Companies usually know what position they need to hire.

They need a Vice President of Sales. A Director of Operations. A Software Engineer. A Chief Financial Officer. A Regional Sales Manager. The title may vary from company to company, but the general role is familiar. Hiring managers understand what the person should do, candidates recognize the title, and recruiters know where to begin looking.

But what happens when a company knows the problem it needs to solve without knowing what to call the person who should solve it? That situation is becoming more common in fast-changing industries.

A manufacturer may know it needs someone to connect artificial intelligence with plant operations. A robotics company may need a leader who understands engineering, commercialization, and customer deployment. A healthcare technology company may need someone who can work between clinical teams, product teams, and customers. An organization adopting automation may need a professional who understands both traditional controls and newer AI-driven systems.

The capability is real. The job title may not be.

When companies are hiring for emerging or rapidly evolving work, beginning with a familiar title can sometimes make the search harder. Instead, organizations may need to start with a different question: What does this person need to accomplish?

Job Titles Usually Follow the Work

Most established positions developed over time. Companies did not always have Chief Information Officers, Customer Success Managers, Data Scientists, Revenue Operations leaders, or Chief Information Security Officers. The work existed before many of those titles became common.

Eventually, organizations began seeing the same need repeatedly. Responsibilities became clearer. Career paths developed. Titles became more standardized. Emerging industries often go through the same process.

The challenge is that companies still need to hire while that process is happening. In areas such as Industrial AI, Robotics, and Humanoid Robotics, organizations may be creating responsibilities that did not exist in the same form several years ago.

One company may call someone a Director of AI. Another may call a similar person a Head of Intelligent Automation. A third may use AI Product Leader.

Another may place similar responsibilities under advanced engineering, digital transformation, innovation, operations, or technology. The titles are different, but parts of the underlying capability may be very similar. That creates a recruiting challenge. If a search begins with the title alone, the company may overlook exactly the people it should be considering.

Start With the Business Problem

When the title is unclear, the business problem becomes the best starting point. Imagine a manufacturer wants to use AI to reduce unplanned equipment downtime. What does the organization need? It might need someone who understands machine learning. But that alone probably is not enough.

The person may also need to understand industrial equipment, sensor data, plant operations, maintenance workflows, existing automation systems, and how an AI solution would be deployed in a production environment.

The company may initially say: “We need an AI leader.” That is a reasonable starting point, but it is still too broad. A better description might be: “We need someone who can identify practical AI applications inside our manufacturing environment, work with engineering and operations teams, evaluate technology partners, and turn those projects into measurable improvements in equipment reliability and productivity.”

Now the search has direction. The organization still needs a title eventually. But the title is being built around the work rather than the other way around.

This is like the idea behind creating a success profile. Instead of defining a position only by a list of responsibilities and credentials, companies can identify the outcomes they expect the person to produce. For a newly developing role, that distinction becomes especially important.

A Familiar Title Can Create the Wrong Candidate Pool

Titles make recruiting easier when everyone agrees on what they mean. They become less useful when the same title represents very different responsibilities.

Consider the title “Director of Automation.”

• At one company, that person may lead traditional industrial controls engineering.
• At another, they may oversee warehouse robotics.
• At another, they may be responsible for software automation and internal business processes.
• A fourth company may use the title for someone leading a combination of robotics, AI, controls, and digital transformation.

Searching only for people who already hold “Director of Automation” may therefore produce a strange mix of candidates.

Some may be highly qualified for the actual position. Others may have a similar title but completely different experience. At the same time, strong candidates may be missed because their current company uses another title entirely.

This is one reason specialized recruiting becomes valuable in developing markets. Understanding the industry means understanding not only titles, but also what professionals do inside different organizations.

DRI works across a wide range of specialized industry practice areas as well as functional areas such as Engineering, sales, operations, supply chain, and Technology and IT. That intersection matters when a new position does not fit neatly inside one category.

