On Hiring: Stop Screening for Experience

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A tradition in job postings that has held on longer than I’ve been in the marketplace is the standard job req. section of required experience, listing years of experience and/or like industry experience. Even in Silicon Valley, with our growing emphasis on outcomes over outputs I find it strange that more have not realized that experience is merely an output, often with zero correlation to outcomes. An extensive study cited by Harvard Business Review shows that experience doesn’t predict a new hire’s success at all.

What we really want is quality performance—something we cannot measure based on whether someone has 10 years of experience or has worked in a like industry or role before. I recently saw a provocative posting about how meaningless years of experience is (I can’t recall the source): “Think about the most difficult person you’ve ever worked with—that person’s resume already does or will soon list ‘10 years of experience.’”

To illustrate how meaningless measuring candidates by experience is, imagine my wife and I used a similar measurement when deciding where to go for dinner on date night.

”Well, I know that place on 5th Street has been making food for 10+ years, whereas this one has only been around for 6 months.”

”This restaurant can seat 100 people, so it must be better than the one that seats 75.”

”Let’s look up which downtown restaurant has the chef with the most years of experience and eat there!”

Screening or rating candidates based on experience is as counterintuitive as choosing restaurants based on quantitative measures—we want to eat at the place with the best food and service. It’s about the quality!

It’s usually easier to screen or score candidates based on experience than the art of evaluating quality, but easier doesn’t mean better. Someone with 10 years of experience may have been doing mediocre work for a decade. If I find someone with experience at a fintech SaaS that tells me nothing about their ability to be innovative—maybe they’ve become so intrenched in the way things are already done that they won’t bring any fresh perspectives.

Many may share my opinion of evaluating the candidates that make it through the recruiter screening, but how many great candidates never make it past that screening? I’ve had designers on my team with months of experience who produced better outcomes and quality than designers with years of experience, of which my team would never have benefited if our screening process never allowed their resume to get to my ‘desk.’

I challenge you to take a hard look at your job reqs. and consider rewriting the experience section to focus not on time spent in a job, team size, or industry, but rather on the actual qualities and performance your team wants and needs.

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