Chad H. Van Iddekinge of Florida State University and his colleagues reviewed 81 studies to investigate the link between an employee’s prior work experience and his or her performance in a new organization. The conclusion: Experience doesn’t predict a new hire’s success. We also found zero correlation between work experience with earlier employers and retention, or the likelihood that a person would stick with his or her new organization. One possibility is that many measures of experience are pretty basic: the number of jobs you’ve held, tenure at your previous employers, years of total work, whether or not you’ve previously worked in a similar role. So we should take experience into account but maybe do a better job of delving into prehire performance. First, we found a smaller set of studies within our data set that looked at prehire experience and performance on the job after three months, two years, and five years. If, say, a sales rep wants to be a sales manager, how much does his or her experience in that lower-level job predict success in the more senior one?
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