Experience is Over-Rated!

OK, that title may be a bit provocative. Of course experience is important! How dare anyone challenge the notion!

Well, before you get too indignant, let me clarify. I’m not saying experience is a bad thing; the right kind of experience really is important. But all too often, employers and job seekers make assumptions about experience that don’t actually serve their best interests, and should reconsider what to focus on and emphasize.

How Employers Tend to View Experience

Let me start by defining what I mean by “employers”. Here, the term encompasses all organizations and individuals involved in the hiring process: public corporations, private companies, non-profits, HR departments, recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, etc. 

When it’s time to hire, employers create a list of requirements for a job position. That list will usually include a requirement for “experience”, typically quantified in terms of some number of years. The experience requirement may specify certain activities: “4 years writing SQL-compatible database software in C++”, “6 years performing open-heart surgeries”. Sometimes the requirement is so aspirational that it is completely unrealistic: “5 years experience” in a technology that has only been on the market for 2 years. Frequently, the experience requirement does not specify what activities were expected. But don’t let that mislead you—there ARE expectations, and very few candidates will actually meet them.

What are those expectations? And why is there an experience requirement, anyway? It’s simple: employers seek to minimize their risk, so they look for people who have already proven themselves successful at doing the job for which they’re being hired. To some degree, there is an assumption that a certain number of years of experience in a job demonstrates that a candidate was well qualified to do that job, but that may or may not be true. (Candidates make a similar assumption, as discussed below.)

The experience requirement can result in a rather tight hiring funnel, especially if the work is highly specialized. Unfortunately, employers frequently lack faith that candidates whose experience involved similar (but not identical) job duties or industries or markets can successfully handle the nuances of a slightly different job, and they often screen out many strong candidates early in the process, without taking a close look.

Why Screening Candidates Based on Specific Experience Criteria May Be Misguided

There’s a fundamental problem with basing a hiring decision on experience with a particular tool, technology, or technique: it may soon become irrelevant. Nowadays, the pace of change is very fast, and it’s only getting faster. Today’s tools, technologies, and best practices may become obsolete in just a few years.

Examples of this are abundant. Invasive major surgeries with weeks-long recovery periods are being rapidly replaced by laparoscopic and robot-assisted surgery techniques that reduce hospital stays to just a few days. SQL and on-premise databases may have been hot before the turn of the millennium, but the market has since moved on to NoSQL, Hadoop, and cloud storage. Most software shops have transformed (or tried to transform) from the waterfall model of project management, which was dominant in the 70s and 80s, to agile development practices that deliver better results faster. And countless teachers who were highly effective in a classroom setting have been forced by a global pandemic to quickly learn to do their work in a virtualized learning environment.

Thus, for many modern jobs, ability to learn and adapt is the most important attribute to seek in a candidate. Employers will do well to look at the details of a candidate’s experience, and assess how much that experience demonstrates learning and adaptation. A startup may be better off hiring a 45-year-old who served in the Peace Corps and taught herself HTML than a recent MIT graduate who is fluent in multiple programming languages, because the Peace Corp veteran likely had to deal with unfamiliar environments, improvise solutions in resource-constrained situations, learn to communicate with people of very different backgrounds, and more. The skills developed in those experiences are likely to be underdeveloped in the MIT graduate, and are likely to be of greater value to the startup as it navigates its uncertain future.

What Job-Seekers Get Wrong About Experience

How many résumés and LinkedIn profiles have you seen that lead off with something like “Experienced Project Manager” or “14+ Years of Experience”? And how do you react—with a sense of awe, or with a shrug and a reaction of “so what?” Most people I know are not too impressed by language like that, because the value of the experience is IMPLIED rather than EXPLICIT. In other words, there’s a vague assertion of value, rather than clear evidence of value.

Of course, these job-seekers know that they’ve learned a lot in their career, and they expect that others will infer that also. But that’s an unrealistic expectation; it’s kind of like saying “trust me, I can handle this” without providing any compelling evidence to support that claim. An employer doesn’t know if you were a creative, innovative leader who made important things happen, or merely a clock-puncher who merely met the minimum requirements of the job. If the candidate doesn’t provide the evidence, a busy employer is unlikely to invest the time and effort into digging for it.

Note that the QUALITY of the experience can be far more important than the QUANTITY of the experience. 3 years serving in different roles in a boutique advertising agency may be deemed more valuable than 10 years preparing routine layouts at a top-tier firm; consider the differences in how the two sets of experiences would develop technical skills, learning skills, creativity, adaptability, interpersonal skills, communication skills, cross-functional management skills, and leadership. Nevertheless, as noted above, employers will often be expecting a specific number of years doing specific tasks, and it’s the candidate’s responsibility to clearly and concisely communicate how their experiences and accomplishments match up to the employer’s actual needs and problems, both now and in the future.

