Experience Is Not the Same as Capability

Hiring is a strange exercise in prediction. We spend most of our time looking backwards while trying to make a judgement about the future. Where has someone worked? What roles have they held? How long have they spent in the industry? What have they achieved? From there, we try to work out what they might be capable of doing somewhere they have never worked, with people they have never met, facing problems that may not have happened yet.

Experience obviously matters. If I need someone to solve a very specific problem tomorrow morning, finding somebody who has solved that problem several times before makes perfect sense. But the more I think about the people I have hired and worked with over the years, the less convinced I am that the experience we find easiest to recognise is always the experience that tells us most about someone's capabilities.

I have a vested interest in the question. My own career is not particularly linear and makes considerably more sense in conversation than it does as a sequence of job titles. Some of the experiences that probably shaped me most sit twenty years back on my CV and occupy only a few lines, while the more recent and impressive titles naturally get most of the attention. That is probably how a CV has to work, but quite a lot disappears when a career is compressed into a few pages designed to demonstrate relevance.

Where capability actually comes from

Earlier in my career, I worked in hospitality and eventually built restaurant businesses in South Africa and Dubai. Years later, when hiring people into sales and operations roles, I would often notice if someone had worked in hospitality at some point. Not because I thought knowing how to run a restaurant somehow made them a better salesperson or operator, but because I knew something about the environment they had been exposed to and the behaviours it tends to develop.

Restaurants teach service in an unusually immediate way. The customer is right there, the consequences of getting it wrong are visible and problems cannot always be escalated or postponed until someone has organised a meeting to discuss them. You learn to read people, anticipate needs, communicate across cultures and personalities, work with urgency and decide which of several simultaneous problems actually matters. You learn to think on your feet and develop resilience, including a healthy ability to eat shit occasionally and keep going.

Some of that can be taught, but some of it simply gets into you after enough repetition. You can teach the principles of customer service, but that is different from spending years noticing the table that has been waiting too long, the customer whose body language has changed or the colleague who is about to become overwhelmed. Eventually you stop consciously looking for some of those signals because you just notice them.

The same goes for urgency. In corporate environments we talk about having a bias for action. In hospitality it is rather less theoretical. If thirty people are waiting for food, understanding why the process failed matters, but probably not right now. Something needs to happen first, and you also learn quite quickly that a problem does not have to be your fault to become your responsibility.

I have found that lesson surprisingly transferable. Years later, in enterprise environments, I have watched organisations expend remarkable amounts of energy establishing whether a customer problem belongs to Sales, Operations, Technology or somebody else. The customer rarely cares, and explaining whose problem it is and actually solving it are two very different things.

Would I therefore choose five years in hospitality over another five years of directly relevant industry experience? Not necessarily. I would, however, want to know what those different experiences had produced in the people who had them, because that is much harder to establish from the conventional markers we use.

We can count years in an industry and search for job titles, technologies, qualifications and previous employers. It is much harder to search for judgement, adaptability, curiosity, resilience, service instinct or what somebody does when the playbook stops working. Yet recruitment, particularly at scale, has to make messy career histories comparable somehow, so ten years feels safer than five, someone from a competitor is easier to understand than someone from another industry, and a familiar job title saves us having to work out what the person actually did.

There is useful information in all of those things, but the problem comes when we stop asking what they were supposed to tell us in the first place. Ten years of industry experience may really be essential, or perhaps what the hiring manager actually needs is somebody credible enough to operate independently with senior customers. Experience with a particular technology may be critical, or perhaps the real requirement is the ability to understand a complex system quickly. A previous job title gives us an indication of responsibility, but it may tell us less than the scale and difficulty of the decisions that person was actually trusted to make. The former is easy to search; the latter takes a bit of digging.

What survives the hiring process

I have also started wondering what we actually mean when we say someone has a “strong CV”. It might mean the CV is well written and tells a coherent story. It might mean there are impressive achievements and recognisable employers on it. Or it might simply mean that it looks remarkably like the job description.

Candidates naturally optimise for that, and I see nothing wrong with doing so. If a role requires enterprise SaaS experience, executive engagement and transformation, someone who genuinely has those things would be foolish to hide them beneath less relevant information. AI has simply made the process much easier, allowing a candidate to take a job description and a career history and reorganise genuine experience around the language and priorities of that particular role in minutes.

That should improve communication, but it also muddies the signal. If everyone gets better at speaking the language of the job description, the presence of that language tells us a little less than it used to. Making a career easier to understand also means removing complexity from it. Early experiences shrink to a few lines, unusual moves are tidied up and anything that does not support the immediate application gets pushed into the background. That is sensible CV writing, but it is also how some of the experiences that explain the person can become almost invisible.

Perhaps that is part of the reason a recommendation can change an application so dramatically. When somebody you trust says, “You should speak to this person,” they are rarely providing a better keyword match. They may have seen what that person is like when things go wrong, how customers respond to them, whether people trust their judgement or how quickly they get their head around something unfamiliar. There is a lot of information packed into a recommendation that is very difficult to fit into a CV without sounding like a collection of adjectives.

In a conventional application, the CV usually has to establish enough relevance to earn the conversation. A recommendation can reverse that sequence and allow the conversation to uncover the relevance. It is tempting to blame Talent Acquisition when that nuance gets lost, but that feels too easy. Recruitment teams are often being asked to turn a fairly complicated business need into something that can be processed consistently across hundreds of candidates.

A hiring manager might describe wanting someone commercially sharp who can build a market, navigate ambiguity, challenge established thinking and establish credibility with difficult stakeholders. Eventually that has to become something searchable: titles, years of experience, competencies, technologies and keywords. Something will almost inevitably get lost along the way.

