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Most hiring processes start with a job title.
Head of Sales. Customer Success Manager. Curriculum Lead. Partnerships Director. Implementation Manager.
That makes sense on the surface. Job titles help organise hiring, define salary bands, and make roles easier to advertise. But in specialist sectors like edtech and education, the job title is often not enough.
The same title can mean very different things depending on the company, product, customer, buyer, market and stage of growth.
A Customer Success Manager in a generic SaaS business may focus on adoption, renewals and account health. A Customer Success Manager in edtech may also need to train teachers, support school leaders, navigate academic calendars, understand learner outcomes, manage implementation barriers and keep multiple stakeholders engaged.
Same title. Different problem.
That is where generalist and specialist recruitment start to separate.
Job titles can help create a starting point, but they are not always a reliable guide to capability or fit.
Research into skills based hiring has grown because employers are increasingly aware that job history and formal titles do not always show whether someone can do the work. LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 report highlights skills based hiring as a growing priority, with employers looking beyond degrees and job history to close skills gaps.
LinkedIn’s Economic Graph research also found that a skills based approach could expand global talent pools by 6.1 times compared with traditional talent pools based on previous occupation.
That is important for education and edtech hiring because relevant talent does not always sit under the obvious title.
A strong implementation candidate may have come from teaching, training, learning design, customer success or operations. A strong partnerships candidate may have come from higher education, employability, international recruitment or public sector engagement. A strong commercial hire may have sold into complex regulated markets without ever having held an edtech title.
If the search starts and ends with the job title, those people can be missed.
A specialist recruiter looks at the role differently.
Instead of starting with “we need a Head of Sales”, the better question is: what problem does this hire need to solve?
Does the business need someone to open the UK higher education market? Does it need someone to improve school adoption after sale? Does it need someone who can turn educator insight into product decisions? Does it need someone who already understands procurement in universities? Does it need someone who can move a product from pilot to paid contract?
Those questions change the search.
They change the talent pool. They change the screening criteria. They change how you assess evidence. They also change how you position the role to candidates.
This is especially important in edtech because many roles sit between functions. A customer success role might include training, onboarding, retention, relationship management, data analysis and education consultancy. A partnerships role might include sales, stakeholder engagement, sector credibility and market development. A curriculum role might include pedagogy, product thinking, assessment, content quality and learning outcomes.
A generalist search may look for the closest title match.
A specialist search looks for the person who has solved the closest version of the problem.
Education and edtech are not simple markets.
Buying decisions often involve multiple stakeholders, longer timelines and trust based relationships. Higher education sales, for example, can involve procurement processes, academic calendars and committee based decisions over long sales cycles.
Education technology procurement also requires early stakeholder engagement across IT, faculty, administrators and student services so the solution works across the institution, not just for one buyer.
This context matters when hiring.
Someone may have strong SaaS experience, but if they have never worked with education buyers, they may underestimate the complexity of the decision making process. They may expect speed where patience is needed. They may push for a close when the buyer still needs internal consensus. They may sell the product well but miss the adoption barriers that appear after purchase.
That does not mean out of sector candidates cannot succeed. Many can.
But it does mean the hiring process needs to identify which parts of the role depend on sector fluency, and which parts can be learned.
That is not a job title question. It is a problem definition question.
In specialist sectors, the strongest candidates are not always the easiest to search for.
Some candidates have the right experience but do not use the right language. This is common with people moving from education, higher education or public sector roles into edtech. They may have strong stakeholder management, training, implementation or curriculum experience, but their CV may not frame it commercially.
Other candidates may have impressive titles but limited relevance. They may look strong on paper but lack the sector judgement needed for the role.
This is why relying only on keywords can be risky.
Keywords help. LinkedIn Recruiter, ATS systems and Boolean searches all need search terms. But keywords do not explain depth. A CV may include “higher education”, “stakeholder management” or “customer success” without showing whether the person has owned the right outcomes.
Specialist recruitment reads for context. Who did they work with? What kind of buyer did they manage? What problem did they solve? What changed because of their work? How similar was their environment to yours?
That is where the real screening happens.
Skills based hiring is useful because it moves hiring away from narrow title matching. Harvard Business Review has argued that focusing on skills can increase talent pools and help employers find quality applicants for hard to fill roles.
But skills based hiring only works if the skills are defined properly.
“Communication” is too broad.
“Stakeholder management” is better, but still vague.
“Managing senior stakeholders across universities during a long sales or implementation cycle” is much clearer.
“Sales experience” is broad.
“Selling a complex product into schools, universities, healthcare, public sector or regulated markets with multiple decision makers” is more useful.
“Curriculum experience” is broad.
“Designing curriculum or learning content that improves adoption, engagement or outcomes in a digital learning environment” is more relevant.
Specialist recruitment adds precision. It helps employers move from generic skills to role specific evidence.
A poor hire in a specialist role is not only frustrating. It is expensive.
The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has previously calculated that a poor hire at mid management level on a £42,000 salary could cost around £132,000 when recruitment, training and lost productivity are included.
The numbers vary depending on role and sector, but the principle is clear. Hiring the wrong person costs more than the recruitment fee.
For edtech companies, the hidden cost can be even bigger.
A wrong sales hire may lose momentum in a new market. A wrong customer success hire may affect renewals. A wrong curriculum hire may weaken product credibility. A wrong partnerships hire may damage relationships that took years to build.
This is why hiring by title alone is risky.
The question is not only “has this person done a similar job?”
The better question is “has this person solved a similar problem in a similar context?”
Generalist recruitment can work well when the role is broad, the talent pool is large, and the skills are easy to compare.
Specialist recruitment is different because it deals with context, judgement and market nuance.
A generalist recruiter may search for job titles and match obvious experience.
A specialist recruiter looks at the buyer, the product, the market, the user, the sales cycle, the delivery model and the business problem behind the role.
For an edtech founder, this matters because hiring is often linked directly to growth. You may need someone who can open doors, build credibility and understand the customer quickly.
For a university leader, this matters because roles often involve institutional complexity, influence and trust. You may need someone who can work across academic teams, professional services, external partners and senior leadership without getting stuck.
In both cases, the title alone tells you very little.
The context tells you much more.
Before starting a search, hiring managers should spend more time defining the problem behind the role.
What does this person need to improve, build, fix or unlock? Which parts of the role need sector knowledge from day one? Which skills are essential, and which can be developed? Which backgrounds could produce the right experience, even if the titles differ?
This is where specialist recruitment can add value early.
Not just by sending candidates, but by shaping the brief.
A strong specialist recruiter will challenge assumptions. They may tell you the title is wrong, the salary is misaligned, the talent pool is too narrow, or the strongest candidates are sitting in adjacent sectors.
That is not slowing the process down.
That is making the process more accurate.
