No one keeps a job for life anymore. Looking for brilliance outside a specific niche opens your business up to the best people out there.
At Atom.com, we’ve recently expanded our team. We were specific about what we wanted, and we now have a team that works extremely well together. In the last year, we’ve rebranded, launched new products, and grown the business substantially. The secret? Hiring outside of the niche domain-sales industry.
When we recruited across marketing, UX, product, sales, and partnerships, we looked for candidates with experience in their own area, but not necessarily our industry. The end result is that 90% of our team comes from outside the domain world, enabling us to build a culture of fearless curiosity that normalizes using a data-driven mindset to challenge what’s ‘always been done’.
Rethinking Norms Within a Niche Industry
Outside talent brings fresh perspectives, which can be particularly important in niche industries where everyone is steeped in the same culture. Outside hires can bring unique perspectives to old problems and practices, asking ‘why do we do it like this?’, instead of taking the received wisdom of, ‘it’s always been like this’.
While the domain industry is growing at a rapid pace, it’s fair to say it remains relatively small in terms of committed domain-sales professionals. While such an industry requires insider insight, it’s also rife for innovation and outside hires can be integral to this process. At Atom, we’ve integrated AI into a series of revolutionary tools for our users, and the fresh perspectives of our diverse team have allowed us to think up cutting-edge solutions to long-standing industry problems, such as valuing domain names.
Impact on Team Culture
Team culture is so important to productivity that any recruitment process must consider candidates based on their impact on the team. Outside-industry hires can make particularly strong additions culturally: they are inherently curious and eager to learn and can contribute to a culture of continued knowledge-seeking that brings out the best in everyone, and they don’t come with any of the baggage of someone in the industry – and this makes everyone re-examine that baggage. Is an industry issue from a decade ago still an issue, or could new tech or a new eye on product solve it? There’s only one way to find out!
When your team is made up of individuals with diverse professional backgrounds, this disparate experience can be a bonding tool. There are no more stupid questions and an open, supportive, and curious culture evolves. How many times have you found you understand something better after explaining it to someone? That’s the exact mechanism at work here.
Additionally, if a candidate has a history of moving into new industries you can expect them to have an adaptability that lets them take on new challenges daily with enthusiasm. This is great for small, agile startups where everyone has to get their hands dirty.
Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber
While outside-industry hires might lack some knowledge about how you do things, they’re also free from industry assumptions and biases. These new perspectives can allow innovative solutions to sticky industry problems and present creative, cross-disciplinary integrations that can improve how you do business.
In app design, gamification is proving the value of cross-industry thinking. Gamification has expanded from apps like Duolingo, which gamified learning languages, and is now firmly established in fintech and banking apps, driving user engagement with traditionally stuffy products. Out-of-the-box thinking is often inspired by outside hires with uncompromised new perspectives on traditional practices.
The Value of Diversity
In many industries, a fixed policy on industry experience for new hires will narrow your pool of potential recruits and hamstring diversity policies and initiatives.
This isn’t just bad from the perspective of public relations or HR box-checking exercises — there’s strong evidence that shows the benefits of diversity in organizations, and many of these affect the bottom line. In 2022, the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Global Market Report found that diverse companies earn 2.5x higher cash flow per employee and that inclusive teams are over a third more productive. McKinsey’s Diversity Matters Report found that diversity in both gender and ethnicity leads to better financial outcomes for businesses.
Understanding the Customer Mindset
Understanding the customer is crucial in creating a strong product and positive buying experience, so when you’re looking to improve, hiring someone from the other side of the transaction can bring valuable experience. This is particularly true in some B2B industries where the complexity of your customers’ needs can be hard to grasp. Sure, you can send out endless surveys to analyze pain points, but if you’re expanding your team consider the benefits of first-hand experience and a genuine POV into the customer mindset.
In the domain industry, we have two sets of customers in parallel. First are our domain investors, who we serve by understanding the domain industry. Our second set of customers, however, are domain end-users. Often, these are startups and small business owners looking for a powerful brand platform. Our outside-industry hires come from various backgrounds and often provide insight into new products from the angle of the industries they’ve been a part of, allowing us to ‘think like the customer’ despite our broad customer base.
Wrapping Up / Foster the Culture You Need to Succeed
In small industries like ours, you can’t assume the talent you need to succeed can be found on the inside. Instead, hiring fast learners with the right broad skills can energize your team, provide fresh perspectives, and breed a creative and curious team culture.
Our international team is spread across the United States, India, Europe, Philippines, and Mexico, with the core HQ team based in Chicago. We have a range of perspectives as broad as our expertise. Our outside hires have been integral in building a mindset that challenges conventional approaches, applies fresh thinking, and strives for growth and innovation beyond industry norms. For a fast-growing startup, it’s a recipe for success.
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