Experience and Education Considered Harmful?
I read a blog post this morning that gets it exactly right! Jeff’s blog Talentism seems overall to have a lot of good information about the hiring process.
But this post in particular is fantastically right. Every hiring decision is a risk. You risk thousands of dollars on the belief that the person you hire is going to have the knowledge, skills, and talents required to do the job, and that they are going to fit in. According to Jeff, “Years of experience and education… are bad indicators of potential and unreliable measures of risk.”
This is my experience too. I once hired a contract programmer based on his experience and a recommendation from a non-technical friend for a 10-20 hour job. By the time it was all over with I’m convinced that he spent well over 100 hours writing a simple JavaScript form verification routine. Because this was a contract job, and we agreed on a possible range of hours up-front we didn’t loose a lot of money, but it took more of my time that I could afford, and got done a week and a half later than it should have. But if this were a permanent hire position, I would have been in the terrible position of having to let this new employee go after just a week or two on the job.
So, if your hiring process puts too much weight on experience and education you are still open to people who are just not a good fit for that job category, and you are also closed off to some people with exactly the right knowledge and talents who for one reason or another doesn’t reach you minimum thresholds.
The moral of this story is to:
- do your homework
- test your candidate’s knowledge and experience directly
- ask the right kind of open-ended questions in the interview — and know what kind of responses you are looking for in advance!
- and if possible, do auditions where the candidate gets to actually demonstrate their abilities to the team.
The job of finding the right people who are going to excel in the particular job you give them is hard enough, but focusing on experience and education as the best predictors of performance will just make it harder, since as Jeff says they “are bad indicators of potential”.