A narrow view of relevant experience,  too much emphases on specialist knowledge and failure to recognise transferable skills could be ruling out  some otherwise very strong and interesting candidates.

The advantage of appointing such people is they are highly motivated and have a track record of employment so you know what your getting in terms of whether they are a team player , reliable and able to use their initiative. However to attract these individuals , who may not have thought of this area of work as an option,  the recruitment process will need to be adjusted as will the prospects of advancement and starting salary.

The biggest obstacles is the mind set of appointing managers who have a tendency to take a very narrow view of relevant experience, put too much emphases on specialist knowledge and fail to recognise transferable skills. This  is then reflected in a Person Specification that excludes rather than includes potentially strong candidates. An example of this is the failure to recognise that management skills are transferable.

As a senior manager in a large Local Authority I oversaw the recruitment process that resulted in the manager of a high street shoe shop being appointed to a management post in the Registrar’s service responsible for recording Births, Deaths and Marriages and Citizens ceremonies. At first glance these management posts may appear to have little in common and the lack of a background in the service or even in the public sector would have in traditional terms ruled this person out from applying.

Yet as the manager of a shoe shop they had experience of managing staff, they had experience of managing a budget, they had experience of managing a building and equipment and they had experience of customer services. Their interview brought out this experience in the way they answered questions about dealing with absenteeism, customer complaints, and  operating a  shift system within a staffing budget.

In other posts the transferable skills may not be so obvious but the need to keep the Person Specification as wide and inclusive as possible still applies. Mind sets need to adjust to taking on people who may be older than is usual for an entry level post and there needs to be a fast track system that allows such individual gain the specialist knowledge and experience at a pace commensurate with their ability and motivation.

Changing profession mid career will in the future be much more common as technology and the pace of change within businesses increases, so recruitment policies will need to adjust.