Staff Writer 
By Memory Nguwi
HAVING spent many years in recruitment, I continue to see organisations making the same mistakes when hiring.
One of the most common problems is the use of arbitrary requirements in job adverts, especially around qualifications and years of experience. These requirements are often presented as if they are grounded in careful analysis, yet in reality, many are simply inherited traditions that no one has seriously questioned.
Consider the common requirement that a candidate must have “10 to 15 years of experience.” Why 10 years? Why not eight or 12? Is there truly a meaningful difference between someone with 10 years of experience and someone with nine? In most cases, there is not. The number often appears impressive, but it rarely reflects a genuine analysis of what is needed to perform the job to the required levels.
Scientific research on hiring has repeatedly shown that the relationship between years of experience and job performance is weak. After a certain point, additional years of experience add very little predictive value. In other words, once someone has gained enough experience to understand the core tasks of a job, simply accumulating more years of experience does not necessarily make them a better performer.
The danger with rigid experience requirements is that they create artificial barriers that exclude capable candidates. An organisation might require 10 years of experience, whereas someone with five or six years of well-developed experience could perform the role equally well. By insisting on inflated thresholds, employers may be filtering out strong talent without even realising it.
Another problem is that years of experience say very little about the quality of that experience. Someone may have worked in a role for 10 years without ever developing strong capability, while another person might acquire deeper competence within three or four years because they were exposed to challenging work, good mentorship, and demanding environments. Simply counting years ignores this critical distinction.
The same problem appears in qualification requirements. Many job adverts include phrases such as “an MBA is an added advantage” or list multiple degrees as if academic credentials automatically translate into better job performance. Yet rarely do organisations ask a simple question: what evidence do we have that this qualification actually improves performance in this specific role?
Research in industrial and organisational psychology has long demonstrated that additional years of formal education do not automatically lead to improved job performance. Education can certainly provide useful knowledge and develop analytical thinking, but its predictive value for workplace performance is often modest once a person has acquired the basic knowledge required for the job.
In practice, many qualification requirements are included because they sound impressive or because they were copied from previous job adverts. Over time, these requirements become institutionalised. No one remembers why they were introduced in the first place, yet they continue to shape hiring decisions and limit the pool of potential candidates.
When you examine job adverts across many organisations today, you will often see long lists of requirements that have little connection to the actual work to be performed. Employers may demand multiple degrees, professional certifications, and extensive experience, even when the job itself does not require such a combination. The result is a hiring process that is more about filtering candidates through arbitrary criteria than about identifying who can actually do the work.
This approach is not only inefficient but also risky. By focusing on superficial requirements, organisations may overlook candidates who possess the real drivers of performance. Decades of research have shown that factors such as cognitive ability, integrity, job knowledge, and conscientiousness are among the strongest predictors of job performance. Yet these factors rarely appear explicitly in job adverts or selection processes.
Instead, employers rely heavily on proxies such as degrees and years of experience. These proxies are convenient, but they are often poor substitutes for assessing the capabilities that truly matter.
A more effective approach to hiring begins with a clear understanding of the work itself. Before drafting a job advert, organisations should first develop a comprehensive job profile based on the role’s actual responsibilities. This means identifying the decisions the role must make, the complexity of the problems to be solved, the knowledge required, and the outcomes the job is expected to deliver.
Once the work is clearly defined, the capabilities needed to perform that work become much easier to determine. For example, a role that involves solving complex analytical problems may require strong reasoning ability and structured thinking. A role that requires influencing stakeholders may demand communication and persuasion skills. These insights provide a far more reliable basis for defining hiring requirements than simply copying generic qualifications from previous job adverts.
A well-constructed job profile also helps organisations determine realistic experience thresholds. Instead of demanding a fixed number of years, employers can focus on the type of experience that truly matters. What kind of decisions must the candidate have handled? What level of responsibility should they have managed before? What types of problems should they be capable of solving? These questions are far more meaningful than simply counting years.
The same logic applies to qualifications. Rather than listing degrees as default requirements, organisations should ask whether a particular qualification provides the knowledge genuinely necessary for the role. In some professions, such as engineering, medicine, or law, formal education is essential because it provides foundational expertise. In many other roles, however, practical experience and demonstrated capability may be far more important than additional academic credentials.
Ultimately, hiring should be anchored in the realities of the job, not in generic job descriptions. Organisations that take the time to understand the work they are hiring for are far more likely to identify the candidates who can perform.
Recruitment should be approached as a strategic activity that directly affects organisational performance. Every hiring decision shapes the quality of the workforce and, by extension, the organisation’s future.
If employers want to improve hiring outcomes, they must move away from arbitrary criteria and focus instead on the capabilities that genuinely drive performance. That shift begins with one simple but powerful step: defining the work clearly before defining the candidate.
When hiring is grounded in a deep understanding of the job itself, organisations stop filtering candidates based on superficial signals and start identifying those who can actually deliver results. That is when recruitment becomes not just a hiring process, but a strategic advantage.
Nguwi is an occupational psychologist, data scientist, speaker and managing consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm.