Even the numbers can be deceptive. We talk about someone having ten, fifteen or twenty years of experience as though the number itself tells us what happened during those years. Twenty years can mean twenty years of increasingly deep expertise, but it can also mean variations of essentially the same year repeated twenty times. Someone with half that tenure may have been thrown into three countries, two industries, a failed project, a turnaround and responsibilities they were nowhere near ready for when they started. Counting the years does not tell us which of those happened.

Depth matters, and there are disciplines where accumulated knowledge and pattern recognition are enormously valuable. Breadth can matter too, particularly when circumstances change. I am not sure there is a useful formula for comparing the two, but it seems more useful to understand what those years actually demanded of the person than to assume the number alone gives us the answer.

The comfort of the known

Hiring someone who has already performed an almost identical role feels safer and often genuinely is. They know the industry, perhaps some of the customers, the problems and the language. There is less to learn and fewer obvious unknowns. There is, however, another kind of risk in a hiring decision that has less to do with the candidate and more to do with the person choosing them.

If I hire someone from our closest competitor who has spent twelve years doing essentially the same job and they fail, I can probably defend the original decision quite easily. The evidence looked good and plenty of reasonable people would have made the same choice. If I hire somebody with an unconventional background and they fail, the questions may start with me. Why did you hire them? Why did you think that experience would transfer? Why didn't you choose somebody who had already done the job? Sometimes the obvious candidate is also simply the easier decision to explain.

Internal mobility has its own version of this. We tend to regard an internal candidate as safer because we know them. We have seen how they perform, how they behave and how the organisation responds to them, but we have seen all of that in their current role. Promotion changes the context, sometimes quite dramatically.

An outstanding salesperson who consistently delivers well beyond quota has clearly demonstrated something valuable. They may understand customers exceptionally well, build relationships quickly, negotiate brilliantly and have an instinct for getting difficult deals across the line. Then we make them Head of Revenue and much of their success suddenly depends on other people selling. Now they need to coach someone who does not think like them, improve mediocre performance, recruit and retain talent, allocate resources, create an operating rhythm, manage forecasts and make difficult people decisions. They may also have to accept that another salesperson can succeed using an approach they themselves would never choose. Being brilliant at selling will certainly help, but it does not automatically make someone brilliant at creating the conditions in which other people can sell.

Hospitality offers the same lesson in a more obvious form. The best waiter in the restaurant might be exceptional at reading customers, managing a busy section and generating repeat business. Make that person restaurant manager and suddenly the job involves scheduling shifts, managing costs, resolving conflict between kitchen and front of house, dealing with suppliers, developing weaker employees and leading people who were colleagues yesterday. What made them excellent before still matters, but it isn't the whole job anymore.

Sometimes the person who looks less spectacular on the scoreboard is the more interesting promotion candidate. The salesperson delivering 115% rather than 150% might be the person everyone else already approaches for advice, the one who can explain why something works rather than simply doing it instinctively, or the one who thinks about the performance of the team rather than only their own territory. The second-best waiter might be the one who notices another section is drowning, helps the new starter without being asked and understands what is happening in the kitchen as well as on the floor.

That creates its own problem. If high performers repeatedly watch other people being promoted ahead of them, the organisation needs credible ways of recognising and developing them without pretending that management is the only form of progression. A bigger strategic account, a specialist role, a new geography, mentoring responsibility or a transformation assignment may be a much better next move than managing people. Internal mobility, seen that way, is less about rewarding someone for what they have already done and more about working out where their capabilities might travel next.

There is a curious difference in how we sometimes approach that question depending on where the candidate comes from. An internal person who has never done the bigger job may be described as having potential, while an external person who has never done precisely the same job may be described as lacking experience. There are good reasons to know more about the internal candidate, but both decisions still contain a leap because in both cases we are trying to work out whether what somebody has demonstrated so far will survive a change in context.

That has always influenced how I think about hiring. I want someone who can do the job in front of them, but I also tend to look for some headroom. What might this person be able to take on once they have mastered it? Where else could they go? What happens when the job itself becomes bigger? There are times when none of that should be overthought and the person who can walk through the door on Monday and start solving an immediate problem is exactly the right hire. At other times, recruiting someone who already demonstrates almost everything the role could possibly demand may leave surprisingly little room for development, while hiring entirely for potential brings an obvious set of risks of its own.

Which is why I struggle to draw a neat conclusion from any of this. Someone who has spent ten years in the same industry may bring depth and pattern recognition that an outsider simply does not have, while someone whose career has repeatedly crossed industries, functions, countries or business models may have become unusually good at entering unfamiliar environments and making sense of them. The outstanding internal performer may be ready for the next role, or their very success may distract us from how different that role actually is. The CV that matches perfectly may belong to exactly the person the business needs, while the one that requires a conversation may contain something the job description never managed to express. Any of them could be the right fit.

I don't think the answer is to value industry experience less, favour unconventional candidates, prefer referrals or distrust internal promotions, because that would just give us a different collection of shortcuts. What I do think is worth questioning is how much certainty we attach to the signals we already use. A CV gives us part of the story, a recommendation adds context, an interview gives us another view and previous performance tells us something about what a person has already demonstrated. None can tell us with certainty what happens when the customer changes, the organisation restructures, the role gets bigger, the strategy shifts or somebody encounters a problem they have never seen before.

The next time I look at a CV, I will probably still notice the familiar things first: the companies, the titles, the years and the results. We all need somewhere to start. I just hope I remember to ask what those experiences actually required of the person, what they taught them along the way, and what they might have prepared them to do next.

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