
How to overcome “years of experience” requirements when applying for jobs - travelstacker
http://workplace.stackexchange.com/q/1478/906
======
csallen
I think the op's point was completely ignored: _Different people progress at
different rates._ When you're in high school, you have roughly the same amount
of schooling experience as your peers. That doesn't change the fact that you
may be taking advanced classes while they take remedial ones.

It's easy to accuse the op of arrogance. And who knows, maybe he is arrogant.
But in the end, that's just an ad hominem and is insufficient for dismissing
his point, which I believe is a legitimate one.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think the OP missed the bigger point, which is that _knowledge_ comes at
various speeds based on an individuals ability to absorb learning, but
_experience_ comes from hours invested and the variety of situations
experienced.

The OP _seems_ to have conflated the concept that someone asking for a certain
number of years of experience are looking for a particular subject matter
knowledge level, when they are really looking for someone who has experienced
more variations.

When people talk about "What is the value of a college degree? I can already
write code with the best of them!" they conflate what they know as equivalent
with experiencing different things. Good college programs go through a lot of
different scenarios quickly and that is how they substitute for some
experience. But any trades person will tell you that learning the trade is
both knowledge and experience. The former tells you _how_ the latter tells
_why_ and with luck gives you the wisdom to choose the best "how" out of a
number of choices.

~~~
ctl
Your argument is unconvincing.

It takes certain skills to be an effective "intermediate software developer."
(Here I use the word _skills_ very generically, so in particular it includes
the things that you call _experience._ ) If a hiring manager has found that
many people have those skills after 3 years of work, it is probably true that
some people have those skills after 2 years of work.

Therefore: the OP might have the skills to be effective at the job he wants.
So for God's sake can somebody just give a good-faith answer to his question?
The amount of condescension he's getting is ridiculous.

~~~
hysan
The real answer, which is alluded to in your post, is that the years
requirement is simply a mechanism to reduce risk and blame for the person
hiring you. There are a few things to consider in these situations:

1\. He is already being interviewed despite satisfying the years experience
requirement. This means they are willing to ignore that requirement. (or I
misread this and he never made it to an interview)

2\. All new hires have a ramp up period. This costs money and a failed hire
can be costly.

3\. A hiring manager (or whoever has the final say) is the person who will
ultimately take the blame for any failed hire.

Considering the above, there is really only one question that needs to be
satisfied in the mind of the employer for any "inexperienced" candidate to get
a job:

\- Is the risk of hiring this person lower than that of all other candidates?

When you try to answer that question, you get a clear understanding of where
the years requirement fits in and how it effects the go/no go decision. So
let's see what risk factors are normally vetted out during interviews:

1\. Skills - Can he do the job? (the well roundedness part of the answer falls
here) Let's make the assumption that he can so the answer is yes.

2\. Personality - Does he fit in with the team? (conflict resolution and all
that other stuff in the SO post falls into here) Let's make another assumption
that he can so the answer is yes.

3\. Will he flake out? - This is where experience factors in heavily.
Evaluating someone with very little work history makes this impossibly hard to
get correct. With longer resumes, it is easier to have high confidence in
making this judgement. 3 years is generally enough time to see if the
candidate either stayed with one company for a long time or stayed at 2
companies for a long time. This is usually a good indicator that the candidate
worked out well and can be trusted to contribute in the long run. This is also
why jumping too many jobs in a short period of time (or over a career) is
generally considered a bad thing. It makes you a very high risk hire.

When you are asked personal questions (where do you see yourself in 5 years,
what do you do in your free time, etc), this is where you are given a chance
to alleviate their concerns. Questions about prior work experience are also
used to vet out a candidate's flakiness. Even someone with tons of experience
can fail this part of the interview in which case they would also get
rejected. Low experience candidates are simply starting with a -10 buff.

So to answer the OP's questions:

1\. How can I overcome the assumption that I do not have the skills required
because I do not have the "right" number of years of experience?

