Does Experience Expire?

How reassuring, experience. Someone who has done the job before. For years. Decades, even.

Every keyword is there on the resume.

You know, when you write your bullet points and add, your heart full of hope:

• 7+ years of experience in the discipline. 7, by the way. Why 7? What magical transformation happens between years 6 and 7? (Six, seveeeen...)

• 10+ years of experience in the industry.

Anyway.

We see experience and we feel reassured.

They've done it before. They know what they're doing. They'll hit the ground running.

And sometimes, absolutely.

Experience is incredibly valuable.

Experienced people recognize patterns faster. They anticipate problems. They've made mistakes before and, hopefully, learned from them. They can see things someone new to the field can't see yet.

The problem isn't experience.

The problem is assuming that years automatically equal expertise.

What is experience, after all?

Think about cooking. Or playing a sport. Or any activity that requires repetition and learning.

At the beginning, we all sort of suck.

Then we observe, we practise, we repeat, we sometimes make mistakes. We encounter similar situations again and again.

And eventually, we start recognizing patterns.

I've seen this before.

We remember what happened last time. We anticipate what might happen next. We have a bigger library of situations and possible responses to draw from.

That's experience. And that's incredibly valuable.

But I've seen this before can be the beginning of great judgement.

It can also be the end of curiosity.

Because sometimes the situation only looks like something we've seen before.

The context has changed. Technology has changed. People have changed. The problem itself has changed.

But we recognize the pattern and reach for the solution that worked last time.

I've seen this before. I know what works.

And eventually:

"This is how we've always done it."

That's when experience can start working against us.

10 years of what?

This is the part I think we don't question enough when hiring.

Someone can have 10 years of experience.

But what happened during those 10 years?

• Did they take on more complex problems?

• Did their role, responsibilities or scope evolve?

• Did they make mistakes and examine them?

• Did they challenge their assumptions?

• Did they change their approach?

• Did they keep learning as their field changed?

Because 5 years of varied, challenging experience, filled with feedback, mistakes and learning, may sometimes produce more expertise than 15 years spent repeating essentially the same work.

Yet we keep counting years. Why?

Because years are wonderfully easy to measure.

Learning ability? Harder. Adaptability? Harder. Quality of judgement? Harder. Curiosity? Harder.

So sometimes we substitute something that's easy to count for the things we care about.

And write 7+ years required.

Don't just assess experience; assess what they've done with it.

Especially when you're hiring into a field or discipline that constantly changes.

Of course, look at experience.

But don't stop at:

"How many years have you done this?"

Ask:

"What do you do differently today than you did 5 years ago?"

"What's something you used to believe was the right approach that you've since changed your mind about?"

"Tell me about a time an approach that had always worked suddenly didn't. What did you do?"

"What have you had to unlearn?"

Or:

"What are you better at today than you were 3 years ago - and what changed?"

You're not asking someone to tell you they're adaptable. You're looking for evidence that their experience has changed them.

So yes, sometimes 7 years really are necessary. Sometimes 10 years are.

But if you're putting 7+ years of experience on a job description, you should be able to explain what you expect those 7 years to have produced.

If you can't?

Maybe 7 is just a number someone typed into a job description years ago.

Don't hire years. Hire what happened during those years.