Take a Risk: Hiring for Potential

It’s a classic hiring dilemma: should you hire for experience or for potential?

Admit it: hiring for experience feels safer

In principle, both seem to have equal ground. In practice, though, HRs tend to lean towards hiring for experience because it’s a classic, tried-and-tested method.

Imagine that you’re trying to pick the best candidate for a web developer position. You’re faced with two choices: a seasoned developer with eight years of experience in that specific framework, or a fresh grad who has interesting projects in his portfolio but who doesn’t have a lot of experience yet.

Chances are, you’ll be tempted to pick the seasoned developer. There’s a lot less risk involved.

Experience is also much easier to quantify than potential–just take a look at your applicant’s history, and there you have it. Potential is trickier because it has no concrete metrics. You’re pretty much basing it on your own judgment, which is prone to bias.

But hiring for potential is becoming a necessity

Hiring for experience, however, doesn’t work all the time–and it may even be impossible. Several hybrid fields are emerging, breaking down the walls between industries.

For example, UX design is very popular now, but you weren’t seeing any job posts about it ten years ago. It can be described as a combination of graphic design, psychology, product management, even programming.

Because formal education hasn’t caught up with UX yet, there’s barely anyone with a degree in UX design. Consequently, people enter into it from different, even unrelated backgrounds.

The same applies to content strategists, social media managers, and many more. For these roles, one is forced to resort to hiring for potential.

When to hire for potential

As with all dichotomies, there’s no hard and fast answer. Rather, strive to use both, and know their proper context. Here are situations where you might consider hiring for potential:

• If it’s a new role (like those mentioned above)
• If the role represents a new business process in your company and it hasn’t been filled in by anyone before
• If creativity and problem-solving skills are part of the requirement, but not deep domain knowledge that only comes from experience
• If you’re hiring for a startup and roles are still prone to change and redefinitions–you need someone who can grow with the company

The hallmarks of hires with high potential

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a global hiring expert who wrote “It’s not the How or the What but the Who,” describes five hallmarks of potential to watch out for.

First and foremost is a burning drive to make a significant impact. Others are curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.

Incidentally, these are qualities that tend to be inherent in the person. You can’t exactly train them into someone the way you can teach hard skills associated with experience.

Why the risk is worth it

The most important skill that a good hire based on potential can possess is the ability to learn. Jobs are changing at an unprecedented space.

With robots automating a significant part of the labor market, problem-solving and people skills are becoming increasingly valued–and these tend to be present in high-potential hires.

Moreover, millennials tend to be on the lookout for opportunities and aren’t afraid of branching out into unfamiliar territory. Taking on a job that’s different from what they had before isn’t shocking for them–it’s a norm.  If you hire based only on experience, you miss out on a lot.

Hiring for potential also lends fresh perspective. A pitfall for hires who’ve spent a while in the industry is the “experience trap,” where they favor conventional methods and have difficulty discarding bad habits that they picked up along the way.

Having a mix of experienced and rookie but high-potential employees guarantees that you have a diverse team, with one group correcting the mistakes of the other.

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