He must minimize the "Will he flake out factor?" Either ace the "flake out"
part of the interview OR show yourself to be so outstanding with regards to
skills and/or personality that they ignore your potential flakiness. The best
way to do this is via skills. You can't be just better than your peers. You
must be better than your seniors. Either show this through outside work
(personal projects, open source contributions, etc.) or by impressing them
with your knowledge. Based on what the OP wrote, he seems capable but doesn't
STAND OUT stand out. The personality route is also viable but that is much
harder to swing unless you know people in the company already.

In the case he didn't even make it to an interview, then he must rely solely
on displaying his skills via his resume. Outside projects and open source
contributions with a personal website (or a link to code repos) is the best
way to accomplish this. If his resume looks generic, then it's no wonder he
didn't make it to an interview.

2\. Are skills directly proportional to years of experience?

No. I know some people who have been programming since they were 10. Coming
out of college, they clearly have outstanding skills but zero experience. But
as stated above, this is not the real reason why he was rejected (he should
actually ask for feedback assuming he made it to an interview round).

~~~
thaumasiotes
Do hirers give feedback? When I was suddenly dropped from dropbox's interview
process, and asked for feedback, I didn't get a response until my friend
working there went and bugged HR, and then the response that did get sent was
"we have no comment".

~~~
hysan
Sometimes. I interviewed a LOT out of college and often made it to 2nd and 3rd
rounds. Every time I got rejected, I would pop an email to the HR rep and ask
for feedback along with something like "thanks for the opportunity." Maybe 1
in 10 would respond and some 1 in 15 would actually give me feedback on how I
did. So while it's a fairly low chance shot in the dark, you don't have much
to lose by asking. Just be polite.

------
imjk
As an employer, I give you this advice: Just apply.

We make exceptions for smart or motivated people all the time. After all, your
resume's gonna be viewed by a human who'll give it a subjective assessment. If
by chance the company you're applying to is so rigid in their standards that
they can only make decision based on objective measures, it's probably not a
company that you want to be at.

~~~
timwiseman
I fully agree, though I will caveat that many companies, mostly larger ones,
have the vast majority of resumes funnelled through HR. HR may be much more
inclined to just toss a resume that doesn't check every box that was listed as
a "requirement" for the job than a hiring manager actually would. Of course,
that may fall under the "it's probably not a company that you want" category,
but it is well worth noting.

~~~
ahlatimer
Which is why you don't go through HR. Every piece of hiring advice from a
reputable source will tell you to find out who the person is making the
decision and go to them rather than firing a resume to jobs@example.com. As
patio11 said, "resumes are an institution created to mean that no one has to
read resumes." [1]

[1]: <http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/>

~~~
nitrogen
I've had experience in the past being referred for a job by someone on the
inside, and still getting turned away by HR for undisclosed reasons. In some
companies, even if someone wants to hire you specifically, HR still gets in
the way.

------
j45
Years of experience is a farce typically made up by HR folks that have zero
understanding or clue of the detail's they're hiring for.

Case in point for people looking for "10+ years of rails experience."

Secret tip:

1) Apply anyways. I got jobs just by showing interest and a willingness to
learn anything.

2) Build cool, publicly usable and visible projects. Show your versatility to
build and ship different kinds of projects

3) Show a knack for picking up languages and technologies quickly and in your
own time. This is something you can't fake until you make it. Maybe consider
using the technologies you're applying to use in a job.

4) For the really crazy and if it fits your situation, say you're wanting a
good fit for everyone and have a few days or week you can chip towards coming
in, hanging out and learning more about the company and job to see if it's a
good fit for everyone, unpaid. Hiring is one of those decisions that people
don't want to hire someone and make a mistake so they'll go for the safe
candidate vs the best.

If they feel like keeping you on and paying you for the week, it's up to them.
It's better to date before getting married anyways, right? The more you can
act like management the greater chance you'll catch their attention and stand
out.

The wrong kind of place might not take notice. The right kind will notice and
like how you roll.

~~~
randomdata
I guess that depends on what a year of experience unit is. 2000 hours? If you
used Rails full time in your day job since it was released and built a Rails-
based startup on the side, it could be possible to have 10+ unit-years of
experience with it.

