BIG DATA is the triumph of data over intuition. But who wins and who loses?  Who is perceived as having the best intuition? That would be the seasoned professional with twenty years in his field who goes with his gut instinct to make the tough calls.

When a June 2014 Harvard Business Review cover story said experience is overrated, I considered the all the traditional trends that are less and less correlated to success and how this is a big advantage for the less experienced! Newly entered professionals could gain advantages on par or greater than their more seasoned counterparts.

HBR Experience is Overrated
The world is changing at increasing rates as companies are competitively forced to compress their product life cycles.  Firms must acquire more of the talent they immediately need instead of having the luxury of time to develop it from within. This puts pressure on budgets to migrate from L&D to comp plans.

Illustrating the impact on recruiting, imagine a company needing to hire an in-house recruiter. It must select between a recruiter with twenty years of experience against one with five years of experience. Our candidate with less experience, though, has almost all of her recruitment experience in big data analytics to pull candidates in through social media. She never posts jobs since her developing expertise lies in pull recruitment!  Instead, she developed skills in big data analytics to get coders to script the right algorithms to target qualified candidates who did not even realize they were looking for a new position.   

Meanwhile, our more seasoned recruiter has two decades in traditional push recruitment. He posts jobs before wading through hundreds of qualified and unqualified resumes alike just to tell the difference.

Never before could the less experienced adequately compete with the more experienced. If experience is overrated, it is because it has been replaced by employee nimbleness – the ability of employees to learn.  HR Avant Garde invites to you to learn the practical side of big data.

In this BIG DATA webinar, updated from two years ago,  we invite you to learn:   

  • How BIG DATA changes career paths of even the most unsuspecting!
  • How BIG DATA changes the way business decision are made.
  • How BIG DATA changes who makes the decisions & the reshuffling balance of power.
  • What BIG DATA skills can you bring to the office tomorrow to increase your value?

Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is suppa@suppa.org.

© Vincent Suppa 2017