How Should We Hire?

Hiring decisions will always come under fire from all corners, for as long as have recruiters and job-seekers. But that’s not the focus today. The question I want to ask here is, what should we hire for? Should we hire experience or for experience? I will explain shortly.

We are in a time where experience is becoming one of the most critical things company recruiters look for when they are hiring to fill a role. They want to know how many years of experience you have garnered, what kind of skills you have acquired from previous roles, and how many years have been spent in such roles.

Some want to know what top gear achievements you have from your previous employer. Why did you leave your former employer? And so on.

But do the answers tell you how a person will perform on a job? Or are they questions recruiters ask to fill time? That a person has seven years relevant industry experience in that role, is it guarantee that they can deliver on your company’s vision?

To answer that question, I want to reference something I read from the book “Good to Great: why some companies leap, and others don’t.” An interesting point to note here is that the chapter about how a company’s success is highly determined by having the right people on board said little or nothing about years of industry experience.

I’ll take this excerpt from a page in the book.

“One good-to-great executive said that his best hiring decisions often came from people without industry or business experience. In one case, he hired a manager who’d been captured twice during the Second World War and escaped both times. He said, ‘I thought anyone who could do that shouldn’t have trouble with business.”

Did you laugh out? Or did you nod your head vigorously in agreement with him? Well, I did both when I read that excerpt. In this case, the man may not have been hired for job experience but for life experience. And I agree that anyone captured twice during a war and escaped in both instances has what it takes to succeed as a business manager.

There is a reason it is said, “People are not your greatest asset; the right people are,” but the reason is certainly not about the number of years of industry experience a person has. As you probably know, the quality of life experiences a person has gone through says much about the quality of character and personality. But If you are trying to decipher the kind of life experience the person has that may make him thrive on the job, then the emphasis on how many years they have worked in a role may not give you all the answers you seek.