AlignMark Recruiting and Selection Blog

What is the Value of Experience in Recruiting and Selection?

During our 35 years experience in the Corporate employee selection and testing market, AlignMark has completed numerous analyses comparing results of behavioral skill assessments to measures of on-the-job performance and has likewise accumulated assessment results on literally millions of job applicants. One finding which has emerged across virtually every individual job studied, regardless of industry, centers on the value of experience and may somewhat surprise even seasoned HR professionals.

The finding across our different studies is that experience, defined as years of prior experience in a similar job, has little or no affect on neither skill assessment results nor job performance. In repeated studies of incumbents as well as applicants (sales, customer service, supervisors, etc.) whereby confidential measures of job performance were obtained along with personal demographics, job experience of individuals seldom correlated to overall job performance or their performance on behavioral skill assessments. Although easily viewed as a counter-intuitive, potential explanations include the following:

• Tenure and Experience are often different factors. Some individuals continually learn from their experiences and others do not - 5 years in B2B sales does not equate to 5 years of sales "experience."

• Tenure may produce a greater accumulation of knowledge that is not reflected in measures of "soft" skills. However, it also appears that such increased knowledge does not often translate into enhanced on-the-job performance for many individuals.

So what are the implications of such findings? For some companies they are unimportant. For example, in a study of 2,000 B2C sales professions results demonstrated no significant differences among experienced and inexperienced job applicants on selection assessments or subsequent sales results. Despite this finding, the company continues to focus the majority of its recruiting efforts on experienced sales professions and accords them preferred hiring status. (See earlier comments regarding failure to learn from experience.) For other companies, implications are embraced more positively and result in challenging existing experience requirements, etc.

Those things being said, I clearly do not advocate universally abandoning experience requirements. Indeed, some experience requirements may be useful for decreasing voluntary turnover associated with mismatched job expectations, etc. However, at the same time, I do advocate differentiating "time" from "experience".

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