Past experience will tell you next to nothing about how a candidate will perform at your company, Inc. reports, based on a recent review of 81 studies.
How could experience and the learning that should come with it not improve a new employee’s ability to do the job? There is a difference between doing a job previously and doing it well previously, points out study co-author Van Iddekinge, though he can’t be sure of the exact basis of the findings.
In other words, the problem isn’t really asking about past experiences. It’s being lazy and doing nothing else to verify that experience actually translates into knowledge and skills.
All of which makes digging into the quality or significance of a candidate’s past experience—through behavioral interview questions, job-relevant tests and internal company screening data—particularly worthwhile.
One good way to verify a candidate’s abilities is to ask them about specific times they solved problems on the job or faced specific challenges, there are some sample questions here from Google’s head of hiring. Read the full story.
