How to overcome “years of experience” requirements when applying for jobs

Think about it. How many well qualified resumes out there were discarded because the hiring manager was angry their football team lost yesterday? How many were lost during the office party? Probably more then we want to know.

People want everything for free. Or in this case, people want all the success without any of the failures which lead to that success.

While there is truth to this, I would say it is less true when there is a labor shortage. By not hiring a good candidate when they have the chance, a company looses the revenue that candidate might have helped them earn while they spend time looking for a surer bet.

Some comments here are about the issue of how companies should hire in the general case. Because that is a frequently asked question here on HN, and because that has been the subject of much research, I'll recycle some electrons here to provide a FAQ on the general issue. The review article "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings"

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

sums up, current to 1998, much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring practices. There are many kinds of hiring screens, such as resume reviews for job experience, telephone interviews, in-person interviews, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general cognitive ability test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than anything else that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

For legal reasons in the United States (the same consideration does not apply in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of a hiring process. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...

held that cognitive ability tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring process had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring process might be illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants and is not supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws.

I think the point of the response was the question cannot be answered.

Specifically he writes:

"How can I overcome the assumption that I do not have the skills required because I do not have the 'right' number of years of experience?"

The answer is "You cannot, it is an assumption by someone you don't know." Since he is not asking "Should I ask a friend of mine that works at this place and knows my skills put in my resume even though I don't have the 'right' number of years of experience?" We could all say "Absolutely." Referrala are great because the knowledge is first person and in depth.

Our authored followed with:

"Are skills directly proportional to years of experience?"

And the answer to that is "Yes." Is the constant the same for everyone? No. But generally some hiring manager has put out this number because he's found folks who have that land in his range of what he wants for this job. But its easily shown that someone with some experience has some sigma greater skill at the job that someone with zero experience, so it seems pointless to simply say "Yes" here.