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Commercial hiring often starts with a very specific picture.
Exact sector.
Exact customer.
Exact title.
Exact deal size.
Existing network.
Same company stage.
Then the search reaches the market.
The strongest candidates rarely match every line.
That does not mean the company has to lower the bar.
It means the hiring team has to decide which requirements predict success and which simply describe the easiest person to imagine.
This is one of the first requirements worth challenging.
EdTech experience can be extremely useful.
But a salesperson from another SaaS sector may have stronger discovery, forecasting and leadership skills.
The question is how hard your market is to learn and how much education knowledge already exists inside the team.
Keep sector experience essential when the context really demands it.
Do not keep it because it makes screening easier.
Networks can help create early conversations.
They also expire.
People move.
Budgets change.
A contact who bought one product may not buy another.
Strong commercial hires know how to create relationships, not simply inherit them.
If a candidate can build pipeline repeatedly, that is usually more valuable than arriving with a list of names.
A company selling to multi academy trusts may initially ask for someone who has only sold to multi academy trusts.
Sometimes that is justified.
Sometimes it cuts out candidates who have sold to schools, local authorities, universities or other complex education organisations and could transfer quickly.
Assess the buying motion.
If the stakeholders, deal complexity and commercial behaviour are similar, adjacent experience may be enough.
A candidate does not need to have managed exactly eight people because your team will soon have eight people.
Look at what they actually led.
Did they hire?
Coach?
Set targets?
Manage poor performance?
Build process?
Develop future leaders?
A person who led four people through rapid growth may be better prepared than someone who inherited a team of twelve in a mature business.
Titles are messy.
Head of Sales at one startup can mean first sales hire.
At another company it means leading thirty people across regions.
A Sales Director may have less scope than a Senior Sales Manager elsewhere.
Compare responsibility, not labels.
If you insist on title matching, you can reject people who have already done the work under a different name.
There are things that deserve a harder line.
Evidence of performance.
Commercial judgement.
The ability to learn.
Integrity with customers and colleagues.
Clear communication.
For leadership roles, the ability to coach and make other people better.
For sales roles, the discipline to qualify, forecast and manage a pipeline.
Those capabilities are harder to repair after the hire.
A search should not be a test of whether the recruiter can find a mythical person who matches every bullet.
It should help the company understand the market.
If the same requirement repeatedly excludes otherwise excellent candidates, ask whether it is doing useful work.
At RecruitHer, we would rather challenge a requirement early than explain three months later why the shortlist is still empty.
Exact EdTech experience, an existing network, the exact customer segment, identical team size and matching job titles can often be challenged if the underlying capability is strong.
Evidence of performance, commercial judgement, learning ability, integrity, clear communication and, for leadership roles, the ability to coach and improve other people.
No. It means putting the bar on the capabilities that predict success rather than on a narrowly matching career history.
Emilia Kruszewska is an EdTech recruiter and headhunter at RecruitHer, working with EdTech companies on commercial and leadership hiring.
