The best hires often come from unexpected places. This might be most surprising at the executive level.

A few years ago, Bert Hensley, the CEO of executive search firm Morgan Samuels Company, was working with a young and newly installed head of a Fortune 500 healthcare company. Because of his age, he wanted to pack the C-suite with highly experienced leaders, and the board insisted they come from within the industry.

But the goals they set for the role—mostly to do with operational excellence—weren’t reflected among healthcare leaders at the time. Hensley recommended they look outside the field at people with experience working in highly regulated industries, managing huge, cybersecurity risks, and handling billions of transactions per day. The new hire, who came from telecom, was such a success that a few months later, the CEO told Hensley that “every board member swears it was their idea to look outside the industry.”

“There’s an illusion that prior experience is a proxy to future success,” said Sandy Gould, the chief people officer at LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD, who joined Hensley for a From Day One webinar about better strategies for executive sourcing. Such a limited view creates tunnel vision that excludes some of the most capable and adept candidates. 

When recruiting for the C-suite, or at any level of an organization, you’re seldom looking for a resume, “you’re looking for their ability to solve a certain set of challenges with certain variables in play that are inherently different at every organization,” Gould said. “It’s about adaptability and capability.”

The two met decades ago when Hensley was hired to help recruit for high-level positions at the financial institution where Gould was working at the time. The company wanted to change the way it had been conducting executive search, moving away from traditional, narrowly focused ways of recruiting and toward building deeper, long-term relationships with talented leaders of all backgrounds.

Hensley’s strategy was new from the word go. Gould described previous search partners who would show up to the meeting with their minds made up about who should fill the role and what their goals should be. “I’m like, ‘Wait, how do you know? Are you psychic?’” he said with a chuckle. “Having somebody come in with curiosity is important.” Hensley arrived eager to learn about the organization. 

“It takes a lot of effort up front to really define the problem you want an executive to solve,” said Hensley. While it’s important to identify the frustrations with whoever previously held the role, the focus should be on future results: What does this person have to get done in the next 24 months? In what market(s) will they work? How many deals do they need to make? Of what size?

Company culture matters too. That is, an honest, clear-eyed view of company culture. To do the job well, new executives must be privy to the good and bad parts of culture, and that means the current leaders need to face the problems too. Every company has them. Does one department tend to clash with another? Are there deep-running office politics? Identify it, talk about it.

One of the most common traps of traditional executive search is that “almost all clients confuse confidence with competence, but there’s zero correlation,” Hensley said. “Zero.” 

In fact, Gould and Hensley said, humility and willingness to say I don’t know are marks of the best leaders. And you can ask for specifics. In fact, you should. “You need to go deep into granular details and examples after you give principles about how you work,” Gould said. “A lot of people stay at a high level, which is not satisfying or helpful.”

It’s not unlike ordinary behavioral interviewing. Gould suggested this exercise: “Talk about a situation where there was a tremendous amount of change going on. How did you adapt and respond to it? What part did you contribute to driving change?” And if you’re looking for a leader who’s not afraid to change the way things are done: “What permission did you have? What did you do when people opposed you? How did you convince them?”

“What we have found through thousands and thousands of searches is that candidates who do the best are really into the details, even if they’re the CEO,” said Hensley. They can talk about what they were doing a decade ago. They’re ready to talk about mistakes they made and what they learned. “Nobody ever sets a perfect plan. None of us.”

Hensley has found a correlation between executives who can work in the details and those who are inspiring leaders. Those with command and control personalities, who want to preside over teams rather than lead them, tend to resist dealing with the small stuff and are unwilling to learn.

Gould’s mindset is that “learning is always right, knowing is always wrong.” Because learning means you remain curious. And if you want to know who’s curious, you have to spend time with them. “Some of our absolute best placements,” Hensley said, “are people whom we took the time to really get to know.”

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Morgan Samuels Company, for sponsoring this webinar.

 Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.

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