1: Do your research

Define your hiring north star

Though counterintuitive, I’ve seen hiring managers struggle to articulate why they need the role they’re hiring countless times. Without a clear north star, finding the right person for the role will be challenging, if not impossible.

Take some time and write it out. Start by outlining what’s important to your business, and work from there. You can even begin by defining the criteria that’s a little more straightforward such as:

• Where does this person need to be based?
• Do they need to be an independent type or a big team collaborator?
• How important is it that they have experience in your sector or with a similar size company?

Determine your ideal timeline and who you’ll need to bring along the journey to support you, whether in-house or externally. Get clear with your thinking and rationale so you can easily explain it to others.

Get curious

You might not be an expert in Data Science or Support Engineering, but it doesn’t mean you can’t start to learn. There are the obvious ways to learn about unfamiliar roles. Read up online.

Type into your search engine and AI assistant exactly what you’re doing, like “How to hire a Data Scientist”. Look for common standards, expectations, questions and capabilities.

Quickly, you’ll start to see some patterns emerge that you’ll likely want to include as part of your job ad criteria, process or evaluation.

Then, identify a few companies who have a good reputation or hire frequently in that particular area. Head to their company LinkedIn page and find the employees whose titles or functions align with what you’re after.

Get curious. Find out where they’ve worked, what they post about, what education they’ve received, and any other insights that give you a more robust picture of who you might be looking for.

Though this isn’t a perfect replacement for years of specialised knowledge in that space, you’re much better equipped with the insights and confidence to move to the next stage.

Tip No. 2: Consider who you know

Leverage Your Network

By definition, a network is a group of people who you surround yourself with to exchange professional value when needed. There’s a reason you’ve been growing it since the start of your career, and now it’s time to leverage it!

You can do this in a variety of ways, including:

• Ask for recommendations and referrals
• Attend industry events and conferences
• Lean on others’ expertise

Let’s explore these a little more.

Ask for recommendations and referrals

Make it easy for your network to promote the role you’re hiring. You can even make it so easy, they don’t even realise they’re helping you! After identifying who in your network might be best suited to help, you might:

• Tag them in a LinkedIn post promoting the new role to increase the post’s reach
• Email them the job description and ask them to share it with anyone they think might be interested
• Check out their connections if you know they’re well connected to folks in that particular space

Attend industry events and conferences

What better way to connect to the kind of people you want to hire, than by connecting with the kind of people you want to hire? Events, meetups and conferences are great opportunities to both learn more and maybe even meet the person you’re looking for (think: a CTO meetup where you learn about a CTO’s pain points in a room full of CTOs… yes please!)

Here are some reasons why events can help you hire a role you’re unfamiliar with:

• Businesses are always vying for a great candidate’s attention. Put you and your business out there to establish familiarity and credibility in the market.
• You never know if the next person you meet may know the next person you want to hire
• Use this as another opportunity to learn more about the role you’re hiring, especially if you plan to make multiple hires of that role or even build out an entire team.

Lean on others’ expertise

Despite all the research and learning you may get up to, there will be limits to what you can achieve on your own when hiring a role outside of your expertise. And that’s okay!

However, some stages of the hiring process may require a proper expert in the field to assess whether a candidate you’re considering meets the requirements or not. Imagine hiring your first software developer and needing to assess an online tech test without knowing how to read code… Yeah nah.

If you know someone in this space, why not reach out to them and see if they can offer some support? Depending on the relationship, they may do it as a favour, or perhaps you can hire them on an hourly rate to do a technical interview or code test reviews.

Seek external support (if available to you)

As a recruiter, I recognise the bias in recommending specialised agency recruiters. But hear me out… this industry exists for a reason!

You might be tempted to DIY your haircut, website, or solar panel installation. And though you could do a decent job at it with enough research and practice, it will never replace the value you get from going directly to the folks who do this day in and day out. Am I right?

As recruiters, we are finely skilled in the art of deeply understanding people, reading between the lines of their wants and needs, and identifying their unique sauce so you can determine if it’s right for your team.

There are many benefits of collaborating with a recruiter, but for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll stick to three:

• Broader networks
• Specialty knowledge
• Save time (and headaches)

Broader networks

Recruiters have spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of candidates throughout their career. We know what gets candidates interested in a job, what concerns them about making a switch, and how to pitch them new roles even if they’re not open to new opportunities.

A great recruiter knows it’s crucial to build AND nurture their network, so they have access to loads of great potential candidates for the job at any given moment.

Because nurturing our network is so important, we have broader reach and a more engaged audience who are ready to hear about opportunities from us when the right one comes along. Plus we have access to handy tools that make doing our jobs much easier and more efficient.

You might be thinking, “But why go through all that trouble when you can just wait for people to apply for the job?”

Ahhh! You see, a majority of the jobs we ‘fill’ aren’t accepted by people who applied to the ol’ job ad. To get the best of the best, oftentimes you’ve got to go looking.

