Does the experience can predict the success of the new employees? I am not sure at all!
The hiring based on candidate’s experience is a norm in recruitment. So, except the entry level positions, most of the job offers required a good level of experience related with the job to fill. According to a survey of Harvard Business Review, more than 80% of job offers listed indicate a strong preference for the candidates having a good level of experience. This is based on the principle wanting that candidate having more experience will be best quality employees than the ones who have less experience.
But does the experience actually predict the success of the new employees? I am not so sure about that.
According to different studies, a lot of years of experience do not permit to predict exactly if a candidate will success in a job in a new company. For example, another study classified the professional experience at the 15th position in order to predict precisely the success the next professional success.
Here are 5 reasons to support my position:
A new company, it’s a different culture.
If the experience of the people mainly comes from their long passage in their last company, it could be possible that they may need a similar culture to success. Despite all your efforts during an assessment of their application, they may not be able to adapt to this different culture, which will have a direct impact on their performance.
Experience level relatively high could increase your salary cost.
The potential number of candidates having a lot of relevant years of experience being usually low, this will have the effect to increase your salary cost. Finally, if their level of performance isn’t superior to a candidate less experimented, each new employee will have a lower return on investment.
People’s years of experience can’t reflect their level of experience.
This is a mistake to assume that an experienced candidate will automatically have a high-performance level. Because if the candidate’s experience would be at a performance level below the average, it’s likely that he will maintains this lower level of performance in his new job.
Levels of experience unnecessarily required increase the recruitment cost.
Indeed, the number of potentials candidates having a lot of relevant years of experience being smaller, your recruitment cost will be higher. And because people are more difficult to recruit, you will more confide the recruitment of few positions to externals specialists (like us), increasing by the same time the recruitment cost of the highly experimented talents.
Candidates having a lot of years of experience could be less capable of doing a slowly transition.
Moving from a company to another needs a lot of adjustments which could have a negative impact on the productivity. All the externals hiring needs a learning and few adjustments. However, few experienced candidates could be more set in their habits and their attitude and therefore, being less capable to make the transition.
In summary, I don’t think you should avoid using the experience as hiring criteria, but rather you stop assuming that a large experience means automatically that the candidate has more capacity. You should also be more open to consider the less experienced talents who learn quickly. In a world with a constant and quick evolution, everything happened few years ago already could now be only old history and is not guarantor of the future.
