People sometimes aren’t very careful about the way they use words. One of those words, is “experience”.
Picture the scene (you’ve probably been there before): you’ve just been told by someone who has never met you, and who has perhaps glanced briefly over your CV, that you really don’t have enough or the right kind of “experience” for a particular job, and therefore they won’t be ‘progressing’ you through to the next stage …
Now consider a problem: why is it that highly skilled people are having trouble finding work that matches their skills, at the same time as employers are having trouble finding people with those same skills? Could it have something to do with the potentially confused way we are defining “experience” in the recruitment process?
What is experience? If we look it up in the dictionary, the key emphasis is on skills and knowledge. It’s about what we can do, or know how to do.
The way experience is often defined during the recruitment process, however, often seems to lean more heavily on things like the number of years employed in a certain capacity. Presumably because that’s easier to measure and verify.
However, seldom does the question get asked, just what does that actually mean? (Whether in terms of skill level or knowledge, or more importantly, how one candidate compares to another in terms of practical ability.)
In the verbal confusion, the meaning and substance of the word itself – what you can do or know how to do – gets lost.
Result? Skilled people who don’t make it through the initial screening stage, and employers complaining about their inability to find skilled people. And all the while, those same skilled people are being put off ever applying for that company again by recruiters telling them they don’t have the necessary “experience”.
As Inigo Montoya famously said in the movie The Princess Bride, ‘You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means …’
Could it be that these potential employees have a great deal more experience than these recruiters have ever guessed at? Or would that just be ‘inconceivable’ …