Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / How a Two-Word Change Tripled Applicant Quality
Transcript
- Lucas: A mid-size SaaS company — about 400 employees, B2B analytics — rewrote one line in their job descriptions and saw applicant quality jump 40 percent in under two months. Luna: One line? What was the line? Lucas: They changed the phrase '3–5 years of experience' to 'proven ability to ship.' That's it. Everything else stayed identical — same title, same responsibilities, same salary band. Luna: So they just swapped a credential requirement for a behavior requirement. And the results were that dramatic? Lucas: More dramatic than you'd think. Over the next hiring cycle, they had roughly 40 percent more total applicants. But the bigger shift was on the screening side: the pass-through rate from application to first interview went from about 15 percent to 38 percent. So not only did more people apply, a much higher percentage of them were actually qualified. Luna: That's a self-selection effect, right? People who might have looked at '3–5 years experience' and thought 'I don't exactly match that' — they applied when the language shifted to output. Lucas: Exactly. The company did a follow-up survey of the new hires from that batch, and the consistent theme was: 'I wouldn't have applied under the old job posting.' Most of them had less than three years in the industry, but they had clear examples of leading a project launch or turning around a failing initiative. Luna: So the company essentially traded a years-based filter for a growth mindset filter — and got people who could actually do the work. Lucas: Right. And there's a really specific mechanism at play here. Psychologists call it 'signaling theory' — job descriptions send signals to candidates about who the company is and what they value. When you say '3–5 years experience,' you signal: 'We care about conformity to a template.' When you say 'proven ability to ship,' you signal: 'We care about results.' Luna: And you mentioned the 90-day performance data — did the new hires actually outperform the old hires? Lucas: They did. The company tracked a composite score at 90 days — manager ratings, peer feedback, first project completion. The cohort hired under the 'proven ability to ship' language scored about 22 percent higher on average. And their voluntary attrition was slightly lower in the first year. Luna: That's a huge return for a two-word change. No budget, no new tools, just a rewrite. Lucas: And it's not just one company. A 2024 study from the Harvard Business Review looked at 2,100 job postings across 15 industries and found that postings using 'years of experience' requirements received 30 percent fewer applications from women and 27 percent fewer from candidates of color — controlling for everything else. Luna: So the years requirement is also a diversity issue. It narrows the funnel in a way that's not predictive of performance anyway. Lucas: That's the second part of the story. The same HBR study found that the correlation between years of experience and job performance across those roles was essentially zero — around 0.03. So you're actively filtering out capable people for a credential that doesn't even predict success. Luna: But a lot of hiring managers push back on this. I've heard them say: 'I need someone who's done this exact job before. I don't have time to train.' How do you address that? Lucas: That's fair — and for some roles, like a senior surgeon or a pilot, experience absolutely matters. But for the vast majority of white-collar roles — the ones this SaaS company was hiring for — the training gap is usually a few weeks. And the cost of missing a high-potential hire is way higher than the cost of onboarding. Luna: So what does a good alternative to the years requirement look like in practice? You said 'proven ability to ship' — but that's very product-centric. What about for a finance role, or an HR role? Lucas: You adapt the language to the function. For finance, it might be 'demonstrated ability to build and manage a budget process.' For HR, something like 'track record of implementing a performance review system that improved retention.' The key is to specify the output you want, not the number of years you think it takes to produce it. Luna: And you have to be careful not to just swap one vague phrase for another. 'Proven ability to ship' is still a bit broad — but it's better than '3 years experience' because it points to a behavior the candidate can give a concrete example of. Lucas: Right. And the company that ran this experiment also introduced structured interview questions tied to that same 'ship' behavior — like 'Tell me about a time you took a project from zero to launch in under six weeks.' So the whole hiring process became aligned around the same signal. Luna: It's interesting — this connects to something we talked about in episode 29 on skills-based hiring, but it's even more granular. It's not just removing degree requirements; it's removing the implicit experience ladder that blocks people who learned fast in a different context. Lucas: Exactly. And the cost of making the change is