by Andre published 8 months ago
The lack of professional experience often leads to rejections in job applications. The approach taken by employers seems logical at first. After all, if a candidate can demonstrate several years of relevant professional experience, they should have acquired relevant knowledge and appropriate skills during this time. The logic: there is a correlation between previous work experience and subsequent productivity at work. Scientific studies prove that this logic is a myth.
What is work experience?
Amazingly, it is not trivial to grasp the full extent of a term such as "work experience", which is taken for granted in everyday life and is often used in connection with the recruitment of new employees. If we consult the dictionary, the word is explained as professional experience. Not a particularly enlightening description. It therefore makes sense to look up the parts of the word "profession" and "experience" separately. "Profession" is defined as an activity through which someone earns an income, while "experience" is described as a routine or knowledge gained by repeating something. "Professional experience" is therefore knowledge gained through repetition in a job that earns you money.
Measuring professional experience
The amount of professional experience a candidate has is usually calculated from the cumulative duration of employment in the relevant function and industry. However, this is a very imprecise measure. For example, a person may already have gained basic professional experience during their training and have carried out relevant activities in other functions or sectors. In addition, the measure of professional experience does not take into account the quality of the professional experience gained in any way.
Requirement profiles in job advertisements
The requirements in job advertisements may prevent potential candidates from applying.
How important is professional experience for performance in the new job?
As early as 1995, Quinones found in a meta-analysis that the correlation between previous professional experience and later job performance was 7 percent. A more recent meta-analysis by Iddekinge (2019) also addressed this question. The result of the correlation between previous work experience and current job performance is even lower at 0.4 percent. In a brand-new meta-analysis by Sackett (2023), this correlation even drops to 0.07 percent. These results are based on more than 150 individual studies from over 50 years of scientific research.
Conclusion
The relevance of professional experience for performance potential in a new job is significantly overestimated. The most likely reason for this is that the very easily measurable measure of "time" (i.e. professional experience in years) is mistakenly equated with the much more difficult measurable competencies (i.e. the ability to act). Professional personnel diagnostics are able to make the much more difficult measurable skills visible, simply and quickly. For a decision on how to proceed in the recruitment process, managers thus have unimportant information on professional experience and, above all, the much more important information on action skills at their disposal.
Sources:
- https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2021-87474-001
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1995.tb01785.x
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/peps.12335
- https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-33488-001
Thanks to Dr. Daniel Mühlbauer for the inspiration for this article:
https://www.hr-datenliebe.de/