But yeah, it's a poor measure, plain and simple. Someone who tinkers with
Rails one week out of each year could soon claim eight years of experience,
even though they'll have no experience compared to someone who has used it in
their full-time job over the same number of years.

~~~
j45
You have a fair point and cool insight that I'm going to keep in mind :)

But does the average non-tech HR person recruiting have any awareness of this?
I think they'd communicate it if they knew better, it would only make them
better at their jobs.

------
ChuckMcM
The top rated answer though is pretty priceless. The easy way to over come the
experience requirement, is to put in the time. But the relevant response is
that when you don't know what you don't know, you're not nearly as effective
as you think you are. I remember being so depressed at Intel one day when I
figured out I was tons smarter than this senior engineer I was working with
but I didn't have a shot at his job until I had more experience.

I advise folks, don't rush, breathe, look around you, learn. And then apply
all that. But recognize its very hard.

Generally the advice here to just apply is solid too. If the skill set matches
I and any other hiring manager will give you a look. And experience comes even
when it isn't 'paid' so doing projects in your spare time is also a great
tool.

~~~
tedunangst
Was your story supposed to conclude with "then I got his job and realized how
hard it was" or were you really smarter?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Lol, no I didn't stay long enough at Intel to qualify. They had hired me as a
hardware guy, but between board bring up from a hardware perspective and a
software perspective I found I generally liked the software work better and so
moved on to Sun Microsystems.

I _did_ however come to appreciate that even though things are "obviously
easy" on the surface there could be mitigating factors which made that not
true. My favorite example was 'give all the source code rights and IP to
RPC/XDR to a standards body so that they can standardize it' (which I tried to
do with the IETF in Amsterdam in 1993. Easy right? No so much. Not when other
people don't want that to happen. So not a technical issue.

------
hdctambien
Something I don't think everyone considers when they don't get a job is that
probably somebody else _did_ get the job.

Maybe you are very skilled but only have 2 years experience and someone else
that applied is just as skilled and has 5+ years experience. Maybe they
interviewed that guy first and liked him and didn't feel the need to interview
anyone else.

Maybe you are very skilled AND have 5+ years experience, but the hiring
manager/HR had a stack of 10 (20? 100?) resume's of equally qualified
applicants and you randomly ended up on the bottom of that stack (You have a
50% change of ending up in the bottom half) And they gave interviews to the
first 5 (or 10 or 50) and ended up really liking one of those guys.

------
jiggy2011
It's funny.

Younger people on HN complain that it's impossible to get hired because they
don't have experience.

Older people on HN complain that it's impossible to get hired because they
aren't a fresh out of college 20 something who has time to code 24/7.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It is very possible for both those statements to be true.

------
gavanwoolery
I remember when I thought I was a badass programmer. Now, after almost two
decades of it, I realize how little I know. IMHO, humility is the best sign of
experience. That said, asking for a hard number (like 5 years of experience)
is no guaranteed filter, but it probably will get you way better application
results than putting the threshold at 2 years.

~~~
microtherion
I fully agree. For most of my 3 decades in programming, I've considered myself
a badass programmer, but in retrospect, there are always glaring mistakes that
were not evident to me at the time.

One concrete benefit of requiring N years of experience, with N greater than
2, is that one of the major career learning experiences is to deal with one's
own code in "maintenance mode", and you can only experience that if you have a
number of years of distance from when you originally wrote the code.

Of course, requiring N years of experience is no guarantee that the candidate
has dealt with this situation, as there are people who (consciously or not)
structure their careers to avoid ever retreading their own code.

------
xsmasher
What the employer _means_ in the context is that they want someone with
practical experience with the tech; not just book-learning. All you have to do
is display the experience that you have, or get some if you don't have it.

"We covered this in class" is generally useless, given the gulf between theory
and practice. "I have app X in the app store" is priceless. Github profile,
history of helpful posts in a related forum, stack overflow reputation - any
of these can show that you've done the work before.

The experience requirement is also used to weed out applicants who intend to
read one book on the tech/language and learn the rest on the job. In some
positions that is appropriate, in others it is not.

~~~
Karunamon
>The experience requirement is also used to weed out applicants who intend to
read one book on the tech/language and learn the rest on the job. In some
positions that is appropriate, in others it is not.

