# Workplace Surgery: Experience vs. Talent in Hiring

- **Episode:** [232](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/232.md) (2025-09-16)
- **Type:** workplace-surgery
- **Tags:** hiring, experience vs talent, workplace surgery, recruitment
- **Time:** 48:19–54:10 (start 2899s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/232?t=2899](https://truthliesandwork.com/232?t=2899)

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[48:19] Al Elliott: Yeah, that's the simplest version. So you've basically just done that to this person. So no wonder they're a little bit narked. Okay, so question number 3, Leigh. Are we too focused on experience? Are we missing out on real talent when hiring? So this person is a founder and CEO of a growing business. They say, I've just wrapped up a frustrating round of hiring. We had several candidates with the right skills, attitude, and potential, but they were overlooked in favor of people with more experience. Months later, the role is still unfulfilled. The longer it drags on, the more convinced I am we're clinging to old hiring habits that don't serve us anymore. Oh, I see. So the team here have overlooked these candidates in favor of people with more experience. Okay. I think I understand that. Is that what you got from that?
[49:01] Leanne Elliott: Yep
[49:01] Al Elliott: So experience is easy to justify, but doesn't always mean someone will bring fresh ideas or fit the pace of a scaling company. I agree. I want to build a team that's sharp, adaptable, and forward-thinking, not just people who've done the job before. So the question is, is this, is this founding team, is this hiring team too focused on what candidates have done and are actually not looking at what they actually are capable of in the future?
[49:23] Leanne Elliott: Yes
[49:24] Al Elliott: Great. Okay. So thank you very much for listening. To be fair though, I mean, I think when I did paraphrase that in a slightly, uh, in a slightly Clearer way. When you say it like that, it's obvious, but why might someone fall back into old habits of going, well, we just need to make sure that they can't, that they have done this before?
[49:45] Leanne Elliott: It's a very common problem within recruitment that we have convinced ourselves that past experience, past behaviour is most, um, you know, important predictor of future performance and behaviour. And that's not entirely wrong, but it's not the most predictive. Adam Grant's book, Hidden Potential, talks all about this in the most beautiful ways and really calls out all the myths that we have in recruitment, real-world examples, and how it's impacting organisations. And a key one that he pulls out is around experience, because experience doesn't really mean much if we don't dig down into what that experience is. You could say Um, say, take, take one of us, Al. I'm looking for somebody who will have 5 years experience in building a podcast. I have 5 years experience in building a podcast. You have 5 years experience in building a podcast. Our experience is very different because I have 5 years experience guest scouting, researching topics, bringing in the science, doing a bit of the promotion, putting the kind of the shareables together, all that side of thing. Your experience is much more technical. Yours is in the editing and the audio processing. And what else do you do?
[51:01] Al Elliott: I feel like you're trivializing my role a bit
[51:04] Leanne Elliott: No, it's really, it's much more important than what I do
[51:06] Al Elliott: I know what you mean. Well, it's not, it's not important. It's as important, but yes, it's a different, I can totally see it takes different skills. You asked me to go out and find guests. I mean, I, I've, I've left guests hanging for months before, I think. And you've gone, Al, did you ever go back to the person? And I'm like, no, I didn't. No. So, so yeah, I totally get what you're saying
[51:22] Leanne Elliott: So my point is, if you're not specific about the exact type of experience you want and understanding how that experience, which is really knowledge, skills, and abilities, what is what we mean when we say experience, what the knowledge, skills, and abilities we've built during that experience that we've gained, how does that predict how well I'm gonna perform in this job in the future? And that should be based on a very solid job analysis. And nobody does a job analysis. Honestly, it— and it's surprising really because so many other areas will do that type of analysis. Like marketers will do loads of market research before launching a campaign. Why would you not do the same level of introspection to understand exactly what campaign person is going to work within your business to deliver the outcomes you want it to? It's the same processes, but for some reason we're not using it for the most expensive thing we're ever going to spend money on in our business. Do you know what I mean? Really sorry, it really bugs me. So, I think the point is experience isn't necessarily the right metric, but even when it can be useful, we're not digging down enough into what actually that experience looks like, what it's needed, and what it's going to mean in our business. You've also got a problem here in terms of that you're identifying people with the right skills, attitudes, and potential, but your hiring team isn't. This process should be very standardised. You shouldn't have As a CEO looking at this recruitment process and the outcomes of the assessments from the candidates, a different point of view of who gets hired compared to your HR manager. That shouldn't be allowed to happen because that shows there's some kind of bias and discrimination. You should absolutely seamlessly come to the same conclusion because there's a standardised scoring process throughout that will give you an objective. This is a person that should get the first offer. So, there's lots of issues here. You're not clinging to old habits, you're clinging to bad habits
[53:10] Al Elliott: Yeah
[53:11] Leanne Elliott: And this requires an entire overhaul of how you recruit, because as you can see, as you've said, it is leaving you with a long time to fill positions, and that is expensive and annoying. So, yeah, time for a rethink
[53:25] Al Elliott: We are considering doing some kind of masterclass. I've just— when we say we're considering, I thought about it for 3 minutes. I told Leanne over lunch, and now potentially, yeah, broadcasting it to the world. Uh, but, um, I think it'd be really interesting to do a little mini masterclass on hiring because I think I certainly had no idea of what I was doing when I was hiring before I met you. You've shown me it is, it is literally a tick box, but a good, a good tick box. It's a matrix. Leanne puts together a matrix of scores. You tick them and then you score people. And then at the end of it, you literally go, okay, well, this is the top 10%. This is the end. Everyone else is, you know, it's just a really scientific way of doing it. Yeah. So if you're interested in that kind of thing, Then find us on LinkedIn or check out the show notes or send us an email or something and tell us. And if we get, if we get more than 20 people emailing us, we'll do that