Editor's note: This blog post is part of the 'Trivialities' series by Andrés Calviño, Head of Organizational Capabilities at Techie Talent. Trivialities spotlights the "white elephant" in the room. Subscribe to the Trivialities Newsletter on LinkedIn for more insights.
Trivialities: Seniority is not experience
Senior means "old", so seniority is about time passing. However, by no means being senior is equivalent to being good or wise. Although wisdom is an accumulation that happens while aging, even the noblest drinks become rancid over time.
When looking for a job, we are all used to stereotyping people as Junior/Senior as a synonym of "experience", introducing the inconvenient yet wrong bias of measuring experience in terms of years of work. Having 15 years of work in your CV does not make you a rockstar... too obvious, right? Yet we continue to see over and over again companies looking to hire a “Senior XX” or even worse, a “Semi-Senior YY” (like a half-cooked thing).
When discussing this with clients, I realize this happens because of the lack of better terms to refer to "experience". Somehow it becomes difficult to find proper adjectives to qualify experience in a person. Also, let’s agree, having “Senior” in front of your job title suggests an undeniable touch of elegance and seriousness that not only feeds your ego but also makes you look more professional. But it doesn’t qualify your experience.
At Techie Talent, we use as a reference the well known Dreyfus Model which offers us not only a proper language to clearly express experience levels, but also a set of concrete behavioral signs that can be measured to evaluate those levels. We don’t need the typical extensive in-depth technical interview to make those signs manifest and this allows us to offer a unique and totally different experience to our candidates in our hiring process.
In our service offer, we don't build blended teams of junior, semi-senior and senior people in roles. We count on beginners, competent and proficient talent on skills to solve problems. Instead of seniority levels and job title hierarchies we have experience profiles and enabling roles. We consider our Techies Starters, Builders, Solvers and Wizards.
Quick glimpse on our Techie profiles:
- Techie Starters are our less experienced collaborators. They clearly denote a “how to do this?” mindset and focus their attention on following instructions. They require both supervised work execution and supervised learning. The main challenges for a Starter are to learn new tools and technologies, to learn working habits, and to understand the results of their work.
- Techie Builders are collaborators with proven hands-on experience solving some problems in concrete contexts. They denote a “what to do?” mindset and focus their attention on producing outputs. They are used to apply recipes and guidelines to produce results and require work planning and prioritization, as well as guidance for learning. The main challenges for a Builder are to follow processes, practice working habits, and embrace quality.
- Techie Solvers are competent collaborators with experience solving multiple problems in several contexts. They clearly denote a “What for?” mindset and focus their attention on outcomes. They follow processes and apply principles, models and practices to resolve contextualized problems. They self-manage their time and work planning as well as their learning needs. The main challenges for a Solver are to understand business needs, contextualize problems and develop retrospection on their work.
- Techie Wizards are proficient collaborators with extensive experience solving multiple and complex problems in several contexts. They clearly denote a “Why, why, why?” mindset and focus their attention on satisfying needs. They use situational analysis to apply patterns and extrapolate known solutions from different contexts, judge alternatives based on convenience or advantages, think from a risk management perspective and reflect on the work done and its quality. The main challenges for a Wizard are to evaluate impact of decisions and provide value judgements.
