Chad Silverstein argues that past experience can be a liability in hiring. Success at a competitor doesn't guarantee success at your company, and unlearning old habits is harder than learning new ones. He prefers candidates with a clean slate over those carrying counterproductive practices from elsewhere.
Chapters
I've talked before about using your experiences and using the experience Transformer. So you take a negative experience and you actually can learn from it. And then when you can share that learning with your team to avoid it from repeating itself, there's such a swing there from, you know, someone who has a negative experience, something bad happens to their business, to their clients, to their employees, to themselves, and then they go down the bunny hole and they're depressed about it, and who knows what leads from there versus taking that situation, learning from it, and then using that learning to actually grow. You know, it's very powerful swing. And one of the things that I came across in my business was that I never liked to hire people with experience. In fact, I had a rule that you couldn't hire someone from another collection agency. The reason was because I didn't care, you know, how much experience you had, because we were different. And I learned that it was hard for people to unlearn what they've learned. So they had this experience and they brought it over to my company and it was the experience that I didn't even want them to have. And I had to unteach them and then teach them our way of doing it where I like having a clean slate. Someone who didn't have experience and then train them. And as long as they're trainable, coachable, and they want to learn and they're eager to kind of pick up new skills, those are the best people. So you have to be really careful when it comes to experience. One other example I'm going to give you is that I used to get into one of the. A big argument with some of the people in my team about hiring people with experience in sales. I always hired young sales reps who are eager and, you know, just wanted to go out and learn and be a go getter. And a lot of times people in my office wanted to hire, you know, the, the six figure and up person because they have experience. They had the book of business from the old company. And I used to say, they're not bringing clients over from the old company. There's no way. And that's. This is one area that I found myself really proving to myself over and over. I was right. Because someone coming with experience does not mean that they can repeat it. You want to think it can. You want to think that previous performance can predict future performance, but it can't. And when you have a company like mine that was so different, and we had all these nuances and things that made us so distinctly the opposite of our competitors that the experience actually hurt you. So you have to know what you believe about experience. You have to know how valuable it is. And in some cases, it's going to be very valuable. Not always. There's always a. There's always an and or a however to everything, an exception to everything. And I think what I want you to take away from today is don't be one of those people that make it so hard to unlearn what you've learned. It's a hard thing to do if you've been in whatever you've been in for a long time and you have to shift and pivot because your job just changed, which a lot of people are going to start seeing now over the next five to 10 years. You have to be open to the fact that you have to unlearn what you've learned. And it's hard to do, but it starts with the way you think about. Starts with being open and being receptive to it and then attacking whatever it is that you need to learn, even though it may be the opposite of what you've learned in the past and just moving forward with it and leaving the baggage behind. Don't let that tie you down, hold you back. It's a crazy concept. You have to unlearn what you've learned. Think about it. Think about where it shows up in your life and think about where you need to do it.
