Employees who had completed tasks or worked in functions relevant to their current ones are not necessarily achieving better performance.
Researchers were surprised by this counter-intuitive finding. The relationship between prior experience and performance is in fact very weak. And yet experience is the first thing companies look for when selecting candidates: the vast majority of job adverts require or prefer candidates with relevant experience.
In the studies, professions such as police officer, firefighter, sales or customer service were prevalent. Some managerial positions were also included but there were no senior executives.
Why didn’t employees with relevant experience outperform others?
There are various possibilities:
- Unreliable measures of experience: the number of jobs you have held, tenure at previous employers or total years of working.
- The premise that past behaviour predicts future behaviour: in reality, experience is not a measure of behaviour as a person might have stagnated in previous jobs.
- Differences in cultures at the previous and new company.
Past performance is telling; experience on its own is not. Therefore, focus on:
- Previous performance, which seems to be much more useful for assessment.
- Have employees learned from their previous experiences? People aren’t always good at this.
- Put more effort into interviews (behavioral questions are helpful, e.g. "How have you previously handled difficult clients?")
Instead of using experience or education as a proxy, focus directly on:
- Knowledge
- Skills
- Traits
Last but not least, when the metrics are more specific (e.g. concrete tasks), they predict future performance much better.
-jk-