I put forward candidates with the right skills, networks, and drive. They get passed over because they haven't sold that exact product before.
The irony? The hiring manager making the call often came from a different industry themselves.
We all talk about transferable skills and soft skills. Yet when it's time to hire, everyone wants the finished product. Reminder: nobody is the finished product.
This is my biggest frustration in building products recruitment. Tunnel vision. A fixation on exact product match that narrows the talent pool, extends the hiring timeline, and sometimes means the best candidate for the role never gets an interview.
Why tunnel vision happens
I understand the logic. Hiring managers default to exact product experience for practical reasons.
Ease. Someone who's sold your product category before needs less hand-holding. They can talk to customers from day one. The ramp-up is shorter.
Reduced training. You don't need to teach them the product, the applications, or the compliance landscape. They already know it.
Proven track record in your market. They've done the job before, in the same sector, with the same type of customer. The risk feels lower.
These are reasonable considerations. But they come with a trade-off that most hiring managers don't fully account for: a dramatically smaller talent pool.
If you're hiring a BDM to sell cladding to architects in Melbourne and you'll only consider candidates who've sold cladding to architects in Melbourne, you might be looking at a handful of people. And those people know they're in demand. They'll cost more. They'll take longer to attract. And they may not be the best salesperson available. They're just the closest product match.
What you should be looking for instead
The question isn't "have they sold this exact product?" It's "how well aligned is their experience, and can they close the gaps?"
Sales ability and drive. Can they hunt? Can they open doors? Can they build a territory? A proven track record of revenue growth matters more than which product generated that revenue. You want someone who creates business, not just manages it.
Market alignment. Have they sold to the same type of customer? A candidate who's spent five years doing specification sales to architects, even if it was a different product category, understands the specification process, the long cycles, and how design professionals make decisions. That transfers directly.
Channel alignment. Have they worked in the same route to market? Specification, project, distribution, direct. The mechanics of selling through a particular channel are transferable across product categories.
Attitude and adaptability. Resilience, tenacity, curiosity, and the willingness to learn. These traits predict success more reliably than product knowledge. Product knowledge can be taught. Drive can't.
Relevant background. Trade experience. Construction knowledge. Interior design or architectural understanding. A former electrician who moved into sales brings credibility with builders and contractors that no amount of product training can replicate. Someone with a design background selling into the A&D channel speaks the customer's language natively.
The best hires I've seen combine strong sales fundamentals with enough alignment to bridge the gap quickly. They might not know your product catalogue. But they know your customer, your market, or your sales process. And they've got the drive to learn the rest.
The risk of only hiring from within
When you only recruit from your own sector, you create several problems.
The talent pool shrinks. Building products in Australia is a finite market. The number of candidates with exact experience in your product category, in your geography, at the right career stage, is small. The longer you hold out for a perfect match, the longer the role stays vacant. And as covered in Topic 4 of this series, vacant territories are expensive.
You get the same thinking. Hiring from within the sector means hiring people who've been trained by your competitors. They bring the same approaches, the same assumptions, and sometimes the same bad habits. A candidate from an adjacent industry can bring fresh perspectives and different ways of solving problems.
You miss exceptional people. I've worked with a sales manager recently who was hired from outside the building products industry. Normally that would ring alarm bells. But they're absolutely smashing it. They brought strong sales fundamentals, adapted quickly, and the fresh perspective has been an asset rather than a liability.
These examples aren't the norm. But they happen often enough that dismissing everyone without exact experience is a mistake.
When product experience genuinely matters
I'm not arguing that product knowledge is irrelevant. For some roles, it's essential.
Highly technical products. Structural systems, fire protection, waterproofing admixtures, engineered solutions. Anything where you're dealing with architects or engineers on compliance-critical specifications. You can't walk into that conversation without deep product knowledge, and in some cases, you need qualifications to back it up.
Complex specification roles. Where the sales process involves detailed technical documentation, testing data, compliance certification, and engineering input. The learning curve for someone without a relevant technical background is too steep and too risky.
Safety-critical products. Anything where getting the specification wrong has structural, fire, or safety implications. The margin for error is zero, and the product knowledge required is non-negotiable.
For these roles, insisting on product experience or closely aligned technical knowledge is justified. The risk of placing someone who doesn't have the technical depth is too high for both the business and their customers.
But for the majority of building products sales roles, BDMs, account managers, and specification managers selling standard building materials through established channels, the product knowledge can be learned. What can't be learned is the ability to sell.
What "well aligned" actually means
When I brief a role, the experience requirement is usually framed around alignment rather than exact match. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Technically aligned products. Products in the same category or with similar applications. Selling plasterboard and moving to insulation. Selling tiles and moving to stone surfaces. Selling external cladding and moving to facades. The product knowledge isn't identical, but the application context, the customer base, and the technical landscape overlap significantly.
Market segment alignment. Proven ability to deal with a specific sector and its key stakeholders. If you've sold anything to commercial builders across major metro markets, you understand the dynamics of that buyer group regardless of the product. The customer knowledge transfers.
Route to market alignment. Experience in the same sales channel. A candidate who's done specification sales in lighting moving to specification sales in acoustic products. The product is different. The sales process is almost identical.
The closer the alignment across product, market, and channel, the lower the risk. But it doesn't need to be a perfect match in all three. Strong alignment in two out of three, combined with proven sales ability, is usually enough.
The conversation I have with hiring managers
When a client rejects a candidate purely on product experience, I push back. Respectfully. But directly.
"This candidate has a strong track record, five years of specification sales experience, and relationships with the architecture firms you're targeting. The product gap is real, but it's learnable in three to six months. The sales skills, the relationships, and the drive are already there. Are you sure you want to pass?"
Sometimes they reconsider. Sometimes they don't. But the question is always the same: are you hiring for what someone already knows, or for what they're capable of delivering?
The best hires are usually a combination of both. But when forced to choose, capability wins.
Quick checklist for hiring managers
- Define what "well aligned" means for your role. Product, market, channel, technical. How close does the match need to be?
- Separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. Exact product experience might be preferred but not essential.
- Prioritise sales ability and drive. Track record of revenue growth, territory building, and account development transfers across products.
- Consider adjacent industries. HVAC, electrical, plumbing, civil, interior design. Strong candidates come from outside your exact sector.
- Reserve the "must have product experience" requirement for genuinely technical or safety-critical roles.
- Challenge tunnel vision. If you're rejecting candidates purely on product match, ask whether you're narrowing your talent pool unnecessarily.
- Remember: product knowledge can be taught. Sales ability, drive, and relationships can't.