Experience Proxies and What They Exclude

Proxies are used because they are cheap to apply. Each of them selects on something other than capability, and the something is usually background.

The principles in “Experience Proxies and What They Exclude” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating the feature summary can use it to coordinate the administrative work around assessment, identify stages that repeatedly expand and plan capacity, while keeping the hiring decision tied to job-relevant evidence instead of raw activity totals.

For an independent benchmark, compare the process with U.S. OPM assessment resources; the useful test is whether the local method remains job-related, proportionate and explainable.

Years of experience

Measures exposure, not competence, and the relationship weakens quickly beyond the first two or three years.

Excludes career changers, returners and people who learned faster than the average.

And is trivially gamed by anybody who has held a title for long enough.

Where you think you need years, name what you actually need and test for it.

Degree requirements

Sometimes required by regulation or by a client contract, which is a real constraint.

Frequently inherited, which is not.

Excludes substantially by class and by country of education, and the relationship with performance in most roles is weak.

Organisations that audit their degree requirements typically remove most of them and report no drop in hire quality.

Continuous employment

Career gaps are read as a signal and are usually caused by care, illness, migration or redundancy.

Selecting against gaps selects against women, disabled people and migrants systematically.

If a gap matters, ask about it neutrally — and be clear with yourself about what answer would actually change your decision.

Prestige of previous employer

Predicts who got hired somewhere else, which was subject to the same proxies.

It compounds advantage rather than measuring capability.

And it is the proxy assessors are least aware of using.

Specific tool experience

"Five years with this software" where the underlying skill transfers in weeks.

Excludes capable people for a gap that onboarding closes.

Ask instead whether somebody can learn a comparable tool quickly, which is testable.

Unpaid availability signals

Internships, volunteering, side projects, conference speaking.

All of these select on financial cushion and free time.

Treating them as evidence of commitment mistakes circumstance for character.

What to do instead

For each proxy in your requirements, write down what you believe it indicates.

Then ask whether you could assess that directly.

Usually you can, and the direct assessment is both fairer and more predictive — which is the argument of this collection compressed into one exercise.

What to check

How many requirements in your last job advertisement were proxies?

For each, what do you think it indicates, and could you test that instead?

Have you audited your degree requirements?

And does anything in your process read career gaps as a signal?

The point

For each proxy in your requirements, write down what you believe it indicates, then ask whether you could assess that directly.

Usually you can.

Underlying all of this

Almost everything in this collection reduces to one discipline: write down what the job requires, assess that thing directly, record the evidence, and look at your own outcomes afterwards. None of it requires buying anything, and organisations that do those four things consistently outperform ones running longer processes built from instruments chosen before the requirements were known.

The recurring pattern

The recurring failure across every section here is the same: measuring what is convenient rather than what matters, then never checking whether it predicted anything. The check is an afternoon of work once a year, and it is the step that separates a process that improves from one that merely persists.