Three questions decide it, and all three are about the role and the business you are hiring into. What goes wrong if this person gives confident advice that turns out to be wrong, where in the process does the sale actually get decided, and can you close the gaps this person arrives with in the time you have?
Answer those three and you will know whether exact product experience is a requirement or a preference for the seat in front of you. Treat it as a requirement when it is only a preference and you narrow the shortlist without reducing a named risk. Treat it as a preference when it is genuinely a requirement and the seat carries a gap nobody has planned to close.
A specification seat and a trade counter seat give different answers. The ranking moves with the role and with what the employer can supply.
What actually makes exact experience non-negotiable?
Three tests decide it: consequence of error, where the sale is decided, and what the employer can supply while the person learns. None of them is settled on its own.
Consequence of error is the first test. If wrong advice ends in a safety, fire or compliance failure, a waterproofing or structural problem, a warranty position or a specification that carries through to construction, product and system depth is a requirement. Say so in the brief and hold it.
Where the sale is decided is the second, and it is the one I spend most of a briefing conversation on. It is easy to picture the sale happening with the builder or the contractor. In categories that sell through projects, the decision that matters can be made well before purchase, at specification, with an engineer or an architect who will never issue a purchase order.
Be careful about what that second test proves. It tells you the person needs credibility with those customers, at that stage. Whether they need your exact product is a separate question. Someone from an adjacent category can arrive with the engineer relationships and the specification habits intact, and only the product to learn.
What you can supply is the third test, and it carries the same weight as the other two. Who trains this person on the range. Who signs off that they are competent to advise unsupervised. How many months of ramp the area can absorb before it has to produce. A gap is only learnable if someone internally has the time and the standing to close it.
That third test moves the answer in both directions. Take a high-consequence specification seat where a candidate has already worked with the same engineers at the same stage on an adjacent performance-critical system. Both risk tests point high. Where the employer has qualified technical support, a real training programme and a rule that nobody gives solo advice until they are signed off, the exact product can still be learned safely.
Here is one from my own work where the second and third tests did the deciding. I ran a sales search for a construction chemicals business with no sales team on the ground here yet. Nothing about the brief was a compliance problem. What made it narrow was that the product sold through civil and infrastructure projects, where the decision sits early and with engineers. There was no internal network to lean on and no runway to build those relationships from zero.
So the gap the business had no way to close was the relationships, and I held that requirement. I will strip softer criteria to widen a search. That one stayed.
What does holding the line actually cost?
A very short list, and you should go in knowing that. For example, on one search in a genuinely niche segment the realistic pool in the country was a list I could read out in a breath, and the honest answer to "can we see more options" was that there were not more options. That is one segment I have worked in rather than a figure you should carry across to yours.
The second cost is less obvious. In searches like this, the client is asking me for a finished candidate who is known in the segment and settled where they are, on a package their current employer has every reason to protect. A finished candidate is, by definition, not looking.
The requirement still stands. Decide before the search whether you are hiring the finished article or building one.
Which kinds of overlap actually reduce risk?
Four, and they do different jobs, which is why "industry experience" as a single criterion tells you almost nothing.
Product and system overlap. Materials, systems, performance requirements and how the thing fails. Weighted heaviest where consequence of error is high.
Customer overlap. Do they already know the people who decide. A rep who has sold a different product to the same architects, engineers, builders or merchants brings the relationships and the buying rhythm with them.
Channel and stage overlap. Specification, project, merchant and distributor, and direct-to-trade are different jobs. Someone who has run a specification pipeline understands influence with no purchase order at the end of the meeting. That is a harder thing to learn than a product range.
Sales process overlap. Cycle length, how many people have to say yes, whether they have held a long lead through two quarters with nothing closing.
Score them separately. A candidate with strong customer and channel overlap and a product gap is a completely different proposition from one with product knowledge and no route-to-market experience, and on paper both read as a partial match.
This is also why we map the market by segment rather than only by product. Two companies making different things can be selling into the same projects, to the same people, at the same stage, and someone moving between them is barely changing job. Two companies making similar things can be selling at opposite ends of the process, and someone moving between those is changing job completely.
