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  • The Experience Question

    Posted on January 19th, 2009 by Spike and currently 5 commenting.

    We all get it. It seems to be one of those built-in interview questions that’s either naturally asked or one that you fall back on when you’ve run out of other questions.

    ‘So, do you have any experience in our industry?’

    Valid question. I get it. You want to make sure we at least have a little bit of a clue of the ins-and-outs of your industry. But when you ask that question, you’re making it about YOU again. I know, I know, it’s hard to not make it about you. That’s what we’re programmed to do, right? But there’s a bigger picture.

    Some of the brightest folks at Brains on Fire had zero experience in the ‘ad’ world. They were carpenters, actors, musicians and street team leaders. And I think they do so well here because they aren’t tainted by ‘experience.’

    Same goes with Brains on Fire as a whole. Sure, we have a lot of experience in a lot of different industries. But not all of them. We have experience in starting movements. Connecting and empowering people. Enriching and improving lives. We don’t have experience in making it about YOU. We have experience in making it about THEM.

    I think ‘experience’ will always be a question. And a good one to ask. But maybe, in this world of new marketing, along with the rest of the conversations out there, it should be flipped on its head…and reframed.

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  • Matt

    Nailed it. I think it’s the idea of “boxing yourself in”. Once you know how an industry works there is the danger of assuming that’s how is SHOULD work which isn’t always true.

    People who understand this start working in fields with just enough information for a base, not enough for a box. Industry “experts” might call them laymen but they are the ones that usually end up changing the game.

  • libby

    Amen!

  • http://heatherartworks.com Heather

    Sweet example. The ‘tried and true’ methods do work for some, but there are those so far outside the box that they no longer know what the box looks like. (Can I work for you? Seriously?)

    In third grade we had a writing assignment, one of the first we would endure in our education system, all meant to teach us ‘how to learn’. In a classroom of 22 students, we each had to write a report on one of our past Presidents for presentation to the whole class, thus the writer learns a lot about one President and the class learns about a bunch of Presidents.

    We all wanted George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Why? Because by the third grade, we’d heard about these two. We all figured, “Hey! I’ve heard about Washington! I can write about him!”

    Our teacher was sneaky and understood this line of thinking. She told us, “No. You each draw a President to write about. One you know nothing about. Because if you already know something about your subject, you won’t learn anything. But if you’re given a subject you know nothing about, then you learn something.”

    She was smart like that. And that stuck with me. And I do my research to make sure I learn things about things I didn’t know before. So experience counts with some, but a willingness to learn can go so much further.

  • http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/ john moore (from Brand Autopsy)

    Yep, experience can be overrated. One of the best lines I’ve heard about hiring only “experienced” employees comes from Guy Kawasaki. In THE MACINTOSH WAY (1989) he shares this chewy nugget … “It is better to hire people who can get you where you want to be than people who profess to have been there before.”

  • http://crowesmostlymovies.blogspot.com Simon Crowe

    I couldn’t agree more with this post!