I'd go one further and say that almost every position is appropriate for this,
it all comes down to the person's willingness and ability to learn quickly.
Given the mindset of an average HR drone though, you almost have to fake it.
I've found that being a quick learner doesn't mean much of anything when it
comes to getting through the process, as it's not something you can readily
prove.

~~~
xsmasher
I'll stand by my statement - smarts and experience are two different things,
and some jobs require both.

When I need an iPhone or C++ expert, and Android guy who read a book or two
will not fit the bill. I need someone with the fine-detail, nitty-gritty
knowledge that only comes from working with a platform over time.

------
gisikw
"Years of Experience" along with "Degree" are objective requirements that can
simplify hiring. Some companies will be hard and fast about them, others will
be more flexible.

But to note, if you want to claim that you have outstanding reasons why lack
of years, or a degree, or a certification, or whatever ought to be
disregarded, figure out why that is, and emphasize it.

If you have an active GitHub profile, an interesting blog, a self-published
book - a great many recruiters will overlook their objective benchmarks.

Focus on your strengths, shore them up, and advertise them. Time wasted
complaining that some recruiters are inflexible is not only pointless; it
takes time away that you could be using to do something positive.

------
nahname
In my experience, companies that use years of experience as a candidate filter
are not companies you would want to work for. Number of years of experience is
easy to determine, but pretty much useless in determining someone's skill.
What it really shows is that the people in charge of hiring are either lazy or
incompetent. Neither speak well to the quality of people going into the
company, so once again, why would you want to work for them?

~~~
jaredsohn
>Number of years of experience is easy to determine

Only if defined in a naive way (i.e. ignore personal projects, work experience
during middle school/high school/college, have some arbitrary way of
interpreting what it means to have experience in a particular language.)

~~~
nahname
You can certainly make the number more or less meaningful by including a
comparison against what the individual accomplished over that period.
Regardless, the question was an individual's number wasn't high enough.

~~~
Morg
EITHER you made something great OR you have nothing to show and then it's
really personal

In the end, once you have something to show, noone cares about your resumé and
they all want you on board because you have shown that you can deliver and are
a low-risk, high-return investment.

------
bunderbunder
Employers use "years of experience" as a concise way of indicating roughly how
much skill they're expecting, as much as anything else. If you think you have
that much experience, apply anyway and let your CV speak for itself.

If the company is the kind that filters out qualified candidates on a
technicality, well, hopefully you didn't really want to want to have your time
wasted by a callback from that company anyway. I'd still suggest not directly
mentioning it anywhere, though, just in case it prompts an HR person to skip
your application without looking any closer. It also communicates a lack of
confidence. Again, your CV should be able to speak for itself.

------
dsr_
I have used "years of experience" as a shorthand for "we are looking for
someone with mature judgement; who has been in many different situations and
worked through them; who will stop and consider consequences before committing
to risky ventures; who will not panic when faced with a new problem; who is
likely to have learned from experience in a way which will benefit our
company."

Perhaps I should spell that out in future, though.

------
Peroni
This will be buried but I'll throw it out there anyway.

In the UK it's actually illegal to specify a minimum number of years of
experience. The issue is that no-one enforces the rule unless someone kicks up
a stink. In the UK, if you are rejected for a position implicitly because you
didn't have the minimum number of years of experience you can claim
compensation through the employment tribunal on the grounds of age
discrimination.

UK law is black and white about the issue and I'm personally sick and tired of
seeing employers and recruiters blatantly and ignorantly flouting the law.

~~~
polymatter
Not doubting you in any way, but do you have a reference for that? Is it part
of the Equality Act 2010?

I'd like to be able to say this with some authority (without it sounding like
"this guy on the internet told me").

~~~
Peroni
Sure. Some citations:

[1] [http://www.xperthr.co.uk/faqs/topics/6,62/age-
discrimination...](http://www.xperthr.co.uk/faqs/topics/6,62/age-
discrimination.aspx?articleid=69746&mode=open#69746)

[2] <http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1046>

[3]
[http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=10...](http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1073792251&r.i=1073792193&r.l1=1073858787&r.l2=1073877851&r.l3=1074003268&r.t=RESOURCES&type=RESOURCES)

[4] [http://www.rightsatwork.co.uk/employment-law/age-
discriminat...](http://www.rightsatwork.co.uk/employment-law/age-
discrimination.html)

[5] Anecdotal:
[http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/03/26/45050/look...](http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/03/26/45050/looking-
for-experienced-staff-could-lead-to-age-discrimination-tribunal.html)

------
SagelyGuru
I recall vividly how two years after Java first came out, many would-be-
employers in the banking sector started advertising heavily for 'Java
programmers with minimum of five years experience'.

