In follow-up to my tweet earlier today in response to an article on AdAge, I wanted to write a bit more about an issue that has driven me crazy for a long time…the institutional belief that the ideal job candidate is one that has spent the vast majority of his or her career working in the same category as the position they are being recruited to fill. The presumptive logic behind this thinking: category experience breeds category expertise. And who doesn’t want to hire a category expert?
Well, me for one. Or anyone else who craves creativity. Dictionary.com defines creativity as “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.” So who’s in a better position to be creative, someone who has lived by category conventions their entire career or someone who isn’t beholden to the “tried and true” (emphasis on tried, not true) ways of the past?
I am not in any way saying that knowledge of a category isn’t valuable. It is. But I’d much rather have someone working for me who has broad, horizontal experience across many different categories rather than deep, vertical experience in one. In my view, they are much better suited to deliver smarter, more creative thinking by applying what they’ve learned (and applied either successfully or unsuccessfully) across a variety of very unique marketing challenges.
I’ll fall back on category expertise when I hire a plumber or a mechanic. But not a marketer.
Northampton Consulting 