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What if the candidate whose resume looks “wrong” is actually the person your organisation needs most?
It’s a question that came up repeatedly during my recent HRchat conversation with István Szabó. His own career makes him an interesting person with whom to explore it. István has served in the French Foreign Legion, worked in security and hands-on technical roles, studied for a degree while pulling cables, managed major infrastructure projects and eventually progressed to become a divisional director responsible for 60 people. He has led a major post-merger integration, conducted more than 300 interviews, developed hiring and onboarding processes, implemented an ERP system and, more recently, moved into AI and automation consulting.
It isn’t the kind of career journey that fits neatly onto the conventional corporate ladder, and that’s precisely the point. István describes himself as a “black sheep”: someone who doesn’t necessarily look or think like everybody else in the room. His experiences raise an important question for HR and Talent leaders about whether our recruitment processes are genuinely designed to identify potential, or whether they are often better at identifying people whose careers already resemble our expectations.
The problem with the obvious candidate
Recruitment inevitably involves filtering. An organisation might receive hundreds of applications for a role, and hiring teams need ways to reduce that number to something manageable. Experience, qualifications, previous employers, job titles and length of service all provide useful signals, but they can also encourage us to favour familiar-looking careers.
Someone who has already performed almost exactly the same job in almost exactly the same environment feels like a relatively safe hire. Someone who has moved between countries, industries and professions requires more interpretation. The hiring manager needs to understand how experience gained somewhere else might transfer into the role they’re trying to fill.
That extra effort can be worthwhile. Unconventional candidates may bring perspectives, skills and experiences that a more predictable career path cannot provide. Someone who has repeatedly had to adapt to new industries, organisations or countries, for example, may have developed resilience, curiosity and problem-solving abilities that don’t appear as obvious keywords on a resume.
The challenge isn’t to hire unconventional candidates simply because they are unconventional. It is to make sure the recruitment process gives them a fair opportunity to demonstrate what they could contribute.
When the hiring system becomes part of the problem
One of the most interesting parts of my conversation with István came from his experience of conducting more than 300 interviews. Hiring managers often talk about finding better candidates, but sometimes the more useful question is whether the hiring system itself needs improving.
Speed is a good example. Businesses understandably want vacancies filled quickly, particularly when teams are stretched and managers are under pressure to deliver. Yet pushing candidates through the process as quickly as possible can create problems later. A vacancy filled in record time isn’t much of a success if the person leaves during probation because expectations, working styles or the realities of the role were never properly explored.
This is where hiring and onboarding need to be considered as parts of the same process. Selecting someone is only the beginning. Organisations also need to think about how people are introduced to the business, how expectations are communicated, how managers build relationships with new employees and how quickly someone can understand the culture in which they are expected to operate.
Those things become particularly important when hiring someone who doesn’t fit the usual mould. If you deliberately bring different perspectives into an organisation but then expect those people to immediately behave, communicate and think exactly like everybody else, you’ve missed much of the value of hiring them in the first place.
Culture fit or culture add?
The idea of “culture fit” has been a feature of recruitment conversations for years. There is some logic behind it. Employers need people who can work effectively with colleagues and operate within the values and expectations of the organisation.
The danger comes when culture fit becomes shorthand for familiarity.
Does this person communicate like us? Did they attend the kinds of institutions we recognise? Have they worked for organisations similar to ours? Would we enjoy having a drink with them after work? None of these questions necessarily tells us whether someone will perform well, and collectively they can create remarkably homogeneous teams.
Thinking about “culture add” provides a useful counterweight. Instead of asking only whether someone will fit into the existing organisation, we can ask what they might bring that isn’t already there. Different professional backgrounds, industries, cultures and life experiences can introduce new ways of solving problems and challenging assumptions.
That doesn’t mean integration takes care of itself. Leaders need to create environments in which disagreement is possible without becoming destructive and where people who communicate differently can still build trust. Transparency and clear expectations become especially important when a team contains people whose assumptions about leadership and workplace behaviour have been shaped by very different experiences.
The international experience problem
István’s career has taken him through Hungary, Canada and Ireland, and our conversation also touched on a frustration familiar to many people who have built careers internationally: the requirement for “local experience.”
There are circumstances where knowledge of a particular market, regulatory environment or customer base genuinely matters. But local experience can also become another convenient filter that prevents employers from properly assessing transferable skills. Someone can arrive in a new country with years of leadership experience, technical knowledge and professional qualifications only to discover that employers place disproportionate weight on whether those achievements happened locally.
From an organisational perspective, that risks overlooking valuable talent. Someone who has successfully rebuilt a career in another country has already demonstrated an ability to learn, adapt and operate outside their comfort zone. Those qualities should at least be part of the assessment rather than being overshadowed by a missing line of local employment history.
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