Hiring for Skills vs. Hiring for Experience: What Works Better in Tech?
When hiring for a technology position, one of the first things employers often look at is experience.
Five years of AWS. Ten years in infrastructure. Previous experience in cybersecurity. A certain number of years managing enterprise environments.
Experience is easy to understand, easy to put into a job description and relatively easy to identify on a résumé.
But does having more years of experience necessarily mean someone is better equipped to do the job?
Not always.
Technology changes quickly. The strongest candidate may not be the person who has spent the longest time doing something. It may be the person who has the right combination of technical skills, problem-solving ability, adaptability and relevant experience to succeed in your particular environment.
The challenge for employers is determining when experience really matters — and when focusing too heavily on it may cause them to overlook excellent candidates.
Why Employers Rely on Years of Experience
There’s a good reason experience appears in almost every technology job posting.
Someone who has spent years designing cloud environments, managing enterprise networks or responding to cybersecurity incidents has likely encountered situations that can’t easily be reproduced in a classroom or certification program.
Experience can demonstrate that someone has operated in real-world environments where systems fail, requirements change and technical decisions have business consequences.
For senior and highly specialized positions, that matters.
The problem occurs when years of experience become a substitute for evaluating whether someone can actually do the job.
A requirement for “10+ years of experience” might make sense for one position. For another, it may simply be an arbitrary number carried over from an old job description.
Years of Experience and Ability Aren’t the Same Thing
Consider two candidates for a cloud engineering position.
One has eight years of cloud experience but has spent the last several years maintaining relatively stable environments.
Another has four years of experience but has designed and deployed complex cloud infrastructure, automated deployments, handled migrations and worked extensively with modern tools.
Who is more qualified?
There isn’t enough information to know.
And that’s the point.
The number of years alone doesn’t answer the question.
What someone has accomplished during those years is often much more informative than the number itself.
Technology employers should look at the complexity, scale and relevance of a candidate’s experience rather than simply counting years.
Technology Makes Skills-Based Hiring Particularly Important
Technology is unusual because the tools professionals use can change remarkably quickly.
Cloud platforms evolve. New cybersecurity threats emerge. AI capabilities advance. Infrastructure becomes increasingly automated. New programming frameworks become popular while others decline.
A candidate can have extensive technology experience while still lacking exposure to the tools an organization uses today.
Conversely, someone earlier in their career may have deep experience with technologies that have only existed for a few years.
This makes hiring purely on tenure particularly difficult in areas such as:
- Cloud and infrastructure
- Cybersecurity
- AI and machine learning
- DevOps and automation
- Data engineering
- Networking
- Data center technologies
- Solutions architecture
Employers still need to understand a candidate’s experience, but they should also evaluate what that person can actually do with the technologies relevant to the position.
What Does Skills-Based Hiring Actually Mean?
Skills-based hiring doesn’t mean ignoring experience or education.
It means starting with a different question.
Instead of asking:
“How many years has this person done this?”
Ask:
“What does this person need to be able to do successfully in this role?”
For a Solutions Architect, for example, that might include the ability to conduct technical discovery, understand a customer’s existing environment, design an appropriate solution, communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders, develop a scope of work and support the sales process.
For a cloud engineer, it might involve designing resilient environments, automating infrastructure, managing security and identity, troubleshooting complex systems and controlling cloud costs.
Once those capabilities are defined, employers can evaluate candidates against them.
Years of experience then become evidence supporting those skills rather than the primary qualification itself.
Experience Still Matters
None of this means employers should disregard experience.
There are situations where experience is extremely valuable.
A senior architect who has been through several large infrastructure transformations may recognize risks that someone encountering the situation for the first time doesn’t.
An experienced cybersecurity professional may identify patterns during an incident because they’ve seen similar attacks before.
A senior data center professional may understand operational risks that aren’t obvious from technical documentation.
Experience also becomes increasingly important in positions involving leadership, strategic decision-making, customer relationships or significant business risk.
The mistake isn’t valuing experience.
It’s assuming that more experience automatically equals more capability.
Certifications and Degrees Have a Similar Limitation
Technology employers can make the same mistake with certifications and education.
AWS, Azure, Cisco, VMware and cybersecurity certifications can provide useful evidence of knowledge. Degrees in computer science, engineering, data science and related fields can provide strong technical foundations.
But neither automatically proves someone can perform a particular job.
