16 Clear Benefits of Lateral Recruitment

Feeling stuck and looking for that special someone to propel your business forward? If so, it’s time to laterally recruit.

Lateral recruitment is the perfect way to add fresh perspective and remedy current skill gaps. 

Here are 16 clear benefits of lateral recruitment — including ways to enhance your network so you have direct access when it comes to sourcing the top talent who have what it takes to get your company ahead. 

Organizational Impact

One of the most apparent benefits of lateral hiring is that you have more control, directly influencing the organizational impact of the person you hire. 

Unlike traditional recruitment, with lateral talent acquisition, you can fine-tune your hiring strategy to target the best candidates with the specific qualities you’re looking for.

Here are some of the key ways a lateral hiring process can help you scale:

1.  Skills Benefit the Company

Lateral hires bring specialized skills and experience that immediately benefit the organization, and they often come into their new role with fresh ideas.

Whatever you want to achieve, find a new hire with that skill set. If you’re methodical in your approach and think about what you need, it is much easier to find a lateral recruit.

2.  Require Less Training Time

 Because lateral hires have experience in the industry already, it reduces onboarding time. That means it’s much easier for them to hit the ground running.

They’re qualified: they’re already familiar with the current role and best practices, and require way less supervision and training time than hires with little-to-no experience in the position. 

3. Add Fresh Perspective to Current Challenges

Lateral recruits have different perspectives and insights you can mine to boost competitive strategies. Their experience and ideas are invaluable; you can integrate some of their suggestions into current practices.

Be sure to get their feedback. If they worked a similar role in the past, they can provide invaluable information and tips on what worked and what didn’t.

Diversity-Led Innovation

Another advantage of lateral recruits is the ability to increase diversity. 

It’s a well-established fact that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams. Striving to increase diversity (seeking people who have different backgrounds, problem-solving styles, etc.) while also bringing in a new employee with previous experience just makes sense.

Look for hires who add to company culture while simultaneously being an expert at what they do.

4. Diversity of Thought

Lateral recruits bring a new perspective to problem-solving and other challenges that hinder progress.

By looking at the issues and challenges that persist within your company and thinking about who you need and what skills would remedy that, you can mine the talent pool and find someone who checks all the boxes. 

5. New Industry Insights

Skills accumulated throughout a lateral recruit’s career can often be directly applied to your organization.

Most people have experience working for other companies that require a variety of skill sets, and there’s always the chance that some of their past experiences may be applicable to your organization. 

6. Culture Add 

Most people have heard the term “culture fit.” Companies used to look at potential candidates and select the ones who were most like them, thinking they’d fit in better.

Most companies saw this practice as a good thing.

However (unsurprisingly!) that recruitment strategy quickly led to teams of people who were all basically the same, and all thought the same way. As a result, you guessed it! Innovation suffered.

While there’s no problem with hiring a pleasant person who works well with others and generally “fits in,” it’s important to hire for culture add, not culture fit.

Hiring managers need to focus on what qualities are lacking. Perhaps there’s some way that the company isn’t living up to the values it espouses. Or, the creativity or experience is unbalanced — and you’re looking to bring in a fresh perspective to round it out.

What qualities, skills, creativity style, etc., are currently missing from your organization? 

Once you’ve identified the gap in the existing culture, your lateral recruitment process can target individuals who possess the missing qualities or cultural aspects.

Whatever they are, be specific: in order to hire for culture add and include that criteria in your job description, you first need to have a clear idea of what’s missing.

A key way to achieve this is to ensure you’re reaching the people you hope to hire. Therefore, it’s vital to partner with a diverse array of organizations.