Who’s the better candidate: someone who can do all of the work with half the skills and experience, or someone with all of the skills and experience?

Specifically, would you hire Mary, a person with limited experience?

Here’s her story.

I was just going through our archives and found an unedited video of a person I interviewed a few years ago as part of developing some new training course content. In 30 minutes I discovered that Mary had worked for one company for four years and accomplished quite a bit with very little experience. In particular:

Mary’s first job out of college was in HR, but she quickly transferred into recruiting since there was more action. Within six months she became employee of the month (out of about 3,000) by finding a number of ways to find hard-to-fill buyer positions that more experienced recruiters couldn’t. Multiple hiring manager clients nominated and endorsed her for this award. She had no prior experience in recruiting.

By the end of her first year she moved into a product marketing position and led the successful launch of a new product. Her big breakthrough came by working with marketing and manufacturing and modifying a design specification that was causing production delays. She had absolutely no experience in product marketing, yet she was successful. Her ability to collaborate and lead multi-functional groups was the key here.

After nine months in product marketing she asked to move into sales and took an associate sales role. Six months later she took over a territory on her own. In her first year in sales she beat quota by 10%. In her second year her quota was increased by 30% and she still beat this by 15%. She made President’s Club both years.

She was one of the first people to move this rapidly in sales with most associates spending 1-2 years as an associate before being assigned their own territory. In fact, most people hired into the sales associate role have had some significant prior sales experience. Mary had none, yet the senior sales rep she was supporting recommended her for the bigger role based on her ability to learn rapidly, her persistence, and being able to work closely with demanding clients. She competed with other internal and external candidates who had far more experience for this job, but won out because of her innate talent, not years of sales experience in the same industry.

In her second year in sales Mary won a sales innovation award by figuring out a unique way to introduce a major product line to an influential end-user who was using the number one competitor’s product line. As part of this sale she led a complex capital negotiation process with a tough-minded CFO who wanted a huge price reduction. They agreed on the initial proposed price.

Some lessons:

1. Experience and skills are overrated. A continuous track record of exceptional performance in a variety of increasing complex situations isn’t.

2. When interviewing someone for any job, get into the weeds and benchmark their performance against their peers. Look for the “Achiever Pattern” in each of their positions. This indicates they’re always in the top 25% of whatever they’re doing. Mary is clearly an Achiever.

3. The best people are those who accomplish the most with the least amount of skills and experience.

4. If you’re a candidate without the full complement of skills and experiences, make sure you can demonstrate you’re an Achiever and someone who can get great results regardless of the circumstances.

If you’re a hiring manager or business leader, would you like to hire people like Mary, or at least be able to consider talented people like her? If so, don’t filter them out based on their level of skills and experience. Instead, ask them to describe the biggest thing they’ve accomplished with the least amount of skills and experience. Then don’t be surprised how many talented people emerge from the shadows. Surprisingly, they were always there, you just weren’t looking for them through the correct filter.