Why years' experience on your job descriptions is hurting your hiring.

When I worked in Germany we never listed the required number of years experience in a job description, to help prevent age discrimination. So why is it usually the first bullet point on a job description in the U.S, and does it help or harm the recruitment process? Years of experience is a reasonable proxy when you’re talking to a recruiter to give them a flavour of the type of profile you’re looking for, but if you’re looking at it to measure a candidate’s  likelihood to succeed in a role you’re looking at the wrong metric. The correlation between years of experience and proficiency in a role is tenuous at best. By setting years of experience as a requirement we immediately exclude a huge swathe of a likely very capable talent pool. In addition, we actively deter high potential candidates from applying.  Here’s why we should probably stop this practice altogether:

Diversity 

Women are less likely than men to apply for roles that they aren’t 100% qualified for. According to this HBR article women won’t apply if they don’t meet all the specified job criteria, even if they know they can do the role. The article goes on to suggest women are more likely to see job requirements as rules, whereas men see them as suggestions. We could argue that this is a wider issue, and more needs to be done to correct this imbalance, but removing this unnecessary barrier to entry to women feels like a good start.

Linear Career Path ≠ Best Career Path

Women and the younger, more diverse population are statistically more likely than men to take a non-linear career path. You could argue that a good recruiter or hiring manager will be able to fish out, and accumulate the years’ experience in a CV, but we live in a world of imperfect hiring managers, and recruiters, and we increasingly use tools that take shortcuts for us. People are moving away from a traditional career path so they look less like this:

And more like this:

A focus on years of experience, forces us to overvalue candidates who have taken a linear career path, when really we should be embracing diversity of experience and exposure to different areas as a huge asset in any candidate. 

Tech Degradation 

In real terms I have over a decade of experience in Excel, but I would bet someone who has just come out of a two week online Excel course would be far better at efficiently creating a fully functional pivot table. When it comes to tech if you’re not using it, you’re losing it. There are many areas in technology where it is actually counterintuitive to have more years’ experience as the potential for your knowledge to have become outdated and/or ingrained with errors increases. Take programming for example, it has repeatedly been shown that there is very little correlation between years of experience and skill in programming. You could spend years at a company learning to use a language the wrong way, where six months immersed in a company using modern frameworks in a well structured codebase could be much more valuable. 

Quality over Quantity  

According to another HBR article, experience doesn’t predict a new hire’s success. Years’ experience doesn’t tell us anything about the significance or quality of that experience. In many cases 5 years’ experience is just 1 year of  experience repeated over and over again. Would you value 1 year of experience in a high growth start up with a wide scope of responsibilities as highly as 1 year of experience in a huge bureaucratic organization with a narrow role? Probably not. So why do we usually have years’ experience at the top of the list of requirements? 

Aptitude  

By prioritizing years of experience we ignore the fact that people learn at vastly different rates. It doesn’t allow us to give precedence to fast learners that are dedicated to self-development, those who may be earlier in their career but spend their spare time studying the latest industry trends and attending seminars. When companies are looking to make senior hires the easiest route is to look for people with many years’ relevant experience under their belt and a similar title to what they’re looking for. In high growth companies those hires often start out strong and quickly fall short. Frequently they struggle to adapt, or they are hired into a role where they don’t yet have a team in place, and they inevitably fail because they aren’t used to, or willing to be hands on. This happens when hiring managers have placed too much value in  years’ experience and overlooked how long it took them to get there i.e. their ability to adjust, learn and grow, rather than focusing on those candidates that have consistently been placed in roles that are over their heads, that are able to rise to new challenges and learn quickly.

 Employer Brand

When strong, high potential candidates look at your job description, and see that they fall short of the year requirement they are less likely to apply, especially if they are women, this much we know. But have you considered the impression of your company the candidate takes away, and the impact on your brand?  The job description is a candidate’s window into your company culture. High impact candidates are deterred by companies that think you need 10 years’ +  experience in a role to do it well. It sends a message that the company is outdated in its practices and unwilling to invest in its team with learning and development opportunities, especially if the requirements are deemed to be excessive or lengthy.

 So how can we do better?

Removing years of experience from all your job descriptions is a good start.  It’ll widen and diversify your talent pool, and help change our mindset so we look more at distance travelled rather than just time spent traveling. Part of what holds our recruiting capabilities back is our inability to broaden our beliefs of what good looks like. What is experience? Is it simply years endured or years engaged? In order to adopt more progressive recruiting practices we must endeavor to understand who people are and what they bring on multiple levels, what they bring to the team, what they add to the role, not just how they “fit” and how their profile matches the person who was there before. 

Any recruitment process would benefit from using  data to find out what factors really are indicators of success in any given role and look for people that have those capabilities.  Warren Buffett for example, has said that the three traits he always looks for in a new hire are intelligence, initiative and integrity. The key with hiring is not to look backwards but forwards. We should make hiring decisions based on what people will bring to an organization rather than what they claim to have done in the past.

Experience isn't a bad thing. Good quality experience can add a lot of value to the team, people with experience are more likely to ask insightful questions and have the ability to think strategically. But hiring for years’ experience can be expensive, and often leads to complacent hires. Someone that has done it all before may be less likely to be open to new ideas, adaptable, and excited about the challenges you face. So let’s stop ruling out the less experienced, highly motivated, more diverse hires at the very first stage of the hiring process.