How Job Seekers Can Better Position Their Experience

For your experience to be impactful, you need to present it in a way that resonates with employers. They want assurance that you can do the job, and the best way to provide that assurance is to present clear evidence. I advise job seekers to find all instances of the words “Experience” and “Experienced” in their résumés, and replace those vague, unimpressive terms with specific, quantified results that serve as concrete evidence of value created, skills gained, and lessons learned.

For decades, career coaches have taught candidates to identify past accomplishments, and to express those in a way that emphasizes results. That makes sense; results sell. An employer wants to know what return they’ll get by investing in an employee, and if the candidate makes that return on investment clear and easy to understand, deciding to hire that candidate gets much easier.

You may have heard of some commonly used models for framing stories, such as Problem, Solution, Result (PSR), or Situation, Opportunity, Action, Result (SOAR), or Situation, Task, Action, Result (STAR). These frameworks can be helpful for getting your thoughts organized, but stories constructed using them tend to be rather long and not very impactful. You might assume that you need to provide context by explaining all the background information, but if you do so, you’ll probably lose attention and impact. My advice: lead with the results and summarize how you got them, abridging or omitting any discussion of problems, situations, or opportunities. If the results and solution are expressed clearly, the situation, problem, and opportunity are implicit. If the results are impressive and your listener is curious, you’ll be asked to provide additional details.

A simple way to test the value of a result is to consider which of two questions it is more likely to evoke: “So what?” or “How so?”. If the value isn’t clear, “So what?” will help you look beyond the result that didn’t resonate and find an outcome that does represent something of value to your audience. (This is often a corollary impact that addresses an underlying need.) Once you hit upon something valuable, your audience is likely to ask how you achieved that outcome – the “How so?” question. At that point, you’ve rung the Value bell, and you can expound on details about the problem and how you solved it.

Here’s an example:

“I led an initiative that re-deployed our legacy CRM system as a cloud application in just 3 months, without any disruption to our daily business!”

“So what?”

“Moving to the cloud meant that we no longer had to buy, deploy, and maintain our own servers, so we freed up an IT person to work on new AI and Big Data initiatives that are critical to our e-commerce strategy.”

“Ah, I see. Seems like a big project. How did you get it done in just one quarter?”

Based on the “So what?” response to the first statement, we learn that it did not convey value effectively. The “How so?” question indicates that value was understood: the value was in getting the IT person redeployed to an important project, not in moving to the cloud. Thus, the revised value statement becomes:

“I freed up an IT specialist to tackle my company’s critical AI and Big Data challenges by migrating the legacy CRM system to a cloud application.”

Prepare Yourself with Relevant Stories

Even a great achievement story will have limited impact if it’s not aligned with the needs of your target audience. Before preparing stories, consider the perspective of the hiring manager. Make a list of the skills and capabilities expected of candidates for the types of jobs that interest you. These include both ‘hard skills’ like ability to write code, and ‘people skills’ (traditionally called ‘soft skills’, despite the fact that they’re hard to master), such as communication, presentation, persuasion, and leadership.  

Now look back on your work experience for examples of accomplishments that demonstrate those skills, and work up stories about those experiences. For each skill on your list, you should have at least one story that provides compelling evidence that you have that skill. If you have multiple stories for each skill, that’s better—when asked about a skill in an interview, you can offer the interviewer a choice of stories. They get to choose the one of greatest interest, and if that story doesn’t end up resonating strongly, you’ve already cued up some alternatives. You’ve subtly conveyed that you’ve got lots of evidence, and that you’re well-prepared for the interview and the job. What employer wouldn’t be impressed?

To get good at telling the stories, I recommend writing them down. Writing requires you to think about the words, phrases, and flow of a story, and subtly implants all of those in your memory. Don’t bother trying to memorize your stories as if they were scripts; that’s too much work, and it will make your stories sound stiff and artificial. The purpose of writing down your stories is to ingrain the framework and key thoughts of each story in your mind, so that you can become comfortable telling a version of it extemporaneously, in a way that sounds natural and makes you come across as confident.