------
bricestacey
Years of experience is an easy way for a company to justify not hiring you. If
you have the skills, you likely need to improve your skill at effectively
educating people of your ability.

I recently went through something like this. I wound up getting the job, but
only after my recruiter pulled a few strings. As an applicant, you can't do
that so it's best you improve your communication so that after that first
meeting they see your spark.

------
loxs
Most of the answers here and on stack exchange clearly show that the person
answering has never been (or lots of time has passed since) in this position.
I have been in this situation lots of times. Not only I didn't have the years,
by I also didn't have the education. And have learned how to "beat" the
system:

1\. Be really good. You can't fake that. 2\. In your resume, show your real
skills and interests. Write details. Lots of details. But only details that
are of interest to the current position. 3\. Don't have a "generic" CV. Write
one specifically for every other position you are applying to. 4\. Do not be
shy and provide references to hobby projects, freelance work and your
ambitions (and also dreams). 5\. Be humble. Never make comparisons with
anyone. Just talk about yourself.

I have been in a hiring position lately, and I can see why this succeeded with
me. Most of the candidates send shitty CVs. One can't judge them from the CV.
For such candidates you can only guess from the years of experience. Don't be
that guy. If you send me a CV that shows passion, knowledge, culture and
determination, I won't look at the years of experience at all.

------
tokenadult
The original StackExchange thread is an interesting read. For the job
applicant (any job applicant), the problem is always how to make an
affirmative case that an employer ought to offer the job to you and not to
someone else. The commenters on StackExchange and here on HN are mostly
commenting from that perspective, that the job applicant has to figure out how
to excel over other job applicants in making a strong case for being hired.

Some comments here are about the issue of how companies should hire in the
general case. Because that is a frequently asked question here on HN, and
because that has been the subject of much research, I'll recycle some
electrons here to provide a FAQ on the general issue. The review article "The
Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical
and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings"

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

sums up, current to 1998, much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional
literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business
hiring practices. There are many kinds of hiring screens, such as resume
reviews for job experience, telephone interviews, in-person interviews, checks
for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on
how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of
occupations.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable
secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work
reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a
general cognitive ability test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic
personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant
does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the
job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in
screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better
predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither
is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad
performers on the job), but both are better than anything else that has been
tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you
are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a
work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

For legal reasons in the United States (the same consideration does not apply
in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants a straight-up IQ
test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of a
hiring process. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the
United States Supreme Court

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24)

held that cognitive ability tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate
impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable
relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In
other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like
the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring
process had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to
performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study,
and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring
and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note
that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring process might be illegal if it
can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants and is not
supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to
successful performance on the job. Companies outside the United States are
regulated by different laws.

~~~
stfu
I am still skeptical about the IQ tests and job-skill tests. They both seem to
look at things at a very narrow timeframe. One could potentially have a high
IQ and be great at a specific task, but it seems to say very little how this
person is going to perform in future tasks - i.e. a brilliant mind, facing a
challenging job skill task, might become highly bored or sloppy when settling
in the day-to-day work frame. But I guess statistics and outliners have one
way or another a problematic relationship.

~~~
wickeand000
I agree with you, but you can see that this test only had a moderate
correlation with successful hiring. In the same way that screening for free-
throw percentage doesn't provide the best catch-all way of hiring basketball
players, an IQ test isn't going to be a perfect (or even nearly perfect!) way
of hiring employees. The point was that it is one of the best ways we
currently know how.

------
jamesflorentino
It does make sense though that companies might be looking for someone who has
developed a sense of judgment over the years. Similar to how fathers
(responsible ones) become less naive on decision-making as the family's
dependency on him grow which is why we turn to him (or our mothers) for
advise. Because they may be less skilled or knowledgable than us, but they've
been around long enough to know how to react to difficult problems.

