Most companies are still hiring for the business they already have.

They write a job description, define the function, list the required experience and then go looking for someone whose career has followed a nice, predictable path to that exact role.

Ten years in marketing. Increasing levels of seniority. Same industry experience. Familiar companies. Clear progression. This used to make sense. Today, it might be filtering out some of the most valuable people you could hire. How?

The problems businesses are facing now don't fit neatly inside the boxes on an organisational chart.

AI isn't just a technology problem. It affects operations, productivity, customer experience, marketing, product development, margins and potentially the entire business model.

Growth isn't just a sales problem. Innovation isn't something that belongs to an innovation team. Customer experience doesn't begin and end with the customer experience department.

The boundaries are disappearing, and that means the people capable of solving these problems may look different too.

The experience you're looking for might be hiding in the wrong CV

A lot of the time when hiring for key roles, candidates keep the conversation squarely on nice, narrow tracks. They want to demonstrate that they are an expert in the specific domain you're hiring for. Understandably so, that's what we've trained people to do.

Industry leading CEOs are figuring out that the most valuable experience is hiding somewhere else entirely. Take Disney for example. Disney chose Josh D'Amaro as CEO in 2026 rather than a traditional media/content executive. D'Amaro came through Disney's parks, experiences and consumer facing businesses, where he oversaw massive physical expansion, Imagineering and guest experience. His first priorities as CEO include using technology to create more immersive and personalised Disney experiences and operating more cohesively across the company. It's a good example of valuing someone who can connect brand AND consumer AND technology AND physical experience AND commercial execution, rather than simply hiring the obvious functional specialist that worked before.

The person who has worked across industries, built things, launched things, killed things and accumulated a slightly strange collection of experiences along the way can bring enormous additional value to a company.

The marketer who understands AI. The operator who has built a startup. The founder who understands enterprise. The strategist who can evaluate technology. The technologist who actually understands consumers. On paper, they might not be the obvious candidate. In practice, they might be exactly the person you need.

If you remember just one thing from this piece, remember this, range is becoming an increasingly valuable capability and pays off in more ways than one.

For decades, companies rewarded specialisation. Become exceptionally good at one thing, move through increasingly senior roles within that function and eventually run it.

There is still enormous value in deep expertise. But the environment around that expertise has changed.

Businesses are now operating through multiple transformations simultaneously. Technology is changing how work gets done. Customer expectations are moving. Distribution channels are evolving. New competitors can appear remarkably quickly. Entire categories are being reshaped by companies that didn't exist a few years ago.

That creates a different kind of leadership problem. You need people who can connect what's happening in one part of the market with what it might mean somewhere completely different.

Someone who has spent their entire career inside one category may know that category extraordinarily well. Someone who has worked across five may recognise a pattern before everyone else does.

That distinction is becoming increasingly important.

Innovation isn't in the innovation lab anymore

There was a period when innovation was something companies scheduled. An offsite. A workshop. A blue-sky session. A room full of Post-it notes and conversations about "the future." Then everyone went back to their actual jobs.

That distinction doesn't exist anymore. Innovation isn't a department, a lab or something you do on a company retreat. Innovation is the job. In many ways, it's the only job.

Every company is now being forced to rethink how it operates, what it sells, how it reaches customers, where technology creates an advantage and where the next threat might come from. The blue-sky meetings are cancelled because this isn't hypothetical anymore. It's happening in real time.

And if you get it right today, great. Tomorrow you have to figure it out again.

This is the new flywheel and it doesn't stop.

Your job as a leader isn't to predict the future perfectly. It's to build an organisation that gets it right more often than it gets it wrong and can move quickly when the signals change.

That requires people with range.

Beware the perfect CV

That's another problem with hiring too literally against a job description: you can accidentally optimise for familiarity. Same industry. Same function. Same competitors. Same way of thinking.

You hire someone because they've solved the exact problem before, only to discover that the problem itself has changed.

Experience is incredibly valuable when it gives someone judgement. It becomes less valuable when it creates assumptions about how things are supposed to work.

That's why, for certain key roles, look beyond whether someone has done the exact job before. Prep your hiring team to look at candidates through a series of new perspectives that probes these questions:

Have they entered unfamiliar environments and worked things out?

Have they built something from zero?

Have they spotted an opportunity other people missed?

Have they been wrong, changed their mind and adapted quickly?

Can they move between strategy and execution?

Can they understand technology without losing sight of the customer?

Can they connect ideas from completely different industries?

Those capabilities are much harder to capture in a job description. They may also be far more useful over the next five years than another five years of directly relevant experience.

Start interviewing for the problems you don't know about yet

This doesn't mean throwing away functional expertise or deliberately hiring people without relevant experience. It means widening the aperture.

If you're hiring someone into a key leadership position, you're not simply hiring them to solve the problems sitting on your desk today. You're hiring them for the problems your company hasn't encountered yet.

That requires a different interview.

Instead of spending the entire conversation validating whether they can do the job description, spend some of it discovering what else they can do.

The next time you're interviewing for a key role, ask two questions:

1. Tell me about something you learned in a completely different role or industry that you still use today.

2. Tell me about a problem you solved that you had absolutely no prior experience solving.

Then listen carefully.

You're looking for curiosity, pattern recognition, judgement, adaptability and the ability to transfer knowledge from one environment into another. Those are increasingly valuable capabilities in businesses where the problems themselves keep changing.

The perfect person for your next key role might not have the perfect CV. In fact, the interesting parts may be the bits you would normally overlook.