Hiring the right person for a role is important. It is not easy. The interview process is how we attempt to identify the correct person. No interview process is perfect, but some processes are far worse than others. Good organizations will put thought and effort into implementing and iterating the interview process. In this article, I wish to put some focus on an oft-overlooked part of the process - the posting of the job description.

One common problem with job descriptions, especially in the tech sector, is using years of experience with a language or technology as a shorthand for skill in that technology.

Sebastian Ramirez tweeted the following in July of 2020

I saw a job post the other day.
It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI.
I couldn’t apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created that thing.
Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that “years of experience = skill level”.

Such an extreme example aside, there are two real problems with this approach. Firstly, the number of years of experience does not necessarily correlate with someone’s level of expertise. Secondly, stating a minimum number of years may introduce unintended bias into your application pools. 

Let me give you a sporting analogy. Two baseball players that we shall call M and S.

M has 9 years of experience in Major League Baseball 

S has only 6 years of experience.

Would you pass on S because of his fewer years of experience? No, you would look deeper and ask questions about what they have done with their time in The Show. If you did not, you would pick Mario Mendoza, who gave his name to the Mendoza Line, a measure of ineffective output at the plate. Player S is one of the most amazing players to grace the diamond, so much so that The Dodgers offered him $700m to play for the next ten years.

Working with a specific technology for a certain number of years does not mean that person brings more to the table than someone with fewer years. Focus the job description on how they use their technical skills. Rather than looking for someone with 5 years of Java experience as a shortcut for Senior Engineer ask for experience leading a software development project. These requirements also provide opportunities in the interview for the candidate to describe that experience.

Another reason to avoid job requirements that list a specific minimum years of experience is to reduce bias. There is research that shows male candidates are more likely than female candidates to apply for roles where they fall short of the threshold. Losing out on a candidate because they miss the cutoff is bad, even more so when that skews the gender balance. 

In summary, avoid using "x years of experience” in a job description.