Look for Capabilities in Adjacent Roles

One of the biggest mistakes companies can make when creating a new position is expecting the perfect candidate to already exist somewhere else with the exact same job. Sometimes they do. Often, they do not.

If the role is genuinely new, the best candidate may currently be performing only part of it. Imagine a robotics company needs someone to lead customer deployment of a new system.

The ideal person may need to understand:

• Robotics technology
• Customer operations
• Technical implementation
• Project management
• Engineering communication
• Troubleshooting
• Commercial relationships

There may be very few people whose current title clearly describes all those responsibilities.

However, potential candidates could exist in several places. One might be a senior field applications engineer. Another could lead implementation at an automation company. Another might manage technical customer success. Another could be an engineering leader who spends significant time at customer sites. Another may come from systems integration.

The search becomes much stronger when the hiring team asks:

Who has already demonstrated the capabilities we need, even if they have never held this exact title?

That question can open the candidate pool without lowering the standard.

Separate the Capability from the Credentials

Emerging roles can easily become overloaded with requirements. Because the company is unsure what background the person should have, leaders may begin adding every credential that seems useful.

The position might eventually require:

• Ten years of industry experience.
• Five years of management experience.
• An engineering degree.
• AI experience.
• Sales experience.
• Operations experience.
• Experience with a specific technology.
• Experience with a particular type of customer.
• Experience managing teams.
• Experience launching products.
• Experience working at both startups and large companies.
• Eventually, the company has described an extremely impressive person.

The question is whether that person exists. A better approach is to identify which capabilities truly determine success.

For example:

Does the person need to personally build machine-learning models, or do they need enough technical understanding to lead the people who do? Does the person need direct sales experience, or do they need the ability to explain technical value to customers?

Do they need experience in the exact same industry, or would experience solving a similar problem in an adjacent market translate? Does the person need to have led a 50-person team before, or is the organization looking for someone who can build the first five-person team? These distinctions matter.

Hiring for capabilities allows companies to remain selective while becoming more precise about what they are selecting for.

Be Careful With the “Unicorn” Search

When responsibilities cross several disciplines, companies sometimes describe the ideal candidate as a unicorn. The term makes sense. The organization is looking for a rare combination of experience.

But rare should not automatically mean unrealistic. A position can require an unusual combination of skills without requiring one person to be an expert in everything. Consider a company developing an AI-powered industrial product.

The leader responsible for bringing that product to market may need to understand the technology, customer workflow, commercial strategy, and industry. But they may not need to be the company’s best machine-learning engineer, best salesperson, best product manager, and best operations leader at the same time.

The goal should be finding the right combination of depth and breadth.

• Which area requires deep expertise?
• Which areas require working knowledge?
• Which skills can be supported by the existing team?
• Which can be learned?

Those questions make the candidate profile more realistic. Without that discipline, an emerging role can quickly become another example of trying to hire three jobs in one.

Titles Still Matter to Candidates

There is another side of the conversation. Even when a company is focused primarily on capability, candidates still care about the title. Titles communicate something about responsibility, authority, career level, and future opportunity.

A candidate may understand the work perfectly but hesitate if the title appears significantly below their current level. Another candidate may worry that an unusual title will make their experience difficult to explain later in their career.

Others may be attracted to a new title because it signals ownership of an emerging function. Companies creating new positions should therefore think about the title from the candidate’s perspective.

Ask:

Will candidates understand what this title means? Does it accurately represent the level of responsibility? Will it make sense externally to customers and partners? Does it fit reasonably within the organization’s existing structure?

Will the person be comfortable putting it on their résumé or LinkedIn profile? Does the title accidentally imply responsibilities that the role does not have? The title does not need to be perfect. It simply needs to be clear enough to support the work rather than confuse it.

The Reporting Structure Can Help Define the Role

When a new position sits between established functions, reporting structure becomes especially important.

Consider an AI leader again.

• Should that person report to the CTO?
• The COO?
• The CEO?
• A Chief Digital Officer?
• Engineering?
• Operations?

The correct answer depends on why the position exists.