A certification can tell you that someone understands a technology.
A résumé can tell you they’ve worked around it.
The interview process should determine whether they can apply that knowledge to the problems your organization actually needs solved.
Look for Evidence of Skills
One of the best ways to improve technology hiring is to move beyond keyword matching.
If a candidate says they have AWS experience, ask what they built.
What was the environment?
What problem were they solving?
What decisions did they make?
What went wrong?
What would they do differently today?
If you’re hiring a Solutions Architect, don’t simply ask whether they’ve written statements of work.
Ask them to explain how they gather requirements, translate those requirements into a technical solution and estimate the resources required to deliver it.
Those conversations reveal far more than a number beside “years of experience.”
Transferable Skills Can Expand Your Candidate Pool
Skills-based hiring can also help employers find strong candidates outside an obvious talent pool.
Suppose you’re hiring for an Azure-heavy infrastructure position.
A candidate with strong AWS architecture experience but less Azure exposure may still have an excellent understanding of networking, identity, security, virtualization, automation and cloud architecture.
The platform terminology may be different, but much of the underlying knowledge transfers.
If the position genuinely requires someone to be productive in Azure on day one, direct experience may be essential.
If the organization can provide some ramp-up time, rejecting that candidate solely because they don’t have five years of Azure experience could mean losing someone with excellent underlying skills.
This distinction is particularly important when hiring for difficult-to-fill technology positions.
Beware of the Technology “Wish List”
Another problem arises when job descriptions accumulate requirements.
Five years of AWS.
Five years of Azure.
Kubernetes.
VMware.
Cisco.
Cybersecurity.
Terraform.
Python.
AI.
A master’s degree.
Three certifications.
And preferably experience in the company’s exact industry.
Eventually, the employer isn’t describing a realistic candidate. They’re describing several different people combined into one job description.
Worse, some of those requirements may have very little to do with what the successful employee will actually spend their time doing.
Before beginning a technology search, hiring managers should separate requirements into three categories:
Must have: The person cannot realistically perform the job without it.
Strongly preferred: Valuable experience that would make someone more effective but could potentially be learned.
Nice to have: Useful, but not a reason to reject an otherwise excellent candidate.
That simple exercise can dramatically improve a technology search.
Don’t Confuse Potential With Lack of Qualification
One of the biggest advantages of skills-based hiring is that it makes room for candidates who can grow.
Technology professionals frequently develop expertise by moving into increasingly challenging environments.
Someone doesn’t necessarily need to have performed every responsibility of a new position before being capable of succeeding in it.
The strongest hire may be someone who meets the important technical requirements, has demonstrated an ability to learn and is ready for a larger challenge.
Hiring exclusively for candidates who have already performed the exact same job can unnecessarily shrink the available talent pool.
So, Which Works Better: Skills or Experience?
For most technology positions, the answer is both — but skills should help determine how experience is evaluated.
Experience provides context.
Skills demonstrate capability.
Accomplishments provide evidence.
And adaptability helps indicate whether someone can continue succeeding as technology changes.
Rather than starting with an arbitrary requirement such as “seven years of experience,” start by identifying what the person must be capable of accomplishing.
Then ask:
What evidence would convince us that this candidate can do it?
Sometimes the answer will be ten years of highly relevant experience.
Sometimes it will be five.
And occasionally, the strongest candidate may have considerably less experience than expected but a much stronger record of solving the problems that actually matter.
Better Hiring Starts With Defining What Success Looks Like
Before posting your next technology position, take another look at the requirements.
Ask which ones genuinely predict success.
Are you looking for years, or are you looking for capability?
Are certain technologies truly mandatory, or could someone with adjacent experience learn them?
Does the degree requirement matter?
Does the certification matter?
And most importantly:
What will this person need to accomplish during their first year for you to consider the hire successful?
Build the search around that answer.
Because ultimately, you’re not hiring a résumé.
You’re hiring someone to solve problems, deliver results and help your organization move forward.
Finding the Right Technology Talent
Vinden Recruiting helps organizations identify experienced technology professionals across cloud and infrastructure, cybersecurity, data center, networking, DevOps, solutions architecture, technical sales, AI, machine learning and data.
Our approach focuses on understanding what a position actually requires and identifying professionals whose skills, experience and capabilities align with those needs.
If you’re struggling to find the right person for a specialized technology position, contact Vinden Recruiting to discuss your search.
