Alibi Hires
You're Not Hiring for Experience. You're Hiring an Alibi.
Nobody gets fired for hiring the veteran. The fault of hiring a veteran lies on the veteran and not on the person that hired them (“on paper, the person looked perfect!”).
When you hire someone senior and the project goes sideways, you get to say: “well, the person had twelve years of experience, this is on them.” The seniority isn’t insurance for the project, it’s insurance for you.
Most companies are reaching for alibi hires because it’s easier than the alternative: hiring people for their character and develop them.
Years are not the same thing as maturity
Most of the world treat “years of experience” as if it were a proxy for judgment, and sometimes it is. Often it’s a proxy for how long someone has been repeating the same year, but in knowledge work, that’s rarely the truth. Having 9 years of experience in different frameworks doesn’t tell me whether you can learn things that are needed in the next quarter.
None of this is to say experience is worthless, of course. If I’m on an operating table, I want the surgeon who’s done the procedure four hundred times, not the one with high learning velocity and a great attitude. But most of us aren’t hiring surgeons. We’re hiring people to solve problems that didn’t exist when they graduated, using tools that will be replaced before their probation ends. In that world, the question isn’t what do you already know. It’s how fast do you get good at things you don’t.
In most knowledge work, learning velocity beats logged hours, an absurd amount of time.
The 90% I bet on
I’ve placed candidates with a lot of customers and projects over the years, and there’s a scene that repeats very often. I put forward someone strong but junior, the customer looks at the CV and says some version of: I don’t know, feels too junior for us. Few years of experience, that disease signaling that someone isn’t up for the job.
Sometimes I let it go, but when I don’t (when I push, when I say trust me, take this person) I win that bet about nine times out of ten.
I don't just mean the client thought they were 'fine.' I mean the customer returns weeks later to say the candidate I had to convince them to hire is now indispensable. When I try to transition that person to a new project, the client begs me to let them stay, the exact same 'junior' they initially hesitated to accept.
I don’t tell that story to brag about my hit rate. I tell it because hiring for so many years has given me the exposure to understand how to hire well. You need to stop looking for the past and started screening for learning slope. Where is this person going to be in six months, not where have they already been.
Developing Others
There is a fatal flaw underneath many hiring strategies, and it stems from a lack of patience.
Early on, when a team member makes a mistake, a manager feels it as a direct cost to their time, reputation, and client goodwill. The fastest way to eliminate that friction is to hire people who never make those mistakes in the first place. People who already know the ropes. People who, ultimately, look and think a lot like the manager - that leads to the same old adage: “I can’t hire anyone!”.
It is a trap dressed up as a strategy. In reality, it is a manager who rarely learned to build anyone, attempting to hire their way around the gap.
To be fair to the managers making these hires, they are often trapped in a system that practically demands them. When executive leadership measures success strictly in 90-day quarters, demands instant ROI, and views training as a luxury rather than an operating expense, they strip managers of the runway needed to build talent.
If a manager knows they will be crucified for missing a six-week deadline, they can’t afford a junior’s “tuition.” The system forces them to buy the overpriced veteran. The company creates a culture of fear, and the manager responds by purchasing insurance. If organizations want teams with high learning velocity, they have to stop punishing the people who take the time to teach them.
The Skill you are Looking For
The skill you need to develop is the ability to sit with someone’s mistake and treat it as tuition instead of damage.
Someone junior will burn a day chasing a bug a senior would have smelled in ten minutes. That day is not wasted unless you waste it. It’s the day they learn the thing that means they never make that mistake again, and it’s cheaper than you think when you stop pricing it as lost billable hours and start pricing it as a person becoming more valuable in front of you. Training isn’t the tax you pay for hiring cheap. It is the job. It’s the compounding part.
Humans don’t ship with documentation. If you don’t have the tolerance for that (the tolerance to let someone fail small so they don’t fail big later) then you’ll keep buying seniority to plaster over a skill you never built.
There’s plenty of talent out there. There always was. What’s rare is the manager willing to grow it instead of rent it.