"Hit the ground running" appears in more job briefs than almost any other phrase. It sounds like a reasonable request. What it actually does is shrink the shortlist to people who have already done the same job, at a similar size of business, using similar systems. That is a very small group of candidates. It is also a group that tends to move on again quickly.
Experience carries real value, and there are roles where nothing else will do. But the assumption that experience always produces the better return stops holding up somewhere around month six.
What does "hit the ground running" actually mean in a job brief?
Most of the time it means one of two things. Either the team has been short-staffed for months and the manager is exhausted, or nobody has capacity to train anyone. Both are genuine pressures. Neither is a hiring specification.
The trouble starts with what happens next. Asking for the same sector, the same software and the same job title turns a wide field into four or five names. Those candidates know they are scarce, so they cost more. They are usually in conversation with two or three other businesses at the same time. And because they were hired on the basis that they would need no support, they often receive none, which is one of the more common reasons an experienced hire quietly fails inside the first year.
Separate what the role genuinely requires from what would simply be convenient. A finance role may absolutely require someone who has run a month-end close unsupervised. It rarely requires someone who has used your particular ledger system. Making that distinction properly will change the size and the quality of your shortlist before you have even placed the advert.
When is hiring for experience the right decision?
Often. This is not an argument for hiring the enthusiastic over the qualified.
Experience wins where the cost of a mistake is high and the learning curve is unforgiving. Regulated work, safety-critical engineering, anything with statutory reporting attached. It wins in sole-charge roles, where a new starter has nobody in the building to ask and no realistic route to learn on the job. It wins when you are fixing something that is already broken, because turnaround work needs judgement that only comes from having seen the pattern before.
It also wins when the honest answer about capacity is no. If the team is already at full stretch, if the line manager has no time to coach, and if there is no induction beyond a laptop and a login, then hiring for potential will not work. The person will struggle, the manager will conclude the hire was wrong, and the business will lose both the money and the time.
The point is not that experience is the weaker option. The point is that it should be a deliberate choice made for a specific reason, rather than the default setting on every role you advertise.
What does potential actually look like, and how do you assess it?
Potential is not enthusiasm. Plenty of candidates interview well, want the job badly, and still cannot do it. Assessing potential properly means looking for evidence, and the evidence is usually there in the CV if you read it differently.
Look at trajectory rather than titles. Someone who has moved from administrator to team leader in three years has demonstrated something an equally qualified candidate who has held the same job for eight years has not. Look at what they have learned without being asked, whether that is a qualification funded themselves, a system they taught to the rest of their team, or a process they rebuilt because the old one irritated them.
In interview, the useful questions are the uncomfortable ones. Ask about a time they were out of their depth and what they did about it. Ask what they got wrong in their last role and what changed afterwards. Candidates with genuine learning agility answer these specifically and without defensiveness. Candidates who are coasting deflect, or blame a previous employer.
Transferable skills matter more than sector familiarity in most commercial roles. A strong customer service professional from retail can become a strong internal sales coordinator. What they cannot do is acquire judgement, resilience or curiosity on the job, because those are the things you were meant to hire for.
The advert has to change too. If the specification lists 10 essential criteria and four of them are systems, the people you want will read it and assume they are not qualified. Strong candidates self-select out of applications far more often than weak ones do. Cut the essentials down to what genuinely cannot be taught, move the rest to desirable, and say plainly that you will train the right person. That one edit tends to do more for the quality of a shortlist than any amount of advertising spend.
Which hire delivers better ROI over time?
Compare the two honestly and the picture changes depending on where you draw the line.
An experienced hire is productive within weeks. They also arrive at a premium, frequently at the top of the band, and often at the ceiling of what that role can offer them. If they joined you for money, the next business offering more will get the same result. You pay for speed, and the speed is real, but you are renting it.
A candidate hired for potential typically takes three to six months to reach full productivity, and longer in a technical role. During that period they cost you time as well as salary. After it, the arithmetic starts moving the other way. They usually join below the market rate for a fully experienced hire, they grow into the role rather than out of it, and they tend to stay significantly longer, partly because the business took a chance on them and that is not something people forget.
The cost that rarely makes it onto the spreadsheet is the vacancy itself. Every time a role turns over you pay again for advertising or agency fees, for the management hours spent shortlisting and interviewing, for the handover that never quite happens, and for the period where the work either sits undone or lands on somebody else. Two experienced hires in three years costs considerably more than one hire who stays for six, even if the second one started slower.
Somewhere between 18 months and two years, the potential hire usually overtakes on total return. Beyond that, the gap widens, because you are no longer just measuring output. You are measuring retention, the cost of not re-recruiting, and the fact that you now have someone ready to step up when the next vacancy appears above them. Hiring for potential is how internal succession happens. Hiring exclusively for experience is how you end up back at the same shortlist every 18 months.
What needs to be in place before you hire for potential?
Three things, and they are all internal.
The first is a manager with genuine capacity to coach. Not willingness, capacity. If their diary is full, the answer is no, whatever they say in the vacancy meeting.
The second is a real induction. Not a week of shadowing followed by silence, but a structured first 90 days with defined checkpoints and someone accountable for them. Most failed hires described as "not the right fit" are induction failures wearing a different label.
The third is a progression conversation you can actually honour. If you hire someone on the promise of development and there is nowhere for them to go, they will leave at the two-year mark and take your investment with them. Be specific about what the next step looks like and roughly when it becomes available.
Get those right and hiring for potential becomes the lower-risk option rather than the braver one.
Deciding between potential and experience is easier with someone who knows both your business and the local candidate market well enough to tell you which the role genuinely needs. That is the conversation we have with clients every week, and it usually starts before a job specification is written.
If you are shaping a role at the moment, get in touch with the ACR team and we will talk it through.