If the goal is developing an AI product, technology or product leadership may make sense. If the focus is improving internal manufacturing processes, operations may be more appropriate.

If the role is expected to create an enterprise-wide transformation, a broader executive reporting relationship may be necessary. Where the position sits communicate what the company believes the job is primarily responsible for. It also influences what kind of candidate will be interested.

A highly technical candidate may view a role differently depending on whether it reports into engineering or corporate strategy. A commercially oriented candidate may want to know whether they have actual ownership of customer strategy or simply provide technical support to sales.

Defining those relationships early can prevent confusion later in the search.

Build the Interview Around Problems, Not Titles

If candidates come from several different backgrounds, a traditional résumé comparison becomes more difficult. One person may be a Director of Engineering. Another may be a Principal Product Manager. Another may lead Solutions Architecture. Another may be a VP of Innovation. Their résumés will not look identical.

That is not necessarily a problem. Instead of asking which candidate has the title that most closely resembles the opening, companies can evaluate each person against the same business problems.

For example:

• “Tell us about a time you introduced a new technology into an environment where the users were skeptical.”
• “How have you taken a technical idea and turned it into a product or solution customers could actually use?”
• “Describe a situation where engineering and commercial teams wanted different things. How did you handle it?”
• “Tell us about a technology project that failed to produce the expected business result. What happened?”
• “How do you determine whether a new technology is ready for broader deployment?”
• “What would you want to learn during your first 90 days before creating a strategy for this function?”

These questions help reveal whether the candidate can perform the work even if their previous employer called that work something different. DRI’s recruiters work across multiple functional areas, which can be particularly useful when a search crosses traditional boundaries between engineering, technology, operations, sales, and executive leadership.

New Roles Need More Explanation During Candidate Outreach

An established title can do much of the communication for you. If a recruiter contacts someone about a CFO position, the candidate already has a general idea of what the conversation is about. A newly created position requires more explanation.

Candidates need to understand:

• Why is the company creating the role?
• What problem is it trying to solve?
• Why now?
• What will the person own?
• Who will they work with?
• What resources will they have?
• How much authority comes with the position?
• How will success be measured?
• What could the role become over time?

Without those answers, a candidate may interpret a new position as experimental or poorly defined. That can be especially important with passive candidates who are already successful in established roles. A strong candidate may be willing to accept uncertainty, but the uncertainty needs to come with meaningful opportunity.

A newly created role can be very attractive when the candidate sees a chance to build something, shape strategy, influence the organization, and create a function that did not previously exist. The employer needs to communicate that opportunity clearly.

Expect the Market to Teach You Something

One advantage of beginning a search before every detail feels perfectly settled is that candidate conversations can help refine the position. Suppose the company believes it needs a Head of AI Strategy. After speaking with several qualified professionals, the hiring team may realize the role needs much more product expertise than strategy experience.

Or candidates may consistently say the responsibilities sound more like an operations transformation position. Perhaps the compensation range does not align with the level of technical depth being requested.

Maybe the company discovers that the combination of skills it wants exists primarily in a different industry. That information is valuable. A search does not only produce candidates. It also produces market feedback.

For organizations hiring in emerging areas, specialized recruiters can help interpret that feedback. DRI’s teams work directly inside markets including Automation and Industrial Technology, Industrial AI, robotics, healthcare technology, GovTech, cybersecurity, and other specialized areas where talent markets can evolve quickly. The strongest hiring teams are willing to adjust the title or profile when the market consistently provides useful evidence that the original assumptions were wrong.

Avoid Rewriting the Position for Every Interesting Candidate

There is also a danger in being too flexible. A company begins with one idea for the role. Then it meets a highly technical candidate and makes the position more technical.

The next candidate has strong sales experience, so the company begins emphasizing commercial leadership. Another candidate has an operations background, and suddenly the position shifts toward operational transformation.

Soon, nobody is being evaluated for the same job. Flexibility is useful when a role is new. Constant reinvention is not. Before interviewing begins, the company should define a small number of outcomes that will remain consistent regardless of the candidate’s background.

