You Nerds are Still Hiring for Experience!

A year ago I wrote that skills expire but attributes compound.

It’s gotten WAY worse.

AI has made my point for me. Aggressively.

Company posts a job. "MUST have 3+ years (insert weird industry software) experience."

Six months later, you can replace that software with a affordable easy to use Agent that changes how the whole company works.

Your "experienced" hire?

Learning from scratch. Same as the smart/hungry/coachable person you passed on.

Except that person would've figured it out Saturday morning. For fun.

Because that's what hungry people DO.

The shelf life of a specific skill has gone from years to months. And it's accelerating.

Half the "must-have" marketing skills from 2023 are now prompts in ChatGPT.

My Dad always taught me "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM."

Match the job description.

Hire the person with 15 years doing the exact thing.

Safe.

Defensible.

Nobody questions it.

Also: a trap.

You're hiring for what the job WAS. Not what it IS. And definitely not what it's ABOUT TO BE.

The job is going to change. Probably before their 90-day review. Definitely before their annual.

A while back on the podcast, I interviewed Sagan member Justin from the Zen Windows franchisor.

He went from studying English to troubleshooting LOCOMOTIVES to running operations for a 24-location window franchise.

His take: "I believe anybody can learn anything as long as they've got a little bit of that drive."

That's it. Whole game.

Some of our best people at Sagan came from restaurants. Retail. One guy was a DJ. Jobs that look NOTHING like what they do now.

Fabi was our first account manager. (We recorded this two years ago, she is still with us crushing it).

She didn't come from staffing or recruiting or any of the things a normal recruiter would filter for.

She came from being smart, hungry, and coachable.

I can teach someone a CRM in a week.

I can't teach curious.

I can't teach resourceful.

I can't teach gives-a-shit.

And THAT is what kills me about the "must know XYZ" hiring crowd.

It was always lazy thinking. But it used to be SAFE lazy thinking. The IBM hire.

Now? You absolute maniacs are STILL writing "must have experience with [tool that will be unrecognizable in 8 months]" into your job descriptions.

While the person you SHOULD have hired…the one who taught themselves three new tools last weekend because they thought it was fun…is making your competitor money.

Right now.

Today.

Skills expire. Attributes compound.

The expiration date just got a whole lot shorter. And some of you are still buying expired milk.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

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