I think that is the most important aspect in achieving your goals in a
company. You need effective decision making skills on top of your technical
abilities.

------
diminium
I think the answer is you don't. People are really stupid creatures who prefer
to hire not based on what's best but what they feel comfortable with. This
results in 95%+ of people being hired not for what is best for them but of
circumstance and of well, luck.

Think about it. How many well qualified resumes out there were discarded
because the hiring manager was angry their football team lost yesterday? How
many were lost during the office party? Probably more then we want to know.

------
sopooneo
One of the respondents makes the point that a company can loose a lot by
hiring a bad candidate, but "false negative cost a company close to nothing."

While there is truth to this, I would say it is _less_ true when there is a
labor shortage. By not hiring a good candidate when they have the chance, a
company looses the revenue that candidate might have helped them earn while
they spend time looking for a surer bet.

------
Tycho
When you come to talk about your experience, just say that although you've
found the longer you have been a programmer, the harder it's been to avoid
picking up bad habits and wasting time on pointless fads, you feel you are so
far on top of the situation and your current weight of experience should not
pose a serious problem for your prospective employers.

------
wavephorm
I just love when job ads require 2-3 years work experience, but also have a
requirements list so long that would take 10+ years of dedication in 7
completely different, or contradictory, disciplines to qualify for the
position.

Now Hiring: Visual Studio/.NET + Ruby on Rails developers with Oracle DBA and
jQuery UI experience, XSL and Adobe Illustrator experience a plus

~~~
Morg
I'd say it depends. I could easily say sysadmin, Xen virt, SQL server,
postgreSQL, jQ, Illustrator, python, java, html5/css3, extensive hardware
understanding, infrastructure design and I've been working for 5 years or
something... The difference is it's my passion and I was in hardware and
computers way before it became my job.

What in my opinion doesn't match with those offers is their part of the
bargain - they want a super motivated multitool expert . for peanuts ...

By the way. you have to realize that's all resumé warfare, they think you're
going to exaggerate and they hope at best that you can code .Net, have touched
RoR twice, used Toad for Oracle three times and had to implement a very small
web frontend for basic purposes - and maybe that you had to design birthday
cards in Illustrator.

Seems more likely with 2-3 years experience, doesn't it ?

------
billpatrianakos
You have to accept when things are out of your control. You cannot reliably
get around job requirements. The best you can do is apply and make your case
either on the application or your resume. It's probably better to work your
way up in jobs requiring less experience than it is to fight the system as
hiring managers have no reason to put their faith in you yet and most likely
won't be easily swayed to let you slide on requirements when they believe
skill and years experience are correlated.

That said, I have a little experience getting around requirements. I was
recently offered a job and havent completed my college degree nor have I
worked anywhere that gave me relevant experience (sort of). About two years
ago I decided I would ignore the rules and simply start my own company sans
degree or work experience. I was a self taught developer with nothing but fast
food jobs to fill my resume with. I worked my ass off for two years for
peanuts while building a portfolio and gaining experience. I took every
opportunity that came my way including accepting a position on the board of
directors of a charity and working under contract for a prestigious health
education organization on a large publicly funded project. When I finally
started applying for jobs I had built up a great looking resume in a non-
traditional way and was able to get hired at my number one choice of all the
paces I interviewed at. For all the interviews I did get, there were orders of
magnitude more that I didn't and I didn't exactly meet the requirements for
any of the jobs on paper but my own self-made experience allowed me to get a
job despite that.

Now, my point is that you can overcome any requirements including years of
experience by simply being good at what you do but you can't expect any
employer to see that no matter how obvious it is as some people don't have the
ability to see when it's appropriate to draw outside the lines so to speak and
go strictly by the book. I'd submit that it's their loss and if you really are
more skilled, the companies that recognize that are the ones you'll want to
work for anyway and the ones who don't are most likely not a good fit for you
to begin with.

------
medusa666
"Years of experience" is a BS requirement from HR. You need to figure how how
to convey to the _hiring manager_ that you understand the work/problem and
that you know how to do/solve it in a way that will suit them.

Read _Ask The Headhunter_. Really. Best job-hunting resource ever.

