Comments on: interviewing – knowledge vs experience vs skill

By: TOP-ALLIANCE

TOP-ALLIANCE — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:45:25 +0000

interviwing is a very special skill, you need to adopt to situatioins.

By: Craig Branch

Craig Branch — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:00:49 +0000

Experience can be hard to beat (although there can be exceptions). The software industry is unique in that experience can trump education levels. Give me someone with 10 plus years of experience over a freshly graduated Masters grad anyday.
As far as those who have learned nothing in 7-10 years…that’s not normal and there is probably something else going on. Its just not trying and I would think an interview process and checking with past managers and referrals would flush those type of issues out.

By: Scott Selikoff

Scott Selikoff — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:50:26 +0000

Unfortunately, Peter is sometimes correct. People hire unqualified friends/families for jobs all the time, in pretty much every industry. These days it’s referred to as “networking”, but nepotism has been around for a very long time.

By: Jeanne Boyarsky

Jeanne Boyarsky — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:53:23 +0000

In reply to peter. Depends on the recommender I guess. I won't recommend someone without skills. For knowledge and experience it depends on the position. Some knowledge and experience matter even for an entry level position. How closely it maps is another story.

By: peter

peter — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:10:46 +0000

I think the most important question is – “who do you know at this company?”

That seems to trump any skills, knowledge, and experience.

By: Jeanne Boyarsky

Jeanne Boyarsky — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:55:28 +0000

Agreed. And ironically it’s the hardest of the three to measure.

By: Kathy Sierra

Kathy Sierra — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:50:54 +0000

All three are important, but this is one of those areas where (to quote Dan Pink) “there is a gap between what science knows and business does”. Thanks to our education system, we are heavily skewed toward assessing *knowledge* rather than skill (largely because knowledge is so much easier to put in a test). And in studies on expertise, the amount of experience is *not* a good predictor of performance beyond the first two years (the “ten years of experience vs. one year repeated 10 times” phenomenon).

So assessing skill — as their level of expertise — is potentially more useful than knowledge and experience (beyond some minimum threshold level of knowledge and experience, of course), but it is difficult to do. In the studies on professional performance, ericsson defined expertise as something like, “given a representative task in the domain, an expert will consistently/reliably demonstrate better choices”. One thing that did come out of these studies is that it IS possible to find a smallish subset of tasks that correlate to how someone will perform across most other tasks in the domain, but again, it takes work to figure out what those representative tasks are.

In Chess, for example, they were able to identify just a few positions that accurately predicted how a chess player would perform in tournaments overall. So in 15 minutes or less, they could determine how strong that chess player really was. There are some representative tasks in music and some technical fields, too. I am really interested in this right now 🙂

Sorry for the long, rambling comment.
TL;DR: you are right, all three are needed, but skill assessment should be weighted much more heavily than knowledge or experience, especially for anyone with more than 18 months to two years of experience.