Lateral Hiring

What is Lateral hiring?

Lateral hiring is recruiting professionals from outside an organization to fill a similar level or with equivalent experience. Unlike the traditional hiring practice that recruits entry-level individuals or promotes from within, lateral hiring seeks candidates with specific expertise, skills, or industry knowledge. Organizations hire employees laterally to share knowledge, diversify talent, and fill out skill gaps in their workforce. This approach enables the companies to recruit the skills or domain knowledge that may not be available for internal hiring. Lateral hires bring novel perspectives and know-how that spark innovation and advance organizational performance. Nevertheless, great lateral hiring emphasizes stronger alignment with organizational culture and values to ensure smooth collaboration with existing teams and their integration.

Example

Lateral hiring can be seen when a technological company hires an experienced software engineer from a competitor to spearhead a new project. Though being able to choose from its own qualified candidates, the organization seeks the experience and the industry knowledge that the external hire has. Through transferring the experienced engineer ipsilaterally, the company plans to speed up project development process, making use of this person's prior success and unique abilities. This lateral hiring offers different viewpoints and creates a healthy competition and knowledge-sharing patterns within the organization. Furthermore, gaining an access to competitor practices and strategies may offer the company a distinct advantage in the market. Organizations can do lateral hiring and hence building up their pool of talent to contribute to the innovation and growth of the dynamic industries.