As a hiring manager running your own recruitment process, finding people one-by-one on Linkedin, waiting for them to accept your connection request, crafting bespoke messages, and crossing your fingers for a reply takes much longer.

Specialty knowledge

Since the purpose of this blog post is about hiring a role you aren’t familiar with, we’d be remiss to not mention the value of specialty recruitment.

You might be wondering if you should just hire an internal recruiter to manage your hiring needs instead of outsourcing. And if you are – congrats!

Sounds like there are exciting things happening in your business! Internal recruiters are incredibly valuable for scaling businesses, so it’d be great to identify whether you’re ready for that step or not.

However, the skill set of internal recruiters lends itself more to the breadth of knowledge in the recruitment space, rather than the depth. For niche, specialised, and ‘unicorn’ roles, an external (agency) recruiter who has years of experience in that particular space is best equipped to find you the person you’re looking for.

External recruiters, or as we like to call them, specialised recruiters, spend years getting to know the ‘patch’ they operate in.

Our team at affix often gets feedback from software engineers about how amazed they are at our level of engineering knowledge – to the point where they can sometimes mistake us for engineers based on the questions we ask!

Save time (and headaches)

With the level of experience recruiters have in running thorough recruitment processes in a timely and efficient manner, it’s no wonder why hiring managers who have plenty else to do choose to outsource.

The truth is, a great recruitment process is time consuming.

In a quick breath, it includes: gathering and understanding the role requirements, writing a PD (position description) and other collateral, advertising and promoting the role, finding and connecting with candidates, interviewing, scheduling, conducting/arranging technical tests and presentations, reference checking and so much more.

Doing it all yourself takes you away from the important work you could be focussing on for your business.

If you have the resources available to you (or want the full perks of hiring with a recruiter without the full up front cost), then outsourcing your recruitment might be worth considering!

Tip No. 3: Trust your gut

Nobody knows your business better than you, so trusting your gut instincts about what your business needs is something that can’t be replaced by any level of experience or knowledge.

No one knows your business better than you

Having others help in the recruitment process will undoubtedly add a lot of value and bring some nuance to the equation, but it’s important to remember that you still have a starring role in the whole thing.

As a recruiter, it’s my job to answer most questions thrown my way by candidates. But when it comes to answering questions about the company, its culture, vision and plans – who better to speak about it all than you?!

Hiring a role you aren’t familiar with can be overwhelming. Assessing for a skill you don’t understand can be confusing.
But both you and I know that hiring the right human for the job goes far beyond skills and experience. None of it matters if you aren’t also assessing how the candidate could be a great culture add to your team.

Leverage your lack of knowledge

If you choose to handle the entire recruitment process on your own, assessing the technical or niche aspects of a role can become pretty difficult.

If leveraging your connections at this stage isn’t an option, you can still use your lack of knowledge to your advantage. Hear me out…

While you may not get this part 100% accurately, don’t underestimate your ability to assess when someone is talking bullsh!t. There’s a fine line of course, knowing that what you may interpret as lack of confidence in a skill or overinflated accomplishments might actually be the way someone manifests nervousness.

But if something doesn’t quite seem to add up, consider it a thread worth pulling on.

Leverage your lack of knowledge by being honest with them about your unfamiliarity in that space and asking questions.

Feel like they’re trying to pack in all the jargon and buzzwords into a sentence? Ask them to explain it to you and see how well they do. Are they talking up their achievements? Ask them to tell you ‘the how’ or ‘the why’ behind their decision-making process.

You’d be surprised what you learn from simply asking questions!

Deciding to get outside help?

That’s awesome! But this is also another opportunity to listen to your gut, along with the logic of what makes a great recruitment partner.

It’s important for you to find a recruitment business you can trust, that understands your needs, is aligned to your goals, and genuinely cares about the success of your business.

There are many ways to assess a great recruitment partner, but to start, you can look at their past clients.

Are they similar in size to your business, or in a similar sector? Do they have any reviews or testimonials to find out why people like working with them? Do their pricing model, their values, and their recruitment process match with the way you roll?

Like in any other business partnership or collaboration, having mutual respect and understanding for the roles each other plays is crucial to a successful hiring process.

So trust your gut about the folks you’re meeting and considering to grow your business. The cost of a bad hire is up to 30% of that hire’s salary (yikes!), so ensuring you find the right recruitment partner is essential to your success in hiring a niche role.

Final thoughts

Hiring a role that’s new for you and your business is no mean feat, but if you consider the points above, you’ll find it much more manageable. And dare I say? Perhaps even enjoyable!

Understand your needs and constraints so you can develop a clear plan forward. Do research about the role you’re hiring so your plan is well-informed. Figure out who can help as part of the hiring process and work that into your plan as well.

Whether you’re going it alone, or decide to bring in external expertise, you still have an important role to play in the success of your recruitment.

Being prepared will help you feel confident in yourself, the process, and most importantly, the new human you get to call a teammate!

If you’re about to embark on this journey yourself – you’ve got this.