essentially zero. You just have to be willing to let go of the comfort of a familiar screening heuristic. But the data is really clear: that heuristic is costing you talent. Luna: I want to ask about scaling this. If a company has 50 open roles, each with a different hiring manager — how do you get consistency in the language? Lucas: That's the hardest part. The SaaS company I mentioned had a central talent acquisition team that created a template with approved output-based phrases for each job family. Hiring managers could choose from a menu rather than writing from scratch. They also ran a 30-minute training session showing the data — because once managers saw that years of experience had near-zero predictive power, most of them were willing to try the new approach. Luna: So you win them with evidence, not policy. Lucas: Exactly. And the evidence is pretty compelling. Another data point: a large retail chain replaced '2 years retail experience' with 'comfortable working in a fast-paced environment and helping customers find what they need' for their store associate roles. Applications went up 25 percent, and the new hires actually had higher customer satisfaction scores after 30 days. Luna: That's a great example because it shows the principle applies even to entry-level roles. You're not just helping neurodivergent candidates or career-changers — you're helping everyone who might have self-filtered out. Lucas: And that self-filtering is the hidden tax. Every time you write a requirement that's not actually predictive, you're paying a tax in lost applicants — and the most capable self-filterers are often the ones who leave. They're the ones who read '3–5 years' and think 'I've done this in 2 years, but they'll probably reject me anyway.' So they don't even apply. Luna: Switching slightly — one of the concerns I've heard from skeptics is that removing the years requirement might flood you with unqualified applicants. Did that happen in the SaaS case? Lucas: It didn't. The total applicant count went up, but the quality went up even more. The share of applicants who met the core technical screen actually increased. Because the language itself attracted people who were confident in their ability to produce results, not people who were just checking boxes. The unqualified applicants — the ones who apply to everything — they're still there, but they're a smaller share of a larger, better pool. Luna: So the signal you put out determines the noise you get back. Lucas: That's a great way to put it. And look, none of this means you should never hire for experience. If you need someone who's run a specific type of manufacturing line, and that line is rare, years of experience on that exact line might be a valid signal. But for most roles, you're better off asking: 'What do I actually want this person to accomplish in the first six months?' and then writing that into the job description. Luna: So the fundamental question for every hiring manager is: Am I screening for a credential or for a capability? Lucas: And the answer, if you look at the data, is that capability almost always wins. The SaaS company's VP of talent told me that the single best hire they made that year — someone who became a team lead within eight months — would have been filtered out by the old posting. She had two years of experience in a completely unrelated industry. But she had 'proven ability to ship' in spades. Luna: It's a compelling case. And I think for our listeners, the actionable takeaway is really simple: pick one open role this week, rewrite the experience requirement as an output-based behavior, and just see what happens. Lucas: Yeah, and measure it. Track applications, interview pass-through, and first-month performance. I'd bet a lot of money the numbers move in the right direction. And if they do, you've got the evidence to roll it out company-wide. Luna: It's rare that you get a hiring improvement that's free, fast, and backed by data. This feels like one of those. Lucas: Totally. And speaking of things that don't cost much — I want to mention something for a second. These conversations we get to have every day, they only happen because a small group of listeners supports the show directly. We don't run ads, we don't sell data, and we want to keep it that way. A handful of people chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what makes this sustainable. If you've gotten something out of this episode or any of the last 39, that's the place that keeps it going. Luna: Absolutely. And no pressure ever — we're just grateful for the ones who do. It keeps the whole thing independent. Lucas: Alright — back to the rewrite experiment. One more thing I want to flag. The company also noticed that the time to hire dropped by about two weeks. Because they were getting more qualified applicants earlier, they didn't need to source as aggressively. So the whole process sped up. Luna: That's a nice bonus. Faster hiring, better quality, lower cost. Hard to argue with. Lucas: Yeah. And it all starts with one line in a job description. That's the takeaway — the smallest change can have the biggest effect if it's the right change.