Another marketing article with overall hiring implications – Marketing Challenge: Hire Experience or Potential? The article is from the MarketingProfs.com website and is basically an open question to their readers looking for their input.
A manager interviews employees and narrows down the candidates to two: one with experience and one with potential, intelligence, and high motivation. Which one would you choose? The experienced employee may ramp up faster and bring in knowledge that will help make the process better. But he or she may also have baggage that could interfere with the work.
The employee with potential may bring enthusiasm and energy into the job and go the extra mile to accomplish tasks beyond expectations. Of course, this type of employee won’t get up to speed as quickly.
First, I would use talent instead of potential. Ideally, we help companies find strong candidates who have both talent and industry experience. If we could pick only one, it would be talent every time.
Experience can be gained. I want my heart surgeon to be experienced. I want my salesperson to have “potential, intelligence and high motivation.”
To explain my strong belief about talent, I must speak from experience. Over the past 5 years, we have assessed thousands of people – both employees and candidates using objective tools. We have had the opportunity to watch them perform in their roles (mostly sales). There is no question in my mind regarding this simple truth – talent will outperform experience over time. The most simplistic of reasons is this – the talented employee will gain experience faster than the experienced employee will gain talent.
I’ll provide one focused example. 72% of top-performing salespeople have a Utilitarian motivation. That is they desire to see a return on their investment of time, money, effort, etc. If I hire an experienced salesperson who has no Utilitarian motivation, there is nothing I can do to create that motivation in them. Granted, they may end up being part of the 28% that succeeds without the Utilitarian motivation, but I would rather bank on the 72% group.
I’ll close from the article:
While experience rarely fails a company, how well a person performs depends more on the person’s personality and capabilities. After all, what good is experience when a candidate has a bad attitude?