Experience versus Capacity

What should a company look for when hiring new team members? During nearly every interview, the employer will ask the candidate about their past experience – where they have worked, what they have done, what level of responsibility they have had, and what successes they have had. It stands to reason that these types of questions and understanding what a candidate has done in the past are great predictors for how the candidate may do if employed within the organization. However, having been through the interview process many times on both sides of the table (both being interviewed, and interviewing candidates to hire), I see that many companies seem to interpret this information very differently.

Some companies interview candidates with the hopes of finding someone with experience as close to matching the job being interviewed for as possible. The successful candidate will have done the exact same job in the same industry, using the same tools, and in as close as possible to the same environment. It stands to reason that if someone has completed this role with similar variables in the past and been successful, they have a high chance of being successful again. This is a safe bet. But, a safe bet also often yields the lowest returns.

Over the years, I’ve hired a number of software developers to serve on the development teams that I managed. We were exclusively a ColdFusion development shop – ColdFusion being the web scripting language used to create advanced web based software applications. During an interview, I once asked a candidate if they had done any work with ColdFusion, they broke out laughing. The candidate had never heard of ColdFusion – other than of course the scientific research of nuclear fusion without producing heat - which would be a fairly absurd question for a software developer’s interview. This, however, didn’t prevent me from ultimately extending an offer to the young developer to join the team.

What I look for in team members for any role is not what they have done, but, what they have the capacity to do. This isn’t to say I didn’t go through their experiences heavily, quite the opposite. As I review the work experience of a candidate, I’m looking for how they were able to work within an environment with the given constraints and variables and be successful. Were they able to use what was available to produce results and advance? Did they demonstrate creativity and ingenuity? Was their work rewarded with progressively more responsibility and new challenges?

Of course, there is some degree of requirement based on experience. For example, as intellectual as a brain surgeon might be, I wouldn’t hire a surgeon to be a software developer if he had never looked at code. So, for a software developer, although I wouldn’t care even he had ever heard of ColdFusion, I would look for him to have developed some type of web based applications. For a management position, I would expect them to have led a team and demonstrated strategic and operational successes. Things such as industry, tools, and even scale are things that can easily be learned and quickly grown into for a candidate who has a demonstrated history of successes.

For me personally, I always want to be learning new things and growing professionally. If I were looking at a position where I had already done everything involved, I really wouldn’t want to do the job again – where would the challenge be in that?

There is certainly a purpose for both types of hiring. If you view, and need, a team that are essentially specialized tools to accomplish a certain task or job, then your goal would be to hire individuals who have the specific experience needed. However, if your needs and views are to establish a strong organization that will grow and perform above minimum requirements in varying environments and circumstances, experiences are merely indicators of past successes, not a list of future capacity. Everyone who has managed a team in any kind of an IT environment knows that one rockstar employee can outperform two or three average employees in productivity and results. So, if you are trying to locate a rockstar, your best bet is to look for people who are adaptable, team oriented, able to engage their environment to produce successful results, eagerly accept responsibility and accountability, and respond to challenges with exceptional results. If those are the qualities of the individual you need on your team, things such as tools, methodologies, technologies, industry, and scope are of little significance. This is the approach I’ve taken to hiring and had the fortune of building outstanding teams that produce amazing results.