Stop Requiring Industry Experience You Don't Actually Need

MomUp Insights

"5+ years of experience in our industry." It is the most common requirement in job descriptions, it feels like the safest, and the research on skills-based hiring says it is quietly one of the most expensive lines you can write.

Every requirement in a job description is a filter, and this one filters harder than most. It removes the excellent engineer one industry over, the operator who has solved your exact problem in a different context, and the professional returning from a career break whose skills did not expire with her tenure. Then it leaves you competing with every other company in your industry for the same small pool.

What industry experience requirements actually filter for

When employers require industry experience, they usually mean one of three things: the person will know our vocabulary, understand our context, and ramp up faster. All real. But vocabulary is learned in weeks, context in months, and ramp speed depends far more on how someone learns than on where they last worked.

Sometimes the requirement is genuine. Regulated environments, licensed roles, and deep technical domains can make specific experience nonnegotiable. The mistake is treating every role that way by default.

What the research says about skills-based hiring

The evidence has piled up fast. A 2026 research synthesis of Harvard Business School, World Economic Forum, and LinkedIn data found that hiring for skills is five times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education. And in SHRM's 2025 Talent Trends data, 76% of organizations that dropped an unnecessary credential requirement successfully hired for the role.

Here is the twist: most companies say the right things and change nothing. Roughly 85% of employers claim skills-based hiring practices, and 53% have removed degree requirements from at least some postings, yet 76% of those same employers admit they still prefer the traditional credential when the decision comes. Harvard and Burning Glass Institute research found the change affected fewer than 1 in 700 actual hires. Announcing a wider funnel is easy. Screening differently is the part that pays, and the part almost nobody does.

What actually transfers: a real example

When Aclarity, a water technology company destroying PFAS contaminants, needed a Staff Engineer, direct industry experience would have been convenient. Requiring it would have shrunk the pool to almost nothing. What the role actually demanded was an engineering foundation, comfort with ambiguity, and the instinct to take ownership when new problems appeared.

MomUp identified Rebecca Gotlib, a mechanical engineer from renewable energy and medical devices. She had never worked in water treatment. She had, however, stepped up to lead an international installation when the project suddenly needed someone in charge, and that evidence of ownership predicted her success better than any industry checkbox could have. Aclarity hired her, and she delivered. The full story is here.

How to decide which job requirements are nonnegotiable

For each requirement in your job description, ask one question: what specifically goes wrong in the first six months if the person does not have this?

• If the answer is concrete, a compliance failure, a safety risk, a client relationship that requires licensed expertise, keep the requirement.
• If the answer is "they'd need some time to learn our space," you are describing onboarding, not a disqualifier.
• If the answer is "it just feels riskier," the requirement is protecting your comfort, not your outcome.

Then replace the filter you cut with the thing you actually wanted: evidence. Has this person mastered complex systems before? Taken ownership without being asked? Learned a new domain quickly? Those show up in a candidate's history regardless of industry, if the screening is built to look for them.

The competitive advantage of transferable skills

There is a quiet edge here too. Everyone in your industry is fishing in the same pond, bidding up the same resumes. The companies that actually learn to evaluate transferable skill, rather than just announcing it, get access to a much larger pool, including exceptional people from adjacent fields and professionals returning to the workforce, at exactly the moment when most employers are still ignoring them.

The industry-experience line feels safe because it is easy to defend. But the goal of hiring is not a defensible process. It is the right person.