In a review of Talent, Edward Nevraumont says:
Everywhere I have worked, the organization’s hiring processes were tilted in favor of experience over intelligence. Interviews include behavioral questions or assessments of specific skills. Rarely is anyone on the hiring loop running problem-solving sessions that require the candidate to demonstrate how they might deal with the real-world challenges they will encounter in the workplace.
That's been my experience too. And for a great many jobs it's fine. The problem is that it often goes way too far.
In sales, specifically, hiring managers not only want someone with a good track record, but a good track record within their highly specific niche of the market. This is a mistake. Just pick the best sales person! A lot of people are surprised by how quickly a new hire with smarts can get up to speed with an unfamiliar product and an unfamiliar set of clients (resellers, distributors, large customers, etc.).
I recall one especially frustrating experience trying to hire a VP of marketing to replace me. One candidate struck me as exceptionally smart, qualified, and with excellent savvy. But she didn't work in our industry. She worked in the software industry, but not our little piece of it.
I didn't think that mattered. She obviously knew the basics of selling business software, and our particular type was hardly so esoteric that it would take years to learn. Anyone talented could pick up the basics in a few months and be 90% up to speed within half a year. In the meantime, the entire rest of the company would be around to keep things on track.
But I lost that battle. My peers just couldn't stomach the thought of hiring someone whose experience was so far afield. I'm still pretty sure it was a mistake. Relevant experience is obviously important, but don't insist on it being hyper-relevant.
POSTSCRIPT: Then again, maybe they didn't like her for some reason they didn't want to admit. Maybe they didn't like the idea of a woman VP. Maybe they didn't like the color of dress she wore. Who knows?
Or maybe she wasn't as smart and qualified as I thought. Perhaps they saved me from making a bad mistake.
That's consistent with my experience looking for work in the corporate sector. Lots of hiring managers and HR teams who are looking for someone has worked in that exact role, or in a more senior role.
Your experience is impressive and thank you for meeting with us, but we are really looking for someone who has been in an executive position within this narrow slice of the industry and is willing to take a demotion to join our amazing company.
Lol, ok sure, good luck.
I am a paralegal. The version I see is in case management software. There are several standard packages out there. Having experience is the specific package a firm uses is a big leg up in getting hired. This is despite their all being pretty similar. If you have used one, you can figure out the basics of another by puttering around in it for an hour or so. But the industry behaves as if this were arcane knowledge requiring vast experience. This may be a holdover from the days when senior lawyers regarded computers as magic boxes, but nowadays all but the oldest have been using personal computers their entire careers, or even their entire lives. It is ridiculous.
Yes, you should hire both smarts and savvy and experience, when possible. Experience is extremely important in certain jobs where you can't fake it. I worked in an industry for a long time where I both made the products and sold them, and you could tell the people who really knew and used the products from a mile away. You couldn't fake your way to that knowledge, and misleading someone had the potential to get them killed. It is funny to return to trade shows and see many people still there I used to work with decades ago because their experience is critical to sales. And it isn't always something that can be picked up by someone just smart and savvy--they have to really know how the stuff works in the real world and be able to answer any and all questions about it.
It's a million times worse when the job is relatively new. I watched places try to hire library directors for fully online libraries over a decade ago. They only wanted to hire people who had already done the job, which back then was a tiny pool. They just could not imagine that a director or manager from a brick and mortar would be able to figure it out, even though nearly every brick and mortar had a huge online collection and some distance students.
That left us with some really bad options.
There's an upside to hiring candidates from outside a particular product niche. They can bring approaches and market insights that are well developed and demonstrated but not conventional in the new area, where conventional hires bring only conventional outlooks and practices.
In my own limited experience, the company not only wants someone who is familiar with some particular software, but is certified in its use (or at the very least, can get certified almost immediately upon hire.) This goes to liability and contract bids, of course. And company short-sidedness.
How interesting. In software/IT, for programmers, this used to be the rule also. But then with the advent of "the coding interview" (started at Google, spread throughout the industry), that's changed, and frankly, it doesn't matter how much experience you have, if you can't solve those coding and systems-design problems in the interview.
I was had a coding test where I was required to write out code longhand using pencil and paper-- yes you read that right. That's as utterly stupid as telling an accountant he could not use a calculator for the math, only an abacus. Needless to say I did not get the job.
People hate risks. They avoid them. If you make the risky decision, it might work out, and you look great. But if it doesn't work out, everyone will second-guess you, and look for reasons that (in this case) hiring the safer candidate would have avoided the problem.