Preparing all these stories may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Writing them down takes time, but you don’t have to do it all in one session. Start by making a list of the titles of the stories you could tell; you can then write up a one-paragraph to one-page version of a story whenever you feel ready to take on the task, and gradually work through your list. Note that a single story typically demonstrates several skills, so you may not need as many stories as you might think. I recommend tagging each story with the skills it demonstrates, so that you can easily choose appropriate stories when you’re asked about a particular skill. Add a new title to your list whenever you remember a notable achievement from your career or accomplish a new one, so that your library of stories continues to grow.

Take Your Story Preparation to the Next Level

Once you’ve gotten good at preparing stories to respond to questions about the expected skills for the job, it’s time to put yourself further ahead of other candidates. It’s time to go beyond expectations.

At the beginning of this article, I asserted that ability to learn and adapt is perhaps the most important skill for candidates nowadays. You might not be asked for evidence of this crucial skill, so you may have to find ways to bring up the topic and provide evidence of your abilities. One way to do this is to ask questions about the future of the role, the company, the technology landscape, and the competitive landscape; the ensuring conversation will often reveal challenges and problems that lie ahead, many of which involve a lot of unknowns. That can give you a perfect opportunity to share a story about how you dealt with a challenging situation that involved unknowns, and explain what you learned and how you turned a difficult situation into a success.

Taking the discussion to the future shows that you’re forward-thinking, and relating stories of relevant prior accomplishments builds confidence that you’re ready to deal with whatever lies ahead.

Got a Good Failure Story?

We learn more from our failures than our successes. Many job seekers have learned this when they were unprepared to respond to an interview question like “What’s your greatest weakness?” or “What was your biggest failure in your career”? Such questions are common, and interviewers don’t ask them just to be mean. They ask them to get a sense of your self-awareness, your honesty, and how you deal with the adversity and setbacks that are inevitable in any job.

Responding effectively to such uncomfortable questions is an art. If you state or imply that you never really failed, you can come across as clueless (“undue modesty is my only fault”), dishonest (c’mon, now, we all make mistakes), or too risk-averse (no guts, no glory). But when you expose real weaknesses and failures, you’re making yourself vulnerable to scrutiny and criticism, and that’s scary.

Here’s the truth: your weaknesses and failures are less important than the actions you take to address them.

With weaknesses, you need to show that you are aware of them, and that you are effective at dealing with them—whether that’s about eliminating the weaknesses themselves or about changing your circumstances so that your weaknesses aren’t a problem. If you aren’t skillful at Excel, you might take a class. If you tend to be late for events, you might adopt new systems and behaviors so that you arrive on time. If you just don’t seem to have creative talents for graphic illustration, you might hire a person for your team who can cover that gap.

When choosing a weakness to discuss, it’s wise to choose one that won’t be likely to create problems later. If you admit you don’t know much about business finance, and say you’re taking a class on it, we can expect that weakness to go away. If you confess that you sometimes lose my temper over little things, and you’re in therapy, we’ll be concerned that you might have an outburst in front of an important customer.

With failures, you need to explain are what you did to limit damage, how you recovered, and what you learned from the experience. Failure is inevitable for anyone who tries new things, so if you aren’t failing, it’s clear that you aren’t trying to learn new things. That’s not how you want to be perceived in an era of accelerating change, or if you have any desire to progress in your career. Learning how to fail and learn quickly and inexpensively has actually become a core competence at companies whose strategy is rooted in innovation, so if you want to work at such a company, you need stories about failure, learning, and recovery.

In my January 2020 article, I share a failure story that I’ve used effectively in interview situations.

Summing Up: Let’s Think Differently About Experience

In this article, I’ve discussed the following topics:

• why many employers should consider not only current skillsets, but also the ability of candidates to learn and adapt quickly
• why job seekers should eliminate the word “Experience” in their résumés, and replace it with evidence (compelling accomplishment statements)
• how job seekers can develop compelling stories that engage employers and move the interview process forward
• ways that job seekers can encourage interviewers to consider skills around learning and adapting, and not just skills acquired to date

I hope you’ve come away with some fresh ideas that will help you move forward more effectively. If you have thoughts to share, please post them in the comments.

Jim Schibler leads product management teams that deliver software experiences customers love, and he coaches professionals on job search and career management. He writes on a broad range of topics; see more of his articles at his website.

Copyright © 2020 Jim Schibler — All rights reserved

Image credits: Robotic Surgery, Are You Experienced courtesy Wikimedia Commons; Peace Corps volunteer courtesy Peace Corps@flickr.com; Golden Eggs courtesy Scott Chan; Quality vs. Quantity courtesy GoodFreePhotos.org; Dragon Slayer courtesy Piotr Siedlecki@publicdomainpictures.net; Mistakes poster courtesy Despair.com.