When we evaluate others — in hiring, for example — people often put heavy weight on experience (track record).
But experience alone can't measure someone's true value. You also need an axis of growth potential: adaptability to the environment, and how strongly they'll contribute going forward.
The hard part: for evaluators, what someone actually did — experience — is a visible metric, so they tend to overweight it. Even when inferring growth potential, the evidence still tends to be past experience.
A spiral is inevitable. To escape it, you need balance between experience and growth. Concretely: don't just look at past experience — fold into the evaluation what they learned from it and how they grew.
If you try to gauge growth potential beyond experience, what metrics are there? How do you measure aptitude or learning ability without past experience?
First: when is experience unreliable? Experience is still an important signal of what someone has done. Someone who's worked long in a workplace, or polished a skill for years, is expected to have rich knowledge and technique in that field.
But among people with the same experience, growth often differs a lot. Just spending a long time and repeating the same thing inside a fixed workflow doesn't mean they'll deliver strong results. Knowing many cases isn't the same as having better technique. (Of course, knowing many cases does build sense — the ability to make intuitively sound judgments.)
So even when you evaluate experience, what matters is how they used it to grow — analyzing whether it came from external factors like environment. (For example: building a ¥100 million business is less about individual ability if the company had abundant budget and reused existing customer leads. In other words, a highly substitutable result almost anyone could produce.)
Someone who keeps learning new skills, adapting to hard situations, and learning from failure should be valued more highly than someone who simply stayed in the same job a long time. The growth process reflects flexibility, hunger to learn, problem-solving — a lot of important qualities.
From hiring I've been involved in, the highest cost-performance hire is, personally: 【① someone with little track record, so the market undervalues them】, 【② you spot unrecognized value and rate them higher than the market】, and 【③ you set compensation high enough that they're satisfied】. Close to the stock-market principle of "buy low, sell high." ③ isn't strictly required, but if it's low you lose them to another company, or they join and leave because pay doesn't satisfy. Matching them to work and an environment where they can perform also matters a lot.
One example from my experience: we posted a web director role and someone not deep in that domain applied. But their interview and how they handled a trial task were outstanding, and we've worked together for a long time since. Probably under anyone else they'd never have reached the interview and would have been screened out. (This was a very successful case — I've failed plenty too, so I'm not claiming special talent at reading people.)
What variables are there for evaluating growth? Inner change and shifts in attitude, maybe. People who keep reflecting, improve communication, and get better at building relationships become highly valuable to organizations and society. That kind of growth can't be measured by experience alone, but it greatly raises overall humanity and leadership quality.
Of course growth eventually becomes track record through sales and profit — so even if someone explains "I grew inside," evaluation is still hard.
In other words, it's important to prepare metrics for aptitude beyond clear experience and results. MBTI shows up in hiring sometimes lately. Setting aside how solid MBTI is, as a way to gauge aptitude it can make sense. (※ Side note: MBTI is said to have weak scientific grounding. Tools like the Big Five and MMPI, by contrast, are said to have higher reliability and validity based on science. "Scientific basis" here means reliability — reproducibility, consistency — and validity — content coverage, link to actual behavior — plus whether empirical research exists, and so on.)
I picked MBTI as a shaky example of measuring aptitude — but tests like SPI for new grads, or programming tests for programmers, aren't track record either; they're one way to measure aptitude and current ability.
Here's another interesting real-world example.
I read "Going Infinite," about the collapse of the crypto empire FTX. The author is Michael Lewis, one of the world's best-known writers of financial narrative nonfiction. All his books are fun.
The book follows Bankman-Fried, who built FTX, once among the largest crypto exchanges.
For those who don't know: the company went bankrupt, and Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years for stealing over $8 billion (~¥1.2 trillion) from customers. (I didn't know this, but Bitflyer apparently acquired FTX Japan.)
It's a financial crime of enormous scale, so his guilt being serious is a given — but the thinking and background behind building a peak business worth ¥3 trillion are interesting, so I recommend it.
Long wind-up: after graduating MIT he interned and then joined Jane Street Capital. Their hiring process is fascinating.
They don't rely on the résumés and track records most companies care about. In the first phone screen they give probability-related math problems; they play games; they even encourage interns to gamble — mainly to gauge how candidates face probability, strip out emotion, and trade mechanically as traders.
It's trader-specific hiring, but probability math isn't nice-to-have for a trader — it's must-have aptitude, so they filter hard on it. And crypto trading was a shady-looking world then, so fewer "respectable" people flocked to it — which made aptitude even more important than track record or résumé.
Weighting must-haves and filtering on them is interesting. Sales skill, English, writing, SPI scores — nice to have — but pile on too many conditions and you may filter out people who would have performed.
(P.S. "The Man Who Solved the Market," about Renaissance Technologies — the legendary hedge fund with ~37% average returns — is also great. Pair it with the above if you're interested.)
Whether an evaluation result is correct is hard to know in advance — but valuing growth also expresses expectation and trust. Growth-focused evaluation pushes people toward further challenges and the will to go past their limits. Experience-only evaluation locks people to past results and risks missing future possibility.
To sum up: when evaluating others, the question is what variables besides experience you can prepare for how they're growing now and how they might keep growing. If people tend to overrate experience and underrate growth, recognizing growth's value and adding it to your own criteria makes for a more future-facing evaluation you can live with.
I wrote a lot and, as usual, didn't answer the concrete question: "So what metrics should you set?"
Oh right — I framed this around hiring interviews, but what I originally wanted to say was that evaluation isn't that reliable anyway. Especially evaluating yourself "objectively" doesn't mean much, so don't obsess over it. That's all.
※ This post was built from a discussion with ChatGPT around the hypothesis that "people overrate experience and underrate growth."
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