For example:

Within the first year, this person must:

• Establish the company’s AI deployment strategy.
• Identify and prioritize high-value applications.
• Build relationships between engineering and operations.
• Create a plan for developing the necessary internal team.
• Move at least two projects from experimentation into practical use.

Candidates may accomplish those outcomes in different ways.

One may bring more technical expertise. Another may be stronger operationally. But the core mission remains the same. That creates enough flexibility to consider different backgrounds without losing sight of why the company is hiring.

Decide Whether You Need a builder or an Operator

New functions often require builders. The first person leading a capability may not inherit a mature department, established processes, clear metrics, or a large team.

They may need to create all those things. That is very different from managing a function that already exists. A candidate who has successfully run a large AI organization may not necessarily enjoy building the first AI team at a mid-sized company.

A senior executive from a mature robotics company may be accustomed to resources that a startup cannot provide. Someone who thrives in a structured environment may struggle when responsibilities are still evolving.

Hiring teams should therefore ask whether the position primarily requires someone to:

Build — create the function, team, processes, strategy, and credibility.

Scale — take something that works and expand it significantly.

Operate — improve consistency, efficiency, performance, and accountability in an established organization.

Those are different leadership challenges. The title may look similar across all three. The capability is not.

The Role May Change Quickly After the Hire

When companies create positions around emerging capabilities, they should expect some evolution. The person may begin by proving the value of the function. Six months later, they may need to hire a team. A year later, they may own a budget, technology roadmap, customer strategy, or larger business unit.

That does not mean the company should hire without a plan. It means the plan should recognize that the role may mature alongside the capability itself. Companies should discuss that possibility honestly with candidates.

• What could the position become if the initiative succeeds?
• What responsibilities are likely to remain with other leaders?
• Could the role eventually become an executive-level function?
• Will the person have an opportunity to build a team?

Those conversations can help both sides determine whether the candidate is interested not only in today’s position but also in what the position may become.

Emerging Roles Require a Different Kind of Search

When a job title is established, recruiters can often begin with a relatively clear map of the talent market.

When the capability is newer, the map may need to be built during the search. Potential candidates may sit in different departments. They may work for different types of companies. Their titles may have little in common.

Some may come from competitors, while others may come from adjacent industries or technology providers. The search therefore needs to focus on patterns of experience rather than one exact résumé.

That can include:

• Problems the candidate has solved
• Technologies they have worked with
• Customers or environments they understand
• Teams they have built
• Products they have launched
• Transformations they have led
• Functions they have connected
• Results they have produced

For complex leadership positions, DRI’s Executive Search services are built around understanding the organization, the role, and the market before identifying and approaching candidates. That approach becomes particularly important when there is no obvious list of people who already hold the exact job.

Define the Capability First

There will always be value in job titles. They help organizations communicate structure. They help employees understand career progression. They help recruiters identify potential talent. They help candidates understand the level and general purpose of an opportunity. But the title should describe the work.

It should not define the limits of the search. When a new business need appears before the market has agreed on what to call the person who can address it, companies should begin with the capability.

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What outcomes does the organization need?
• What does the person need to understand?
• Which skills require deep expertise?
• Which skills can come from the surrounding team?
• Where might people with those abilities be working today?
• What backgrounds could reasonably translate?

Once those answers are clear, the title becomes much easier to determine. More importantly, the search becomes about finding someone capable of succeeding rather than finding someone whose current business card already matches the opening.

At Direct Recruiters, Inc., our teams specialize in identifying high-impact talent across rapidly changing and highly specialized industries. By combining industry knowledge with expertise across engineering, technology, sales, operations, supply chain, and executive leadership, DRI helps organizations define critical positions and identify candidates whose experience aligns with the actual business need.

Explore DRI’s Practice Areas or learn more about our recruiting and executive search services to discuss an emerging or mission-critical talent need. Sometimes the hardest part of hiring is not finding the right person. It is realizing that the right person may already exist, even if nobody has agreed on what to call them yet.