Fire the interviewer

Our fellow blogspotter Witho is riding the job interview trail, and blogging about the results: four interviews, four rejections, but never say die. The reason for the fourth rejection is just staggering:

In the case of the latest one, working as an Information Officer for a Mental Health Organisation, I didn't have enough experience of Microsoft Access [...]

The same thing happened two years ago to my sister: the company hired someone who had fewer years of less-relevant experience, whom the interview panel rated below Sis, who was disliked by future co-workers who knew her outside the company - but who knew Excel.

Now, I know a thing or two about computers (I write software for a living, and spent five years teaching people to use software) and I'd like to point out that this is nonsense, for three reasons.

First: Anyone can learn to use any piece of software. My local community college offers forty-six closely-printed pages of courses in all kinds of software programmes. Call up your local community college, there's a two-day course in whatever-the-hell starting next week.

Second: Studies show definitively that the length of a person's experience has no relation to the quality of their work. Take a simple example: does any reader not know somebody who's been driving cars for ten years, but is a lousy driver? If a person has not become proficient with a piece of software in their first year with it, they will never become good at it no matter how many further years they spend.

Third, specific to Witho: Microsoft Access is the simplest database programme in the world. Anyone who has worked with a grownup database like Oracle, Informix or 4D, would master Access before their afternoon teabreak. Witho has done big stuff with real databases (read her blog); turning her down because of Access is like telling Michael Schumacher he doesn't have enough experience driving Ford Escorts.

In any case, the focus is wrong. You are not hiring "experience", you are hiring a person. Is this person right for the job? If she is, then hire her and train her and get the benefit of her being the right person for the job.

The person who is wrong for the job will always be wrong - even if he knows Access.