The ‘Years of Experience’ Problem
When was the last time you read – or wrote – a job posting without “X years of experience” as one of the qualifications?
Length of experience is the absolute worst measure of a candidate’s qualification for a job. Which is strange, when it’s so ubiquitous. How could something so pointless become so common?
In my opinion (which is sure to be unpopular with some), it’s laziness. It’s there because it’s easy.
Requiring a certain number of years of experience makes it easy to screen applications in or out. It’s easy, because it’s so clear-cut: the candidate either has that length of experience, or they don’t. It’s also easy, because it’s always been done that way.
If it’s easy, why is it so problematic?
Well, to begin with, there are situations like this. It was this tweet that got me thinking about this in the first place:
You’d have to be a pretty talented developer to have experience with software dating to before it was developed. (Or, I suppose, a time traveler.)
There are similar parallels in other fields. It’s easy to forget that Twitter and Facebook have only been in the public sphere since around 2007. TikTok is just a baby, with international use dating back only to about 2018. I’ve seen more than a few job postings where the company is asking for more years of experience with these social media platforms than it’s possible to have.
I could also go on for paragraphs about the all-too-common requirement for ‘3 to 5 years of experience’, even for supposedly entry-level jobs. But I’ll just roll my eyes and leave it at that.
What does it even mean?
The biggest problem, though, is that length of experience is just not a reliable indicator of anything. Years of experience don’t have any consistent bearing on someone’s capability, or potential performance.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed candidates who – on paper – have fifteen years of experience doing a particular thing. In reality, though, what some of these people actually have is one year of experience, fifteen times over. There’s no growth or progression, just repetition. And when it comes right down to it, a candidate could have been doing that thing really poorly for fifteen years. Just because they’ve been doing something a long time doesn’t mean that they’ve been doing it well.
The reverse is also true. I’ve interviewed candidates who were junior on paper, but who had packed more learning, development and growth into a single year than some other people have done in decades. I’m not sure about you, but I know which candidate I’d prefer to hire onto my team.
Yes, I know that years of experience aren’t the only way companies determine qualification when they’re hiring. In interviews with hiring managers, candidates have to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. Some companies go further, using pre-hire skill testing to make sure the person can actually do the job. Even references (when companies check them) can offer a bit of third-party validation of a candidate’s abilities.
It’s time to leave ‘years of experience’ behind.
If you’re on the job market and you see it listed in a job posting as one of the criteria, my advice to you: ignore it. Unless you’re in a line of work where every single person with five years of experience would be measurably more qualified than every other person with only three years of experience (and I honestly can’t think of an example), pretend it’s not even there. Apply anyway, and show in your application why the experience you have has more than sufficiently qualified you for the job.
If you recruit and hire, ditch this as a qualification criteria in job postings. If you’re asked by a client (internal or external) to include a certain number of years of experience as a requirement, ask why. What would that length of experience tell you? What are some other ways to determine the capabilities of applicants, so that you don’t have to include it at all?
We can do better than ‘years of experience’. Let’s start today.
Photo by Behnam Norouzi on Unsplash