Everyone likes having the newest technology, and every company looks for efficiencies – but really? In hiring? As Jack Welch used to say:
What could possibly be more important than who gets hired?
And the kicker is – everyone’s doing it wrong, because experience no longer matters.
Yep, I went there. I even wrote a book about it.
Most businesses still look at employees and job candidates through the same lens as they did two or three decades ago. They review résumés and interview using the same old, tired questions. They look for experience and technical competency as if these are the only criteria needed in this world of massive and constant change.
Today, we are confronted with a multi-cultural and multi-generational workforce with investors and shareholders demanding more profits, lower expenses, and better efficiency. In an era of social media, every employee and every customer are broadcasters, having the ability and ease to shout their complaints or problems to millions of people.
Today’s employees are significantly different from those who came before, and employers have significantly different needs from what they ever had before.
There are two major excuses offered by companies who wrongly insist that experience is the most essential factor in hiring.
"Because that’s the way we’ve always done it."
A bank in the southeast U.S. once asked me to help with an issue with their tellers. Seems that they were having a problem hiring and retaining bank tellers. It took me 5 minutes to spot the issue – a college degree was required. Really? For a $10 an hour bank teller position? Turns out the CEO liked having employees with college degrees – that was the way it was done when his father (and grandfather) ran the bank. But the insistence there be a college degree was the reason many potential applicants declined to interview, and also why existing tellers bolted when the first better offer emerged.
It took 5 minutes to find the issue and about a month to talk the CEO into changing the policy. A college degree is a piece of paper and proves many qualities, but being a great bank teller isn’t one of them. I instead re-focused the bank’s hiring managers into looking for a genuine customer service orientation; a values system aligned with the banks culture; and a hunger to work at the job. Desire and passion are very good motivators. By opening the position up to a larger pool of candidates, turnover decreased and hiring became easier. Within a year, there was even an uptick in customer satisfaction!
"So the new employee can ‘hit the ground running’".
This is code for 'I don’t want to spend time training this person.' Yet there’s going to be a significant amount of training no matter what. A CPA firm I work with requires of its newly hired CPA’s to have at least 3 years of experience in a certain software program. The problem is that the software dramatically changes every few years, so there inevitably must be significant training or re-training anyway. And why 3 years of experience? What’s the difference between 1 and 2 years or 3 years? Very little, in my opinion.
I learned the lesson about over-relying on experience nearly 20 years ago. I was managing a sales and service operation for an insurance company – about 30 employees. I was having problems hiring an inside sales representative. After 6 weeks, my boss called and told me he’d hired a person for me. I thanked him and asked for her resume and when I would get to interview her. He indicated I’d forfeited that chance – I’d meet her when she completed corporate training.
When I met finally met her, I was impressed by her desire, and during the first day our client clearly responded to her positive and friendly attitude. So I called my boss and asked to (at last) see her resume. Turns out there wasn’t a resume. She was the checker at his grocery store. He’d been going there for years and was impressed by the way she remembered his name and her friendliness.
And my boss was right: no way I would have even interviewed her, because I wanted insurance “experience”. I missed out on a whole number of great potential candidates because I over-focused on experience.
I’m not saying to eliminate experience and education entirely (you wouldn’t want a high school student performing your brain surgery); but I am saying you need to re-think exactly how critical (and how much) is necessary for your hire. Experience only proves the past – attitude, agility, and alignment predict the future.
Artificial Intelligence might be able to screen for attitude, agility and alignment in the future, but they can’t and aren’t doing it now.
Hiring is critical. Not only do you want to hand-select employees who are likely to stay on board for more than a little while, but you also want employees who will blow you out of the water in terms of performance. You need to find employees who have the intangible values and characteristics that your company needs, and you must also find those who will flourish in the face of change. You won’t find that reading a resume.
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