Should you avoid hiring employees with experience?
October 8, 2008 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Assessing the right candidate, Entry level recruiting, Executive recruiting, In This Week's E-Newsletter, Latest News & Views
Obviously, companies want employees who know what they’re doing. But are there cases where hiring candidates with too much experience can backfire?
Maybe, according to a recent report, “Unpacking Prior Experience: How Career History Affects Job Performance,” published by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
According to the study’s authors, employees may be better off investing in developing fresh talent instead of hiring folks who’ve already built up their expertise. Why?
Mostly, it comes down to culture. While prior experience gives an employee valuable knowledge, it also leads to “habits, routines, and other cognitions and behaviors” that may cancel out the value of someone’s knowledge. (Which is made more problematic because experienced employees cost more.)
The report’s conclusions are based on an in-depth study of two companies and the successes and failures of their employees. You can download the paper here.
What do you think? Who have been the most successful candidates you’ve hired — the people with more or less prior experience? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Tags: culture, experience, Wharton
October 10th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Almost without exception performance has nothing to do with experience.
October 10th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
In many jobs good performance is not possible without considerable experience; training and attitude alone don’t always get the job done. And not hiring someone because they have too much experience sounds like it opens the company up for a potential age discrimination charge.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:03 am
In my HR career, I find that the people with less experience lack the work ethics of experienced workers. Among the younger, inexperienced workers, their work habits include excessive personal phone calls; sending and receiving personal text messages ; a lack of concern about being at work on time: and lack a sense of urgency
If the statement in your article were true, (”While prior experience gives an employee valuable knowledge, it also leads to “habits, routines, and other cognitions and behaviors” that may cancel out the value of someone’s knowledge.”), an experienced worker’s work habits are not necessarily a bigger problem that dealing with inexperienced workers who are focused on their personal lives rather than their work life.
I find the above quote from your article to be very unfair and discriminating. Typically, the more experienced candidate is the older candidate. The article implies support toward age discrimination.
October 13th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
I definitely agree with Maargaret, without knowledge on most jobs too much time is spent on training for much benefit to the company for some time, also work ethics have not been established and they think their personal call and texting are more inportant than the job yo9u give them.
October 14th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
There is actually a ton of research on this very question. While experience matters, particularly for complex jobs, only a small amount of experience (say, a year or two) helps. Beyond that we really don’t see a big correlation between amount of experience and performance. Note we’re talking AMOUNT here, not TYPE.
I don’t disagree that there may be some new habits of the younger workforce, including texting, that we have to address. But in my experience this usually results from them not having enough to do rather than not doing the work they should be doing. Is this really any different from the workers that have been there 20 years spending the first hour of every day wandering the cubicles wasting people’s times? (yes, I’ve seen this behavior more times than I’d like)
As good managers and HR professionals we should be focused on how to engage our workers and increase their performance, not pigeonhole them (as either young or old).