Cross-Pollination of Ideas

A few years ago, I was on the job market, looking at a lot of marketing jobs, I came across one that really stuck out to me:

A commercial glass company, in need of a marketer of commercial glass.

A marketer with ten or more years of experience marketing commercial glass. Specifically.

Please note, while I was looking ideally for remote work, I was open to anything, and this job was not remote. It was local. In a fairly small city in the US.

How many people in that city had glass marketing experience? Of ten or more years? And was not the person that company presumably just lost somehow?

This job listing has haunted me for years. Sure, I may take it a little personally--I've worked in so many jobs, so many roles and industries and sectors and geographic locations, that I will never be so specialized. But also, I couldn't get over how little sense it made.

Say you find your person. There's someone who has been slinging commercial glass for over a decade, right there in town, and they're on the market for the right price at the right time. Is that person going to be good at the job? Sure. I guess. But what does it mean to be good at marketing?

I've come to look at in in several ways over the years. Someone who conveys value to potential customers. Someone who draws positive attention to their product or service. Someone who begins an emotional relationship between a customer and a brand, and who plays a part in continuing that relationship over time.

Ideally, a combination: you grab attention in a way that immediately conveys unique value and creates an emotional reaction that becomes a bond.

So if you've been in commercial glass forever, how do you grab attention? Does this person who's only ever known glass have any fresh ideas? Things that will make your glass stand out from the competitors they presumably used to work for? I mean... probably not, right? Where would those ideas come from?

I'm saying open your mind a bit. Hire a marketer from outside the commercial glass sector. And I'm saying this goes for all the rest of you, too. If you're in an innovative space, if you're trying to solve new problems or create new ideas, open your mind. Which means hiring someone with experience a little different from what you want them to do for you.

In working in science, law, and academia before getting into business, I haven't abandoned my skills and knowledge from those sectors. They came with me. Same goes for running different segments of businesses, and businesses in different industries. And the dark secret from being a career nomad?

They're not that different.

There's at least as much variation between jobs with a specialty (let's say, for instance, marketing) than there is between that specialty and an adjacent one (let's say, sales). In both types of job, you need to be organized, communicate clearly, keep your eye on your goals. You need to convey value to customers and keep their needs in mind. You need to be good with words and know the strengths and weaknesses of your product or service inside and out.

But between two different marketing jobs? You might be writing long-form educational content for one, and catchy jingles in another. You might be targeting wildly different audiences, tracking wildly different metrics.

Which may tempt one to think: clearly I need to narrow it further! I can't just get any marketer, I need someone who can step in and immediately do MY marketing!

I'm sorry to break it to you, no one can just walk in and start doing your marketing (or any role) with no training. They need to know your product/service, your market, your tools and resources. There will need to be training and onboarding no matter what. So why not get someone who brings something new to the table?

Another anecdote: after law school I spent a year doing a fellowship, studying the intersection of law with science and technology. One of the areas I found most fascinating was the communication between fields, particularly in the context of scientific or technical expert witnesses. Witnesses trying to talk to lawyers, judges, even juries.

How do you explain DNA evidence to a layperson? Let alone a lawyer? Most of my classmates specifically cited their hatred of math as their reason for attending law school. And there is, in fact, quite a bit of math involved when you're trying to explain how strong a piece of DNA evidence is. It's not all created equal. But explaining all of population genetics and probability theory? Not an option.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, I thought, someone must have solved this before! Courtrooms are not the only place where complex scientific information needs to be conveyed to a layperson, who then has to make a decision based on that information.

So I did some poking, and found that, in fact, there is another area where this process is done, and where people have actually researched how to do it--a doctor's office! Explaining to your panicked patient the risks and probabilities of different choices on their health outcomes, that's even harder than explaining it to a bored juror.

It got me thinking, is the way doctors do this perfect? Not in my experience, no. But using what they've learned would give the legal field a huge head start in questioning expert witness more effectively. As far as I could tell, no one else had really considered this.

This is what I mean when I talk about cross-pollination. As things are, we silo different fields, assuming no one can learn from anyone else. And we're missing out, reinventing wheels left and right instead of looking across the way to what other people are doing.

And nowhere is worse about this than the job market.

Yes, it's hard to look outside the box. It's easier to do a keyword search for the thing you're hiring for, throw out any resumes with less than x years of experience in it. The alternative is going through every resume manually and trying to imagine how transferrable their skills are, then training your new hire on the specifics.

What I'm saying is not that it's easy, just that it's worth it. And if you're busy, which of course you are, you don't have to go one at a time. But think about what other jobs can fill gaps in your staff's skillsets, and look for that. Hire someone at your law firm who knows how to speak medicine to laypeople (doesn't have to be a former doctor or nurse, could be a teacher or trainer!). Hire someone from a completely different field to market your commercial glass, so your glass stands out among the competition.

And instead of looking for more years in one specialized field, look for a mix of experience. Someone who's pivoted their career has a wider range of skills and they show they can learn fast when they need to.

Maybe there's a metaphor in here about good recruiters being pollinators, bees and butterflies bringing in the perfect outsiders to level up your team. Or maybe the pollinator is the new employee bringing outside ideas to the table. However you think about it, it's key to a healthy ecosystem.