And if you hire the safe candidate, and it doesn't work out, there's no vulnerability. It's hard to second-guess.
Careerism is the thing here, IMHO
Plus the upside just isn't that great. If they work out everyone is going to take credit or forget who was pushing the hire. The downside is much greater.
"Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan."
Nobody gets fired for picking IBM.
Downplaying experience to insignificance is just an invitation for making new openings no-show jobs for family members of the management & HR teams.
It's exactly what happened at Milwaukee Enroll Services in 2009-15.
I think most of what is going on is actually a "Level above me" effect.
Most people not only are average, they have only a very vague clue about what non-average looks like. They can understand and judge a person on their knowledge (or lack there-of) of type XZ sprockets; they cannot distinguish between someone 10 points smarter than them and someone 30 points smarter.
They literally cannot see the difference between these candidates, in the same way that I probably could not tell the difference between a slightly fashionable dresser and someone who is competent to edit a fashion magazine.
I'm not sure how you fix this. You really need someone strong (and capable of detecting talent) at the top who is able to populate the top two tiers with people similarly strong and capable of detecting talent, and with the self-confidence and bull-headedness to hire based on this sort of generic "seems intelligent", over-riding colleagues.
And of course something like that can never last. The colleagues who were over-ridden will seethe, try to sabotage the new hire, and forget all the times the process led to great results, but will trumpet to the skies the one time it led to a failure.
This is one thing I hate at most companies. Most people do not want to hire anyone who is smarter than themselves or has more experience. Time and again I have seen people overlooked because they were considered "overqualified," which is shorthand for they might be better than those already there making them look bad. My default position is look for the smartest person qualified for the job, and yes experience is part of that qualification for some jobs. But, bottom line is hiring is an art, not a science. In the end a lot of decisions are made based on gut feelings, at least at smaller companies.
I worked at one company for 20+ years. Every time someone left, the new hire was "better, stronger" than the former employee. I used to say that at this rate, all our newer employees would be super human. Sometimes jobs would be open for quite a while, while management looked for just the right person. Then we would joke, that the ad should read, " Can you walk on water? Then you might be the right person for this job." I think a lot of times companies overlook people who would be very good, because they don't have the exact qualifications they think are needed, and they don't look at the transferability of skills.
Qualifications for a job are not set to help you get the best person for the job, but are set so you don't get fired for picking the wrong person. "How could I know, they came from such a good school..."
> Then again, maybe they didn't like her for some reason they didn't want to admit.
This seems like the answer to me, at least a lot of the time. I base this on experience at both very small and very large employers.
When I started my career, I worked for small businesses - my first several jobs were under 50 employees, mostly well under. Newhires were big deals - when you're 10 people, a bad hire can kill the firm.
Particularly at one place, we were all young, including the owner. It was fairly high-trust - we all knew each other well and it was very low hierarchy. Nobody was terribly concerned with HR-related legal risks - at least amongst ourselves, people talked pretty openly.
And even there, some people were black-balled for reasons that didn't make any sense. I'm certain people didn't want to admit their real reasons, I suspect out of embarrassment.
I'm now employed by a company owned by a Fortune 100. I go through yearly training on how to talk about this stuff, write about this stuff, etc. And then I talk to lawyers who repeat it all and add other nuance.
And I'm certain people don't admit their real reasons, because we're trained not to.
I think many of you are missing an important point. Not only are you hiring someone who can hit it out of the park, but you’re also hiring someone who will stay, and work within the company, and grow. Sometimes the smartest person is the least retainable in the long term. When experience is ultimately what provides value, those that leave too quickly have none.
No.
The vast majority of people are hired because they know somebody, not because they are able to do or have ever done the job. As Donald Trump and Elon Musk have amply demonstrated, you can be dumb as a sack of doorknobs and a criminal to boot and still be successful if you have a good network.
Yeah, knowing somebody isn't always the key - I've gotten some jobs with no "in" - but at least half the time it is. Classic example was the time I was the only candidate for a fill-in position. They just wanted somebody who could do the job, and while I didn't know them I was recommended by the person they really wanted for the job (who wasn't available), so they took her word for it. Most relaxed job interview I ever had.
But I'm amused by the notion of wanting somebody trained in the particular software system, even though they're all alike. In my field, software handles the exact same technical data and the only difference is the interface. Further, we're always getting a new one and have to learn it from scratch. Being trained in a particular one would be no help. My line at interviews was that I'd learned a dozen of these programs and I could certainly learn another one.