When a Strong Candidate Isn’t the Most Obvious
Most hiring managers can describe the person they expect to hire before the first résumé arrives. The candidate has the same title, comes from a similar company and segment, and has a career that moves in a clean line toward this role. It’s a reasonable picture, and sometimes that person is exactly right.
But the obvious candidate and the strong candidate aren’t always the same person. When you’re evaluating candidates for an important food and beverage leadership role, the résumé that most closely mirrors the job description doesn’t always show what someone can do once they’re in the seat.
Why Hiring Teams Choose The Obvious
Familiarity feels like lower risk. A candidate who held the same title at a recognizable company is easy to explain to leadership and easy to defend if the hire doesn’t work out. Structured screening exists for good reasons: it keeps evaluation consistent, saves time, and guards against decisions made on instinct alone.
The trouble starts when the screening criteria stand in for the actual work. Job descriptions are often written quickly, modeled on the previous person in the role, and lengthened over time. Each requirement was added for a reason, but not every line carries the same weight. When you treat them all as non-negotiable, the hiring criteria narrow the pool in ways the team may never see.
“Different” Doesn’t Mean “Unqualified”
Two candidates can both be missing the exact experience listed in a posting, for very different reasons. One lacks the capability the role demands. The other built that capability in a setting that looks unfamiliar on paper.
Consider a plant operations leader who has run a high-volume beverage bottling facility and is being considered for a canned foods manufacturer. The products differ, but the demands may not: FSMA compliance, throughput pressure, labor management, tight margins. Or take a sales director from a foodservice distributor considering a CPG brand sales leadership role. The customers to have conversations with may change, but the judgment about pricing, account priorities, and team leadership carry over.
That’s the distinction that matters. The question isn’t always whether product experience matches. It’s whether a record of transferable skills shows that this person can do what the role requires.
Beyond Titles and Career Paths
Titles are inconsistent across food and beverage. A director at a large organization may carry more P&L accountability than a VP at a 50-employee specialty producer. A plant manager title can describe a single-line facility or a multi-site operation.
Career paths vary too. Someone who moved between segments, stepped sideways to gain operational exposure, or grew through a smaller company may not show a tidy title progression. What they can show is outcomes: costs reduced, yield improved, an audit program rebuilt, a key account grown, a team stabilized. Accomplishments describe capability more reliably than titles do.
Must-Haves & Nice-to-Haves
Some requirements should stay firm: a key credential the role requires, regulatory knowledge, or level of leadership the position can’t function without. Loosening those could be risky.
But many items on a job description are preferences, such as experience in a specific industry segment, or familiarity and contacts within a particular customer. A useful test is to ask what would actually go wrong in the first six months without this qualification, and whether your onboarding, a strong team, or the candidate’s own track record could close the gap. If the honest answer is “not much,” it’s likely a preference.
Evaluate Capabilities
Evaluating capability asks what the person has done, how they did it, and whether the conditions were comparable to the ones they’d face here.
That usually means going deeper than the résumé allows. While interviewing, ask candidates to walk through a specific problem they owned: the constraints, the decisions, the results. Listen for underlying skills like leading through a recall or a labor shortage, managing supplier volatility, or building cross-functional trust, rather than the setting where those skills were used. Candidate experience from an adjacent segment is strongest when the person can explain clearly how it translates.
Assess the Right Fit
When a candidate prompts a “not quite what we expected” reaction, these questions can help determine whether the concern is substantive:
- Does this candidate demonstrate the required capabilities for the role, even if they developed them in a different environment?
- What accomplishments show this person can handle the responsibilities of the role?
- What would this candidate bring that someone with the traditional background might not?
- What would this person need to learn, and is that gap realistically manageable?
- Are we passing on this candidate because they’re unqualified, or because their résumé looks unfamiliar?
Broaden the Search
An experienced executive recruiting partner helps hiring teams see which requirements are truly driving the search and where a candidate’s experience translates, even when the résumé looks different. Kinsa Group brings that perspective to food and beverage recruiting, with a clear understanding of the technical, functional, and leadership demands of each role. Our recruiters evaluate candidates against what the position requires, not what their résumé looks like, so the best fit for the role rises to the top. When you need help finding the right talent, work with Kinsa Group.
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