Years of Experience - Specific Years Don't Matter

"This person has to have 10 years of experience in finance (or sales, or marketing or whatever you want to insert here). My follow up question: "what if they have 9.5 years"? The response: "well that's ok too." My second follow up question: "what if someone has 7 years of experience being incredibly successful in exactly our role, has learned from an incredible Leader and will bring creativity to our company?" The response to that: "oh, ya, that would be great!"

I'm left doing this ??♂?. To be clear, you aren't going to hire a VP of Marketing who has 2 years of experience in marketing. The point though is to look for those all important indicators of success. Don't focus on specific years of experience.

To me, it's far more about what someone has accomplished during their career. Have they worked for both a start up and a larger company? That's important if you are looking for someone to build and scale something. Have they built an Engineering team that includes both mobile and web based Developers? That's important if that's the specific needs of a new Engineering team. What type of leadership skills have they learned from other leaders? That's important as you build a diverse leadership team. Have they taken a company from pre-IPO to IPO? There are nuances to those situations which is why that can be importnat. Have they grown sales through certain strategies? That kind of speaks for itself but wouldn't it be nice to have someone who has implemented multiple different sales strategies and can now bring the best one to your company? When you list your "qualifications", these are the items you should be focussing on. After all, that's exactly who you are looking for.