Are You Actually Looking for Experience?

Experience or skill?

Here's a question for employers advertising an early careers role: do you actually need someone with experience, or do you need someone with a particular skill?

There's an important difference. When a job description says 'previous experience required', it can be tempting to treat that as a simple filter. But before adding an experience requirement, ask whether it's genuinely necessary.

Experience they genuinely need

There are roles where previous experience really does matter. Perhaps the job involves specialist technical knowledge, professional qualifications, regulatory requirements or responsibilities that can't realistically be learned overnight.

In those cases, be specific. Explain what experience is actually needed and why.

Instead of 'Three years' experience required.', you could try 'Experience using [specific system] is required because this role involves managing...'

That gives candidates useful information and helps you attract people with the right background.

Skills you could teach

Does someone really need to have used your particular software before? Do they need to have worked in your exact industry? Do they need to have performed the same task in another company?

Often, the answer is no. If a skill can be taught through training, mentoring and practical experience, consider whether it needs to be an essential requirement.

You might find that you're excluding capable candidates simply because they haven't previously been given the opportunity to learn it.

What could you look for instead?

For early careers roles, consider whether you're better off assessing qualities such as:

• Curiosity: do they ask good questions and want to understand how things work?
• Reliability: can you trust them to turn up, follow through and meet deadlines?
• Communication: can they listen, explain themselves clearly and work with other people?
• Problem solving: can they think through a challenge rather than immediately giving up?
• Willingness to learn: are they open to feedback and interested in developing?

These qualities don't always come with a long employment history

These qualities don't necessarily come with a long employment history. Many of these focus on the candidate's work ethic rather than specific job related skills.

Read your job description again

Take your current job description and look at every requirement. Then divide them into two columns:

• We genuinely need this: these are the skills, qualifications or experience someone needs to be able to do the job effectively from the outset.
• We could teach this: these are things a capable person could learn once they join your organisation. You might be surprised by how much moves into the second column.

Don't confuse experience with potential

Someone with five years' experience isn't automatically going to be better at the job, and someone with no professional experience isn't automatically going to struggle. Experience tells you what someone has already done, but potential tells you what they could do next. For early careers recruitment, that distinction matters.

Young people can't have five years of experience before they've had their first opportunity. If every entry-level role demands experience, you create a rather difficult problem: 'How is anyone supposed to get their first opportunity?'

So before you add another experience requirement to your next job description, stop and ask if you genuinely need this experience, or if you could teach the skill. This way you might be able to open the door to a much bigger pool of talented people, and thus find your next great employee.