where did all that experience go?
by ed mendlowitz
call me before you do anything: the art of accounting
we hired sam out of school and he worked for us for two and a half years and then we split up our firm. this was ages ago and sy and i left our third partner to form our new firm on jan. 1.
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however, there is a valuable lesson here and i think it is worth sharing. it changed the way we hired staff.
sam was really very good and a nice guy and clients liked him. when our firm split up, sy and i did not know if we would make a living and certainly could not take any staff. the partner we left also did not need as much staff and sam was let go.
about seven years later i met sam at a bus stop in manhattan, chatted a short while and found out he was looking for a job. i asked him what he wanted in salary and hired him then and there. we were growing rapidly and could not hire enough of the right type of staff, and sam fit the bill. he was at a manager level and i “knew” he was good.
well, it turns out he wasn’t so good. he was still very pleasant but not as experienced as we thought he should be. he had almost 10 years of experience but his performance was at about a four-year level. we could not understand it but eventually figured it out.
while sam chronologically worked nine and a half years, the training he got was inconsistent and had gaps. also, he worked for five firms, with the longest being the two and half years with my prior firm. here is what happened.
during his first two and half years, he was trained in everything he needed to know and do for us. he listened, followed instructions, did good work and met his time commitments. he was great. when he left us, he interviewed very well and got a job at a higher level and higher salary than his level of experience warranted. the firm that hired him, as with any firm that adds staff, was shorthanded and needed him right away to clean up past due work and reduce the work in progress inventory. they put him right to work performing cleanup work at a higher level than he could achieve.
the jobs got done, but the partners did more fixing up than expected. disappointment set in and while this went on for a few months, sam was already going to some clients, which made it awkward to let him go. he was a “body” who took the partners’ pressure while adding to their workload and fixing up what he did. there was absolutely no training, and sam was left to learn on his own while he was constantly pressured to move the work forward and out. poor raises resulted and sam left for more money, each time getting a job with his new boss’s expectations of him being at a higher level.
we hired sam at a manager level, but his cumulative experience was at the level, on our development scale, of someone with about four to four and a half years. not near his salary level. he did not perform well, and he and we were disappointed.
the lesson learned was that hiring someone with “experience” doesn’t work for me. sam wasn’t our only disappointment, but we detected a pattern with other people we hired. they had the appropriate years of working, but their experience was grossly inappropriate for their salary level because of bouncing around, sometimes not by their choice. my partners and i came to the conclusion that we needed to pass on these people and concentrate on hiring out of school and doing our own training. the simple result was that we were richer by doing this than by hiring so-called “experienced” people.
this is the result of my and my partners’ many years of experience hiring and running a practice. think about your experiences. i know that many small firms shy away from hiring out of school because they do not want to deal with the training process. i was like that but “learned” a better way.
2 responses to “when an employee’s growth has gaps”
frank stitely
this is a great article and mirrors our experience. there’s experience and then there’s chair warming. a telltale sign me for me is a resume with a lot of 1 – 2 year stints at firms. they are around just long enough for the firm to realize they don’t know anything and then move them on.
robert j. lawrence
i would like to offer a perspective from the other end. i started in industry, and have worked in numerous small and start-up businesses. in that dynamic environment, there are a lot of changes, and often that includes businesses splitting off, or failing. as i quickly review my resume, i notice many 1-3 year stints. there are stories behind each of those situations. when interviewing for my most recent position 6 years ago, the many short stays were a topic of concern. i explained my overall experience and approach and discussed each situation individually. although there may be gaps, i have also seen and learned from a lot of different experiences, and feel that i add significant value. a year after that, that company was acquired by a much larger company, which once again adds a new job to my resume, although i’m still working at the same place. i believe it’s important not to assume you know what kind of experience someone has based on length of career, or even by looking at the length of jobs listed on the resume. nothing can substitute for speaking with the candidate, and getting examples of their abilities and work. i think a hiring company should be prepared to assess capabilities and train or retrain as needed, whether hiring an “experienced” candidate or a recent graduate. hoping to avoid training does your employees a disservice, and sets them up for failure in the future, whether that future is with you or elsewhere. even a truly experienced candidate deserves continued training and development to avoid stalling at whatever level they have reached.