Saturday, January 9, 2016

HR - Years of Experience

I have never understood the whole "X-Y years of experience" because this seems to be a metric that does not mean anything and nearly impossible to gauge. I have worked with people with 20+ years of experience yet struggle with the basics. If anything, I have more concerns that someone has been doing the same thing for 20+ years especially in the technology industry. There are some exceptions like chefs, service providers, etc. But even then, that is not a strong indication of knowledge or skill.

In my experience, I find that the more "experienced" colleagues to be much slower at completing tasks and quite inflexible in learning new ideas. Maybe I pick things up faster. I end up wasting a lot of time just waiting getting trained or training others. On top of that, they seem to get flustered and stressed over changes making improvements ever harder to adopt. Although, I have found that these types of colleagues usually have decent work ethics.

On the other hand, those who appear to be less experienced have many variables that make them hard to determine what quality of work is expected. Work ethic is very difficult to judge within a couple hours but easily seen after a month. Learning curve is also another large variable. 

What if someone is experienced but has short exposure to new skill? What does it even mean to have 2 years of experience? I worked at a small business where I had to work on many things at the same time. I could claim 20 different skills at 2 years, but I will not be as good as someone who does one thing for 2 years. On paper, I would look better and other person could be filtered even if I am deemed unfit after an interview. 

So at the end of the day, what does "years of experience" even say about a candidate? I've worked jobs where they requested 5-10 years yet I learn most of it within a few months and excel my colleagues within a year. I think this description is such a waste of space while misleading everyone.

As a candidate, this shows me the HR has no idea what the position entails. This is a way to summarize the job description without knowing what they are looking for, yet a method to make it look like they did some research because nothing looks better than numbers. And sadly, knowledgeable candidates know how to game the system.

My goal with the Human Resource Management application is to better understand the roles and candidates. I believe good companies need a better method to hire quality candidates and for good candidates to find good companies, so there must be a method to bridge this gap.


As of 1/9/2016, there has been little development. The database is still being constructed and most of my attention is still on the other applications.

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