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Should an EdTech company hire SaaS talent or education talent?
Usually both.
The useful question is which capability is missing from the team right now.
EdTech businesses need to understand education and operate as businesses.
Leaning too far in either direction creates a different problem.
Experienced SaaS hires can bring repeatable commercial habits.
Pipeline management.
Forecasting.
Revenue operations.
Customer segmentation.
Renewal process.
Experimentation.
Clear metrics.
Experience moving from founder led selling to a sales team.
Those skills can be particularly useful when an EdTech company has strong customer knowledge but growth still depends on a few people doing everything manually.
Education professionals understand context that is hard to learn from a dashboard.
How schools make decisions.
Why teacher workload matters.
What implementation looks like on a busy timetable.
How language lands with educators.
Where a product creates friction.
Why one enthusiastic champion may not be enough to drive adoption.
That knowledge can improve sales, customer success, product, implementation, partnerships and leadership.
A Revenue Operations hire may need SaaS systems experience far more than classroom experience.
A school implementation leader may benefit greatly from having worked inside education.
A first Head of Sales taking a founder led motion and building a team may need strong SaaS leadership, but also enough education understanding to avoid importing the wrong playbook.
A market lead entering a new country may need deep local education knowledge because localisation is more than language.
There is no universal answer.
Some of the most useful people in EdTech can translate between worlds.
They understand what a teacher means when they say a product will not work in class.
They can also turn that insight into a product decision, commercial message or customer plan.
They understand that a school is not just a prospect.
They also understand that purpose does not remove the need for revenue discipline.
That combination is rare, but it does not always come from one career path.
Companies sometimes say they want people who get education.
That can become a vague way of hiring people with very similar backgrounds.
Be specific.
Do you need knowledge of curriculum?
School procurement?
Higher education?
Assessment?
Teacher professional development?
Public sector selling?
Customer implementation?
Once you name the knowledge, you can assess it properly instead of relying on labels.
A playbook that worked in another technology market may not fit education.
Long buying cycles, public procurement, academic calendars, data protection, multiple users and constrained budgets all affect the commercial motion.
A strong SaaS operator should be curious enough to adapt rather than trying to force the market into a familiar process.
Look at the current leadership team and ask what knowledge is over represented and what is missing.
If everyone knows schools but nobody has scaled recurring revenue, hire for commercial systems.
If everyone has scaled SaaS but nobody understands how the customer works, bring education expertise closer to the decisions.
RecruitHer was built around this intersection.
EdTech grows stronger when commercial skill and education knowledge sit in the same conversation.
Most teams benefit from both. The right hire depends on which capability is currently missing from the business.
It can be especially useful for revenue operations, forecasting, repeatable sales process, customer segmentation and scaling a founder led commercial motion.
It is particularly useful where customer context, implementation, curriculum, school buying behaviour or localisation needs to influence product and commercial decisions.
Emilia Kruszewska is an EdTech recruiter and headhunter at RecruitHer, working with EdTech companies on commercial and leadership hiring.