How do the three tests play out across real seats?
The same candidate is a sensible hire in one row and a real risk in another. Work down the columns for the seat you are filling.
| Consequence of error | Where the sale is decided | Technical depth needed | Learning window you have to fund | What the employer has to supply to close the gap | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Specification manager, performance-critical systems | High. Reaches construction, carries warranty and compliance exposure | Early. Engineers, certifiers, specifiers | High. Must be credible in a technical room | Long. Set by system complexity | Technical support, product training with an assessment, a senior technical contact, patience through a project cycle |
| A&D and interiors specification | Medium. Commercial and reputational | Early. Architects and designers, including at concept stage | Medium | Medium | Samples and library support, introductions, presentation material |
| Civil and infrastructure, structural or engineered product | High. Performance and liability | Early. Engineer-led, long lead | High. Engineering literacy is the job | Long | Formal technical onboarding, competence sign-off, no solo advisory calls until signed off |
| BDM, project and commercial | Medium. Costs an order or a margin | Middle. Contractor and builder, post-specification | Medium | Medium | Estimating support, pricing authority, a named technical contact |
| Trade and distributor sales | Low to medium. Recoverable at the counter | Late. Transactional, at the point of supply | Low to medium | Short to medium | Area data, rebate and pricing clarity, joint calls early |
| Sales leadership | Medium and indirect. Shows up in the team's decisions | Varies. Governs rather than sells | Medium. Enough to govern, not to advise | Medium | A capable technical function underneath, a clear escalation path |
The first two columns are the risk tests. The last two are the third test, and a row only resolves when you read all of them together. The same row is a different decision in a business with a technical function and a training programme than in a business with neither.
Two limits worth stating. The table does not produce a score, and it does not describe what Australian employers generally do. It sets out the questions I work through before a brief goes out.
Never design a role that expects an unqualified person to give technical, compliance or safety advice. If the matrix pushes you towards a candidate who cannot yet do that, build the support structure and put a competence gate in front of them before they start.
Where does an adjacent hire work well?
Where the customers, the stage and the sales cycle carry over, only the product has to be learned, and the employer has someone who can teach it.
In the moves I see, A&D is the clearest case. Candidates can carry the same architects, designers, project stages and sales habits into an adjacent product. What changes is the product, and that sits inside a job they already know how to do.
One nuance if you are hiring there. Some candidates want to broaden across the A&D range, and some have worked out that staying deep in one area compounds and will not move for breadth. The second group needs a different pitch.
Move that same logic to civil and infrastructure with a structural product and it stops holding. There the technical bar and the engineer relationships are the job itself.
On how these hires turn out, I have no counted set to quote, so I am not going to give you a retention rate or a risk comparison. What I will give you is what I check before backing one: that the customers, the stage and the cycle genuinely carry over, and that the employer has named who closes the product gap and how long they have to do it.
How do you decide?
Work the three tests in order, then use the four overlaps to name the gap you are actually being asked to carry.
- Name the consequence of error if this person gives confident advice that turns out to be wrong.
- Name where in the process the sale gets decided, and who has to find this person credible at that point.
- Name what you can supply. Who trains them, who signs off that they are competent to advise unsupervised, and how many months the area can go before it has to produce.
- From those three, mark what is genuinely non-negotiable. Everything else is a preference and should be described as one.
- Work through the four overlaps one at a time. Each is a separate question with a separate answer.
- Ask for evidence of learning a technical product before: what they learned from scratch, how, how long before they were trusted unsupported, and who decided they were ready.
- Price the learning plan, and write it down before the offer rather than after. If nobody internally has the time or standing to close the gap, that changes who you hire. The hiring scorecard is where to hold it alongside your interview criteria, and what that plan should contain is the next question after that.
- Decide, and expect a short list if the answer was genuinely non-negotiable.
Widen the brief where the risk profile and your capacity to train both allow it. Hold it where either one does not.
If you want a read on where a specific brief sits, talk through the brief with me. The candidate side of the same question is on the paired page.