To Hire the Perfect Job Candidate: These Two Words Matter Most

By Jeff Haden    

A friend wrote a job posting for a sales support specialist and asked me for feedback. One thing stood out right away, and not in a good way: “Successful candidate must have at least five years of direct sales support experience.” 

Granted, that’s not unusual. Most job postings include some form of experience qualification. That’s even true for entry-level jobs; in this study of over 95,000 entry-level job listings, 61% required three or more years’ experience. 

And it’s also understandable. Experience implies some degree of skill and knowledge, which should mean less training and more rapid up-to-speed time. Greater familiarity with the work involved also should mean it’s less likely the new employee will bail after a few months.

But experience isn’t a proxy for skill. Or attitude. Or work ethic. Or teamwork. Or accomplishment.

Or—and this is what you care about most—future performance. As Adam Grant writes in Hidden Potential, “Past experience rarely predicts future performance. What matters is past performance, and current motivation and ability.”

Science agrees: a meta-analysis of 81 studies published in Personnel Psychology shows almost no correlation between experience and job performance—or turnover.

Keep in mind the difference between correlation and causation. Correlation is the degree that as one variable changes in value, another variable tends to change in a specific direction. Taller people tend to weigh more. Towns with more churches tend to have more criminals, not because churches cause criminal behavior but because towns with more churches tend to have larger populations, hence a greater number of criminals. A correlation coefficient of 1.0 is a perfectly positive relationship; one thing goes up, so does the other. A 0.8 is fairly strong, a 0.6 is moderately positive and a Blutarsky-like 0.0 indicates no relationship at all between two variables.

So how does experience correlate to job performance and turnover?

• Job performance: 0.06 correlation
• Training performance: 0.11 correlation
• Turnover: zero correlation.

Yep. In effect, basically no correlation, oddly enough even with “training performance,” the degree to which people can effectively be trained to perform tasks that, to some degree, they already know how to do. Experience doesn’t even help with that.

The study’s findings line up with a Leadership IQ study that shows almost 90 % of new hires who fail in their first 18 months fail because of problems with motivation, willingness to be coached, temperament or emotional intelligence. A lack of technical skills—which experience should theoretically help indicate—was almost never the problem.

Clearly experience doesn’t predict future performance. Nor, oddly enough, does past performance. As Grant recently said:

“The most valuable indicator of future potential is not past performance. It’s recent progress. The people who exceed expectations tomorrow are the ones who improved the most yesterday. Getting better shows the drive and dexterity to learn.”

Growth is an accomplishment in itself.

Looking for a great sales support specialist? What matters is what they have accomplished, especially recently. Helping salespeople boost sales. Creating more efficient and effective CRM tools. Fielding—and landing—smaller, in-house sales opportunities.

Not someone with a certain degree of experience. Someone who shows they recently have, or clearly have the potential to, deliver what you need. In short, doers of things that need to get done.

That’s obviously even more true if yours is an entry-level opening. Describe the attributes of a great candidate, not the skills. Attitude. Enthusiasm. Work ethic. Interpersonal skills. Experience is interesting, but largely irrelevant.

What someone has recently done, and therefore is most likely to be able to do, matters most. What you can teach someone with the right attitude, aptitude and willingness to learn matters.

Because the past doesn’t predict the future.

Unless, as Grant says, it’s the recent past.

Jeff Haden is a keynote speaker, ghostwriter, LinkedIn Top Voice, contributing editor to Inc., and the author of The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win.

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This article was originally published on diversitycomm.net.