{"id":210,"date":"2006-08-03T10:57:51","date_gmt":"2006-08-03T15:57:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/?p=210"},"modified":"2006-08-03T10:57:42","modified_gmt":"2006-08-03T15:57:42","slug":"the-industry-experience-trap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2006\/08\/the-industry-experience-trap\/","title":{"rendered":"The Industry-Experience Trap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting article from ere.net titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ere.net\/articles\/db\/57704FDA9DC148309F8E2BFA6D30401B.asp\" target=\"_blank\">The Role of the Hiring Manager in Recruiting<\/a>. The author cuts to the quick in one of his bullet points:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>The industry-experience trap.<\/strong> Industry experience is not only highly overrated, but it&#8217;s also the quickest way to sub-optimize the talent you recruit. If you think of the pool of top-quality, top-quartile talent, the minute you say they must come out of the food industry or the high-tech industry, you&#8217;ve reduced that pool of available talent by about 98%! <em>The fact is that for the majority of our jobs, top talent with high learning agility can learn the nuances of our industry, but industry-experienced candidates who do not possess high learning agility will never become top talent or future leaders for you.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I emphasized the last sentence since that is a battle with which we are most familiar. The author is absolutely correct in that statement, yet companies often revert to an overemphasis on experience &#8211; especially when hiring salespeople. I believe they do it because it is difficult to discern a strong salesperson from a weak salesperson who interviews well (unless you are using assessments).<\/p>\n<p>So, all things appearing equal, it is safest for the hiring manager to hire the candidate with more industry experience. If that candidate fails, the hiring manager can say they aren&#8217;t sure what happened &#8211; the person had great experience.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.selectmetrix.com\/Process_Main.html\" target=\"_blank\">May I suggest a process that eliminates the guesswork?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting article from ere.net titled The Role of the Hiring Manager in Recruiting. The author cuts to the quick in one of his bullet points: The industry-experience trap. Industry experience is not only highly overrated, but it&#8217;s also the quickest way to sub-optimize the talent you recruit. If you think of the pool of top-quality, top-quartile talent, the minute you say they must come out of the food industry or the high-tech industry, you&#8217;ve reduced that pool of available talent by about 98%! The fact is that for the majority of our jobs, top talent with high learning agility can learn the nuances of our industry, but industry-experienced candidates&hellip; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2006\/08\/the-industry-experience-trap\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,3,15],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5Oho-3o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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