“I need someone with experience.”
I hear this a lot when talking about hiring. And I get it. You don’t have six months to get someone up to speed. You’ve probably hired someone before who needed way more help than you expected.
So this time you want someone who can come in and do the job.
But I think it’s worth getting really specific about what “experience” actually means before making it a requirement.
What do they need to know on day one? What would be difficult or expensive for you to teach? What could a capable person reasonably learn in 30, 60 or 90 days?
Because sometimes when we say we need experience, what we’re really saying is: “I need someone I don’t have to train.”
Those are two different problems.
Maybe the job truly requires five years of hands-on experience. But maybe what you really mean is: “Our manager doesn’t have time to train someone. There’s no onboarding process. The only way to learn is to shadow someone and hope they explain things.”
That’s not an experience problem. That’s a training problem.
And when you solve it by only hiring people with prior experience, you’re not fixing the system. You’re just hoping the next person happens to have what you need already built in.
Every additional requirement removes people from your candidate pool. You might be eliminating someone with good judgment and the ability to learn quickly, simply because they haven’t already done the exact job somewhere else.
Before saying, “I need someone with experience,” ask this instead:
What must they already know to succeed? And what should we be able to teach them once they arrive?
If you can’t answer that clearly, you don’t have an experience problem. You have a clarity problem.