Experience Doesn’t Matter (…As Much)
People gasp when they hear me say it. Or at the very least, they roll their eyes. “When hiring,” I say, “prioritize experience below most other things.” Or, more bluntly, “Experience doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does.”
I’m not talking about personal experience, the ability to learn and improve from our own lived successes and failures. In fact, as I’ve written about before, personal experience (particularly of the negative kind) is one of the most valuable teachers we have.
Instead, I’m talking about placing former work experience on a pedestal when choosing who to hire.
Flashback to 2015: My early startup days, attempting to build the world’s greatest and fastest team. At Anchor, we were building products in the audio space and so were naturally inclined to look at resumes that included words like “audio”, “radio”, and the like. My cofounder and I had not formally come from that world. We needed team members who would bring that DNA into the company.