Hiring for skills vs hiring for experience: What the research says

Ben Schwencke is the chief psychologist at Test Partnership, with extensive experience in consultancy and research. He writes extensively on many topics, including psychology, human resources, psychometric testing, and personal development.

Hiring for skills vs hiring for experience: What the research says

Relevant experience is often a non-negotiable requirement for many roles, and many hiring managers will discount candidates offhand without it. However, much to the frustration of candidates, they can’t actually get relevant experience unless someone employs them, creating a catch-22 situation. The underlying reason why employers want experience is because employees acquire skills through experience, ensuring they can hit the ground running in their new position. Those without experience, however, may or may not have what it takes, and organizations seldom wish to take this risk.

In this article, I will outline what the research evidence says about hiring for experience vs. hiring for skills, and which approach makes the most sense.

Hiring for experience

Significant research has been conducted to investigate the claim that relevant experience predicts effectiveness in the role. This research involves quantifying “relevant experience,” usually calculated in years, and then correlating that variable with job performance, usually supervisory performance ratings. If experience matters, then the association between the two variables would be positive and moderate-strong, suggesting a benefit to hiring candidates with relevant experience. However, if the relationship is weak, non-existent, or even negative, this discredits the strategy of hiring for experience.

Overall, the research finds only a weak positive relationship between the amount of relevant experience and job performance. Although the relationship is positive, meaning that more experience is associated with greater performance in the workplace, this relationship isn’t particularly strong and isn’t a very effective predictor. This is particularly important, as the vast majority of other predictors were more effective, including interviews, ability tests, knowledge tests, and assessment centers.

However, when diving deeper into the results, we see that the first five years of relevant experience are stronger predictors of performance, but then the association flattens. This suggests that people acquire most of their skills during the first five years, and additional experience does not seem to help. Additionally, there is a time-horizon issue with measuring job performance itself. Naturally, if you measure an employee's performance on the day you hire them, those with previous experience will be substantially higher performing, as they can hit the ground running. But after several months or even years after employment, the association weakens as the inexperienced candidates will have caught up.

Hiring for skills

Unlike relevant experience, skills are difficult to define. For example, we have “hard skills,” which include technical, practical, and knowledge-based skills that people acquire, which are the most commonly recognized form of skill. But we also have “soft skills,” which are more inherently behavioral and character-based, including emotional intelligence, resilience, and interpersonal skills. Lastly, I would argue we also have cognitive skills, which allow us to solve problems and make effective decisions. Consequently, “skills” can mean a number of different things, and they influence performance in the workplace in different ways. Additionally, skills can be measured in a variety of different ways, and with varying levels of effectiveness, confounding things further.

When it comes to hard skills, the research suggests that knowledge tests, which evaluate a candidate's level of workplace-relevant knowledge, are an effective predictor of performance. Knowledge tests outperform experience as a predictor, even when only looking at the first five years of experience. However, the correlation between knowledge test performance and cognitive ability test performance is particularly strong, suggesting significant overlap. Nevertheless, hiring for hard skills does seem to be an efficacious strategy, especially when compared to hiring for experience.

Soft skills and cognitive skills are powerful predictors of performance in the workplace, greater than hard skills or experience. Cognitive ability is the strongest predictor of performance in moderate-cognitively complex work, particularly professional and managerial work. Soft skills individually tend to be weak-moderate predictors of performance, but because there are so many different soft skills, behavioral assessments can be very powerful selection tools overall. Combining hard, soft, and cognitive skills completely outclasses experience as a hiring strategy, and is by far the more effective approach.

Conclusion and recommendations

Ultimately, the reason why people hire specifically for experience is that they believe candidates would have acquired workplace-relevant skills during their previous tenure. Independent of skills, there really isn’t anything special about experience; it's just a lazy proxy for skills. Consequently, skills are what employers are really looking for, and the research suggests that measuring skills directly is a better approach than just inferring them from previous experience. Additionally, when we expand the definition of skills to include soft skills and cognitive skills, their predictive power increases substantially, rendering relevant experience largely irrelevant in all but a few niche situations.