Hiring pricing talent when you haven’t worked in pricing is like hiring a controller without an accounting background. You know the output you want — better pricing decisions, stronger margins, fewer fire drills — but assessing candidates feels like guesswork.

We’ve helped hundreds of non-pricing leaders — across finance, sales, product, and private equity — hire their first or next pricing person. The shared challenge? They know the outcomes they want — better margins, faster quote turnaround, smarter segmentation — but they’re not always sure what to look for in a candidate.

This guide breaks it down by candidate level and hiring context, so you can feel confident in your evaluation — even if pricing isn’t your domain.

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Analyst / Senior Analyst / Associate Manager

What to prioritize on the resume:

- Maintained price files, created dashboards, supported quoting

- Hands-on experience with Excel, SQL, Power BI, or CPQ tools

- Mentions of working directly with sales or finance teams

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Interview questions to ask:

- How do you validate pricing data before releasing it?

- Tell me about a time you spotted something in the data that others missed.

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What to listen for:

- Comfort with imperfect data and a clear logic trail

- Ownership of outcomes, not just task execution

- Curiosity about what the data means — not just how to move it

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How context affects the bar:

- In distribution, expect messier data and more exceptions

- In SaaS, look for familiarity with price tiers, feature bundles, usage metrics

- In retail or ecommerce, speed and automation typically matter more than theory

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Manager / Director

What to prioritize on the resume:

- Led pricing initiatives, tool rollouts, or policy redesign

- Experience working cross-functionally to improve margin or quote performance

- Quantified business impact (GP%, mix shift, win rate, time-to-quote)

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Interview questions to ask:

- What did you own versus support in your last pricing project?

- Walk me through a pricing change that touched multiple teams.

- If you joined a company without a formal pricing function, what would you do in the first 90 days?

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What to listen for:

- Evidence of leading through friction — not just building in a vacuum

- Stakeholder awareness and sequencing

- Real impact, not just surface-level participation

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How context affects the bar:

- In PE-backed businesses, look for roadmap thinking and comfort moving fast

- In complex sales environments, test for ability to navigate incentives and channel conflict

- In growth-stage tech, prioritize execution bias and cross-functional agility

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VP / Head of Pricing 

What to prioritize on the resume:

- Built a pricing function — team, process, policy, tooling, reporting

- Clear commercial ownership — pricing decisions tied to business impact

- Comfort operating at the executive level and influencing product, sales, and finance

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Interview questions to ask:

- What does a healthy pricing function look like — and how do you build one?

- What did you say no to in your last role, and why?

- Tell me about a pricing decision that impacted multiple functions and how you navigated it.

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What to listen for:

- Prioritization under constraint — do they sequence or try to fix everything?

- Political awareness — how they balance stakeholder needs without losing the pricing thread

- Evidence of true ownership — do they talk like a builder or a bystander?

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How context affects the bar:

- In industrial or distribution, test for margin rigor and sales credibility

- In SaaS, dig into monetization strategy, usage-based pricing, and the friction points that come with product-led growth (PLG)

- In multi-brand or acquisitive orgs, ask about harmonization, integration, and governance

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Use a Situational Question to See How They Think 

Resumes are backward-looking. Structured questions are narrow. But a real-world situation — even a simple one — can reveal how a candidate thinks, what they prioritize, and how they handle uncertainty.

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Question:

One of your commercial leaders is frustrated. They feel like your current pricing approach is slowing deals down and missing opportunities to win strategic accounts. How would you respond?

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This works whether the candidate is joining as an analyst, a manager, or a VP. Their response will scale with their experience — and that’s exactly the point.

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What to listen for:

- Analysts might focus on digging into the data, double-checking logic, or offering to re-run analysis to support sales

- Managers should talk about gathering perspectives, identifying root causes, and balancing commercial and margin goals

- VPs should frame it as a cross-functional issue — addressing both communication and structural gaps in policy, tooling, or alignment

You’re not looking for the perfect answer. You’re listening for how they handle ambiguity, whether they think commercially, and how they engage with peers who don’t always agree with them.

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Final Thought 

You don’t have to be a pricing expert to hire one. But you do need to ask questions that reflect the real work the role requires — in your systems, your org, and your constraints.

At Jennings, we help finance, sales, product, and private equity leaders scope, assess, and build pricing teams that land. The strongest hires don’t just know pricing — they know how to make it work inside your business.