Why years of experience predicts almost nothing, with Heidi Wassini of Viebke & West

Skills-based hiring, ageism, and what the research says about years of experience, with Heidi Wassini, Chief People Officer at Viebke & West.

Most hiring processes begin by screening on years of experience, and the evidence for that practice is close to nonexistent. A 2019 meta-analysis of more than 80 studies found the corrected correlation between prehire work experience and job performance is 0.06, which is where Heidi Wassini's comparison to horoscopes comes from, and she makes it without much patience for the alternative. She has removed the CV from hiring processes since 2012, long before unbiased recruitment became a topic in Denmark, and she is quietly amused that people have since been invited onto national television to talk about doing the same thing.

Heidi came into talent acquisition from telco product management, which means she arrived thinking commercially about hiring before that was fashionable, and her working rule is that if she is not helping managers make money or save money she should not be in the room. She has led global talent acquisition and employer branding at Too Good To Go and Vivino, spent a decade at Ramboll, and runs Heartfelt.biz alongside her in-house role. She is an RL100 member, a Noon AI Talent 100 honouree, and is quoted in both of Katrina Collier's books.

The bias she names is one very few people would guess at. We ask candidates to demonstrate motivation, in written applications and again in interviews, on the assumption that we can read it. A 2021 study from Utrecht University tested that assumption by comparing recruiter judgements of candidate motivation against candidates' own self-reported motivation and against an algorithmic assessment. The algorithm was the more accurate of the two, and the recruiters were not merely imprecise, their reads ran in the wrong direction, so candidates who were motivated were judged not to be and candidates who were not were judged to be. What recruiters were actually responding to was tone of voice, facial expression and other behavioural signals they trusted far more than the evidence supports. Heidi pairs this with the observation that the overwhelming majority of chief executives describe their decisions as intuition-led, and lets the listener draw the obvious conclusion about what that means at the top of an organisation.

Her alternative is not theoretical. Hiring a recruiter onto her own team, she asked candidates to answer case-based questions with no names attached, then ran structured competency-based interviews through an avatar system that scored the answers alongside her own scoring. Five finalists came out of it and not one of them would have survived a CV screen. Three came from communications backgrounds with no recruitment experience, one from a public sector role she had privately written off as untransferable to tech, and one was a woman who had recruited in India and Canada and then spent three years in Denmark unable to get a job at all. Heidi hired two of them. The second is the best hire she has ever made, and on her first day, before formally starting, she sourced two candidates in three hours for a technical engineering role the team had failed to fill in six weeks. One of them was hired.

The episode closes on something Heidi had not planned to say. She is 54. At fifty, her applications stopped converting entirely, including the referred ones, which she describes as a common experience among women in her network. So she took ten years of pre-HR experience off her CV, removed the dates from her education, added the ages of her twins, and the interviews resumed. When her real age surfaced in those interviews, the word that kept appearing was young. Young team, young energy. She builds her own GPTs, has a job-ad writing tool she developed herself, and tracks the frontier of talent technology more closely than most people half her age. Her closing line is the argument in miniature: you can be a very old thirty year old, and you can be a very young fifty year old.

Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.

Guest: Heidi Wassini, Chief People Officer, Viebke & West
Host: Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo.
Willo: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host