Employers ask, ?Are You Experienced??

It’s an age-old question that doesn’t have an absolute answer.

Should an employer hire the recruit fresh out of college or the one with experience?

Ramsay Ball, a principal with Colliers Dickson Flake Partners Inc. in Bentonville, said it’s a question his business grapples with before each new hire. But he believes there is a cohesive solution for his commercial real estate company.

“We find that the mix of rookies and veterans is a good mix,” said Ball, whose team ranges in age from 22 to 51. “We try to have a balance, and we feel that the balance is more of a synergy where you find out that one-plus-one actually equals three.”

While projections for the average age of the labor force show workers getting older (from 34.8 in 1978 to 40.7 in 2008), employers like Ball are realizing benefits in hiring younger.

There’s no age discrimination issue here. No one is strictly targeting youthful workers. Some just see it as an opportunity to open up a company’s mind to new ideas and hopefully, new solutions.

“We find that people who are coming out of college, while they may be inexperienced, often have really good ideas and a different perspective,” said Ball, 48. “And they bring vitality to the organization because they’re fun. The older people are fun, too, but in a different way.”

Burt Box is the 28-year-old president of Milver Investments Co. and is developing property in south Fayetteville. He has only three employees but said the importance of pitting young with old still remains.

“You’ve got to have some experience to keep you level headed, and not try anything too far fetched,” Box said. “But someone who has been in the business for a while isn’t willing to change much whereas a young person tends to be more open to everything.

“A young person can also bring that kind of aggressive, go-getter, forward-thinking mentality that may be better suited for the type of growth in this area.”

There’s no right answer here. There are benefits in hiring both kinds of workers.

An inexperienced person may cost less, but need more training. An experienced person may cost more, but be able to hit the ground running.

Andrea Edwards, vice president of marketing for Little Rock-based Staffmark Inc., said she sees companies wanting both experienced and inexperienced employees, depending on the profession. She’s quick to point out that younger workers aren’t always cheaper, though.

“Especially for professional positions,” Edwards said. “If you’ve got somebody who’s right out of college and they’re entering, say an IT [information technology] field, they’ve got a lot of knowledge already and they may be in just as much demand or even more than someone who has experience in an IT related field.”

Edwards said there’s another level-of-experience issue her company has noticed nationally that’s a direct reflection of declining unemployment rates, which were 4.8 percent in July, down 1.4 percent from July 2002.

“There are fewer people out there looking for a job, so the need for better employees is greater,” Edwards said. “Before, you might have wanted five years of experience, and now you might be looking for someone with three.

“People are more and more inclined to invest in people with less experience and then develop them for that skill or talent in that particular field.”

At Staffmark internally, Edwards said they also look for a mix of young and old. They have more than 900 employees at some 250 branches across the country.

“We are always looking for people who have talent, regardless of age,” Edwards said. “We’ve given a lot of people their first job and they’ve risen through the company to become managers or directors. Other times, we bring people in who have a few years of experience in something else, just to have some parity.”

Ball’s philosophy comes from his own experience as a new hire. After earning an MBA in finance in 1983, Ball began searching for a job in the Little Rock area before hitting the same roadblock that slows down most recent college graduates. No experience.

And how is someone going to gain experience when most job openings require someone with experience?

Like Ball, most finally run into someone willing to take a chance by sacrificing experience for education. Ball’s break came when he interviewed with Dickson Flake of Barnes, Quinn, Flake and Anderson of Little Rock.

“[Flake] asked if I had any experience right away,” Ball said. “And I said, “No,” knowing that most people were looking for experience and I was surprised when he said, ‘Good.’

“The reason he said, ‘good’ is that he liked to hire people out of college. He likes to teach them the business from the ground up.”