Why HR managers shouldn’t consider the quantity of experience as the primary filtering criteria for a job vacancy?
HR managers have been using quantitative experience as the Preliminary criteria to evaluate an applicant for any given job vacancy. A candidate is filtered through this ancient methodology available to a hiring manager in the first stage of a hiring process, leaving only a set of quantitatively qualified candidates to fill the vacancy.
The quantitative filter may prove useful in repetitive jobs, like in the example of a ‘long-distance truck driver’ (David Amstrong 1962 *) where an experienced truck driver can drive efficiently even when he is not conscious. In such jobs, the quantity of experience determines the best possible outcome. But the sad fact is that the same filtering tool is used when hiring for jobs where the qualitative experience of an individual defines the best possible results.
Why quantitative methodology is not the best hiring method?
We are psychologically inclined towards the ancient concept of ‘Wise old man’, considering the number of years lived as the yardstick to measure the wisdom of an individual. This universal unconscious bias spread through literature and fables still influence our judgments and decision making when it comes to hiring for a job vacancy.
An individual is more than the totality of her/his conscious experiences, our decisions and judgments are highly influenced by unconscious responses and biases, just like in the case of the hiring manager above. Modern cognitive science still considers consciousness to be a mystery and shy away from defining it, but the scientific and philosophical community agrees on the fact that the nature and behavioral disposition of an individual are highly influenced by qualitative subjective experience and selective attention filters (the gorilla experiment is a great example to understand the concept of selective attention*). These two salient features of consciousness are in direct proportion to the worldview, beliefs, and cognitive pre-disposition of an individual, the number of instances an individual goes through an experience has a very marginal role to play in the scene *.
You can get stuck in the same traffic for years and never see the policeman clearing the traffic, but a new engineering graduate at your uniform manufacturing company may see the policeman and can propose a new material with a body cooling system. Long years of experience may have put you in an autopilot mode but having an inverse effect on the new graduate and letting her explore new opportunities.
To summarise, I believe that the quantitative methodology shouldn’t be the primary criteria when hiring for Jobs where the qualitative experience determines the best possible result. Hiring managers should devise a customized qualitative selection methodology for their company to bring about a paradigm shift in the hiring process. Only then you can have teams of game-changers in the company rather than a team of conformists.
References & Notes
- David Amstrong — Long-distance truck driver
http://michaeljohnsonphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Armstrong-What-is-consciousness.pdf
- Selective attention — The Gorilla experiment
- (The concept of worldview, beliefs and the role experience plays in these concepts are debatable. I didn’t go into the depth of these topics to make this article short, but I am more than happy to discuss these concepts in upcoming articles)
