November 12, 2014: The Value of Education and Qualification

This is part 2 of a 7-part series on hiring.

A job posting will nearly always have a set of criteria a person needs to meet to be qualified for the job.  The implication is obvious: if a person does not meet all of the criteria, the person is not able to do the job.  In practice, however, qualifications also include some nice-to-haves as well.

Does a manager of engineers need to have an engineering degree?  Or does he need a management degree?  Don't say he needs both degrees, because there aren't nearly enough people with both degrees to fill all engineering management positions.  Many of those people, obviously, are doing a fine job without one or the other (or both) of these degrees.

The qualifications argument also has another implicit assumption: that the institution that provided the qualification did so in a way to ensure that the individual actually learned the concepts and can apply them.  How many high school graduates do you know who have trouble reading?  Or college graduates who can't write well?  It is safe to assume that there are marketing grads who can't market, design grads who can't design, and MBAs who can't work their way through a balance sheet.

So what, then, is the value of education and qualification to a potential hire?  Setting out a list of requirements or qualifications has the following benefits:
1) It narrows your candidate pool.  When the list of requirements is steep, you may get fewer applicants for your opening.  I know one tech company who lists "a bachelor's degree" as the only qualification for engineering or management positions.  This widens their candidate pool, which has certain benefits.
2) Long-standing requirements for a team of people will mean that, over time, the skills of each member of your team will compliment each other.
3) A set of qualifications gives the candidate a specific lexicon that may be important.  Does your candidate need to know about ROI and gross margin?  Or should she know about spherical aberration and astigmatism?  Or Lean 6 Sigma?  Or the interaction of covalent bonds in a protein?
4) It shows the candidate understands the value of learning and was able to stick it out.  To me, this is the key to education.  A person who has finished a degree shows that he understands the long game, is willing to invest in his own future, and carries through to the end.

Those are it - there are people without engineering degrees who can engineer, people lacking business degrees who can business, people with no formal education in teaching who can teach.  We all know people who display competence outside of their area of formal education.

When you are making your hiring decision (but hopefully before you even post the job), you need to decide which things are requirements (qualifications).  The bar for setting a requirement is high: if the person does not have the requirement, she is not able to do the job.

When you interview a candidate for a technical position, it is important to probe a bit.  Have someone in the room who is a subject matter expert on your requirements.  I once interviewed a potential engineer who claimed to speak Japanese.  Impressive for someone wanting to join a Japanese company.  So I started speaking Japanese to him.  He looked at me in shock (I don't look Japanese), and said (in English), "I only know a little."  He didn't make the cut.  His engineering skills were fine, but his honesty was questionable, a risk we did not need to take.

We have to rely on qualifications and education more as we consider candidates without much in the way of work history.  These become less relevant the further along the individual is in his career.  A person with a degree in marketing but a career in equipment maintenance might be a better fit for a maintenance position than a marketing position.

In summary, qualifications tell you something about a person; not nearly enough, certainly.  So give qualifications some serious weight and consideration, but don't let that be your deciding factor.