Why hiring new talent doesn't always bring new knowledge

Companies often hire people from competitors because they want to bring in new knowledge. The expectation is that bringing in new expertise will enhance existing knowledge and improve performance. But just adding new knowledge isn’t sufficient: businesses must have a strategy for integrating that knowledge no,for it to lead to better results.

Here’s the wider context: the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39% of workers' existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated by 2030, while 63% of employers identify skills gaps as a major barrier to business transformation. Given these estimates, businesses will increasingly need to hire employees with up-to-date skills.

But there’s more to do than merely hiring people with new skills. A study by Dong Nghi Pham (Esade Business School), Luis A. Rios (Purdue University) and Maciej Workiewicz (ESSEC Business School) explores what happens after those new employees arrive. Published in the Strategic Management Journal, the study used a simulation model to explore how organizations learn from new hires and what determines whether they benefit from the knowledge those employees bring. The results suggest that a company's existing knowledge can determine how quickly it absorbs new ideas.

Companies aren't empty vessels

Organizations do not just passively receive and absorb knowledge from new employees. They already have established practices, beliefs and ways of working, shared among their existing employees. Embedded ways of working can be both a blessing and a curse because they can make new knowledge easier to absorb—or, conversely, make it much harder to displace what people already know.

Pham and his co-authors focus on two characteristics of this existing knowledge. The first is internal fit: how closely the different elements of a company's existing approach reinforce one another. The second is external fit: how effectively that approach performs in its environment.

This is a significant distinction because highly coherent organizations can become attached to their existing approach. When a new hire introduces a new way of working, employees may be reluctant to change, while the organization itself continues to pull in a different direction.

The researchers argue that it may be more useful to think about learning-by-hiring not so much as simple knowledge transfer, but rather as knowledge displacement.

The counterintuitive finding: coherence can become a barrier

Their findings show that firms with a lower internal fit, where workers had varied ways of working, absorbed new knowledge more quickly than companies whose employees were more internally aligned. This was the case even when the companies were performing equally well relative to their environments. More internally aligned firms with established procedures can be slower to change because their existing knowledge creates a stronger pull toward the status quo.

This does not mean that organizational coherence is inherently bad. Rather, in a complex environment, being very good at reinforcing an existing system can make it harder to move away from it when circumstances change.

Imagine a restaurant where the kitchen and wait staff are efficient and keep things running like clockwork. The business has a high internal fit. But if it fails to change in response to customer demands, it has a low external fit. The opposite can also be true: a restaurant may be disorganized behind the scenes, but if it responds to what customers want and keeps its customers happy, it has a good external fit.

The study describes the challenges that highly coherent businesses face when they try to incorporate new knowledge as a "tug of war" between the knowledge held by long-term employees and the knowledge brought by new hires. Firms with lower internal fit can gain an early advantage because there is less resistance between competing approaches. Over time, their improving performance also means that they encounter fewer potential hires with superior knowledge.

More hiring isn't necessarily more learning

There’s another surprising twist. A company that is poorly matched to its environment may have the greatest potential to benefit from new knowledge. Yet in complex environments, hiring more people with different expertise can make learning more difficult.

New employees obviously bring valuable knowledge. But if several new hires join the company at once, they may have different ways of reaching the same goal, and their advice may conflict.

The organization receives more opportunities to learn, but also more noise and confusion about which direction to take.

Is resistance really resistance?

One interesting nuance is what happens when an organization itself appears not to change, even though its employees are slowly and subtly changing.

The simulations suggest that organizational resistance can emerge from the learning process itself, even without assuming politics, organizational culture or individual preferences. Employees may gradually change their own knowledge while the organization's formal approach remains relatively stable.

The researchers describe this hidden process clearly: "What may appear as inertia on the part of a firm's approach masks the subtle but ongoing process of gradual unlearning."

Eventually, this gradual unlearning can reach a tipping point. A period of apparent resistance may therefore be followed by a sudden realignment, as employees' changing knowledge finally becomes reflected in the organization's practices.

Insights for managers

The findings suggest that hiring for knowledge is not simply a matter of finding the person with the best expertise. The organization receiving that expertise also matters.

Existing knowledge can influence how receptive a company is to new ideas—workers may be set in their ways and comfortable with the same routines. Multiple new hires can also create competing signals in complex environments. However, a lack of visible change does not necessarily mean that learning has stopped. Employees may be gradually absorbing new knowledge before the organization itself changes.

These findings are not a prescriptive management formula. The computational model used in the study deliberately abstracts from factors such as organizational structure, incentives and power dynamics, so its conclusions need to be understood within those limitations.

The challenge of unlearning

As the workplace and the world around it evolves, organizations will need to acquire knowledge from outside more frequently. But the value of that knowledge may be lost if organizations can’t make space for it.

Hiring someone who knows how to do things differently is the easy part. The harder task may be allowing the organization to let go of what it already knows—and recognizing that meaningful learning may sometimes be happening long before anyone can see the change.