Know the adage "When you become so good at using a hammer everything begins to look like a nail"? Same thing holds true for recruiting and the notion that peeps must have specific industry and/or product experience to be considered a viable employment candidate.

The only data is the self-fulfilling prophecy held by many hiring managers when they hire someone out-of-spec - the HMs spend a good deal of time "looking" for reasons to prove recruiting wrong and create structures that practically ensure a negative result.

Consider the best reason for hiring out of range...creativity. When you hire 100% within spec, you're genetically engineering creativity out of your organization. Fewer ideas from other areas is like incest - you end up inbreeding all the bad stuff.

Read here about how some in finance actually embrace variety in their function. And be sure to subscribe to CFO.com and it's newsletters - the best "tools" a recruiter can find these days - financial knowledge and how organizations are really managed.