Field Note: a hiring pattern I've observed and formed a view about.
Symptom
A job description requiring "10+ years in [our specific vertical]" for a role whose actual challenge is that the vertical's playbook has stopped working.
What I Notice
Deep niche tenure delivers real things: relationships, regulatory fluency, pattern memory, credibility with buyers. It also delivers the assumptions the niche stopped examining. The person who has bought leads for twelve years is excellent at buying leads and structurally unlikely to ask whether the company should be buying leads.
What Is Usually Actually Happening
Every industry has a set of practices that were once rational responses to real constraints, and that persist after the constraints change. The practices get transmitted as expertise ("this is what our industry does") rather than as decisions with reasoning attached. A hiring filter that selects exclusively for tenure inside the niche selects, unintentionally, for people who have inherited the practices without the reasoning.
Why It Matters
You end up with a team that executes the consensus playbook well and cannot tell you why the playbook exists. When the market shifts — a channel's targeting model changes, a vendor category gets commoditized, a buyer's research behavior moves — the team optimizes harder inside the old model, because from inside, the old model is just "how it works."
What I Would Investigate
For any expensive standing practice, ask what problem it originally solved and whether that problem still exists in that form. Then notice who in the building is capable of asking that question — usually someone recent, adjacent, or slightly outside, whose ignorance of the orthodoxy is doing useful work. Balance the team so at least one such person is in the room, and make it safe for them to sound naive.
Related Case Studies
$5,000 Against $50,000 — what happened when I asked why we were buying leads.