What is a lateral hire, and when does it work?

The three terms get used interchangeably, and that goes wrong more often than you would expect. They do not differ in technique but in what you are actually buying.

Sourcing is a way of approaching people. You find those who are not applying and speak to them directly, whatever their level or background. That could be a graduate, a career changer or a lateral hire. Sourcing describes the route rather than the profile, and what that route involves is set out on active sourcing.

Executive search sits a layer above. It concerns a small number of candidates for a role carrying final responsibility, with its own process and a long lead time. Hiring at board and management level is a discipline of its own, described on management and executives.

A lateral hire falls into neither category. It is a choice of profile: you decide you want someone who already knows the trade and therefore does not need a year of running-in. Usually that person comes from a competitor, or from an organisation doing similar work in a different sector. The term comes out of law firms and consultancies, where a partner moves across with their own client files, but the behaviour shows up anywhere the field is small and everyone knows everyone.

It works when time is the real constraint. There is work that has to be done now, nobody available can take it on, and training somebody takes longer than you have. Then someone with exactly that experience is the shortest path, and it is reasonable to put more effort and more budget into it than into an ordinary vacancy.

It also works when you want to fill a blind spot. Someone who learned the trade elsewhere brings in a way of working your team has never seen. That is often the real return, more so than the speed.

Now the other side, which rarely gets written down. In a small field, everybody is everybody else's candidate. If you take someone from the firm you are already losing people to, you move the shortage around instead of solving it, and in a year it comes back to you. That is not a moral objection, it is arithmetic.

Two other things go wrong structurally. First, someone who already knows the trade arrives with expectations about how it ought to be done. If those do not match how your organisation works, they leave again, and you have paid for one vacancy twice. Second, if the reason nobody applies is not scarcity but the role itself, an experienced candidate solves nothing. They can read that role better than anyone. For telling those two apart, hard-to-fill vacancies is the place to start.

In short: choose a lateral hire when you are buying speed, and not when you are trying to hire your way out of a problem in the work.

Is a lateral hire the same as a career changer?

No, though the confusion is understandable. A career changer moves in from a different field and still has to learn the trade. A lateral hire already has the trade and is only changing employer. English uses "lateral" for the sideways move in level, not for the sideways move in subject. We keep the two apart, because the approach, the lead time and the risk are all different.

When would you rather hire for potential?

When you have more than one seat to fill in the same kind of work, and when there is somebody able to train a newcomer. Then you are building supply rather than moving it around, which for a structural need is almost always the wiser track. Go for experience only when time is the bottleneck, or when there is genuinely nobody who can guide a new colleague.

How do you stop a lateral hire leaving within a year?

By being honest in the conversation about the differences rather than the similarities. Someone arriving from a comparable organisation fills in the blanks themselves, and that picture is almost never quite right. Name what is different: the size of the caseload, the freedom, who decides. Anyone who hears that beforehand is not surprised later, and surprise is the main reason for an early exit.

The terms in this piece also appear in our glossary, alongside the other words that get used interchangeably in recruitment. If you are unsure whether your vacancy calls for experience or for potential, SocialFind is happy to think it through with you. If you would like articles like this in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.