Some Candidates Don’t Lack Experience. We Lack Imagination.

I write this admittedly annoyed by something. I was speaking with a friend of mine who is a talented, intelligent, articulate, capable woman. However, she doesn’t have a college degree. Despite her extensive volunteer experience in non-profits that are demonstrative evidence of her leadership skills, her creative problem solving, her ability to manage complex budgets, her ability to inspire, and everything else she brings to all she does she is often overlooked when she applies for jobs. Why? I will give you a clue. It’s the paper ceiling, the lack of a college degree. And it is RIDICULOUS. Yes, I am yelling.

There is a particular kind of irony in the modern labor market. Employers routinely say they are looking for innovation, adaptability, critical thinking, creativity, resilience, and fresh perspective. Then they construct hiring processes designed to select primarily for familiarity. We say we want people who can think differently, but we often begin by asking whether they have already done almost exactly the same job, in almost exactly the same environment, using almost exactly the same systems.

The candidate has seven years of leadership experience, but not in this industry. They have managed budgets, but not budgets of this particular size. They have supervised people, resolved conflict, built programs, interpreted financial information, managed competing priorities, communicated with stakeholders, and navigated organizational change…but their title does not match the title in the job description, so they are passed over.

Sometimes the problem is not that candidates lack experience. Sometimes organizations lack imagination. There is an uninspired kind of logic behind hiring for direct experience. Organizations want to reduce risk. Managers are busy. Training takes time. Hiring mistakes are expensive. A candidate who has already performed the exact function appears, at least superficially, to be the safer choice.

However, there is a difference between reducing risk and reducing possibility. Experience is not merely a collection of tasks performed under a particular job title. It is the accumulation of judgment, adaptation, pattern recognition, relationships, mistakes, responsibilities, and lessons. Two people may have held the same position for ten years and emerged with dramatically different capacities. Another person may never have held that title at all and yet possess nearly every underlying skill necessary to succeed in the role.

Our obsession with directly comparable experience can therefore become strangely anti-intellectual. Instead of asking what someone has learned, we ask where they learned it. Instead of examining the substance of a person’s work, we evaluate the institutional packaging surrounding it. The result is a labor market in which familiarity can masquerade as competence.

This becomes particularly troubling when we consider what I mentioned earlier, the so-called paper ceiling. This term refers to the discriminatory barriers faced by workers who possess skills and experience but lack a bachelor’s degree or another expected credential.

A woman I work with told me this week that I am a mother’s worst nightmare because I am a perpetual student. I did not take offense. She is not wrong. I do confuse my parents. And, I do love to learn. I have, what seems like to most people, 47 completely unrelated degrees. So, this is coming from someone who has participated in traditional education. Yet, I would argue that a degree is merely evidence of one particular educational journey. It is not a universal measurement of intelligence, judgment, curiosity, leadership, competence, or capacity.

For many positions the degree requirement has become less a carefully considered qualification than a cultural shorthand. It communicates something about who we imagine a professional person to be. That is where a hiring practice becomes an economic justice issue. Access to formal education has never been distributed equally. Education requires money, time, stability, transportation, childcare, health, family support, and often the freedom to delay earning income. A person who began working at eighteen because their family needed money may have spent the next fifteen years acquiring extraordinary expertise without ever accumulating the credential that allows an automated applicant tracking system to recognize it. A veteran may have led people through circumstances far more complex than anything described in a management job posting. A person who built a small business may understand budgeting, sales, operations, customer relationships, hiring, inventory, crisis management, and strategy without ever having been called a director. A formerly incarcerated person may have rebuilt a life, completed training, developed leadership abilities, and gained insight into systems and human behavior that no conventional career trajectory could reproduce.

Yet our hiring systems often ask the same narrow question: Have you already been allowed to do this somewhere else? That question quietly reinforces existing distributions of opportunity. Those who have already been granted access to prestigious organizations, conventional career ladders, desirable job titles, and formal credentials become the people most likely to receive the next opportunity. Opportunity begins reproducing itself. This is how inequality can persist without anyone consciously deciding to discriminate. The requirements simply become more specific.

I have seen another version of this problem in the way religious and community nonprofit work is sometimes evaluated. Someone may spend years directing educational programming in a religious setting, supervising staff and volunteers, developing budgets, coordinating community outreach, teaching adults, managing sensitive interpersonal situations, organizing events, communicating across generations, working with boards and committees, and responding to people experiencing genuine human crises. Yet when that person enters a secular or for-profit sector, the experience may be treated as somehow less professional because it occurred inside a religious or non-profit institution. But managing people is managing people. A budget does not become imaginary because it belongs to a religious organization. Conflict does not become less complicated because the organization is small. Leadership does not become less demanding because some of the people being led are volunteers. In fact, anyone who has ever attempted to lead volunteers might reasonably argue the opposite.

There is an enormous amount of sophisticated labor occurring in religious organizations, grassroots movements, family businesses, mutual-aid networks, small nonprofits, community groups, military settings, caregiving environments, and entrepreneurial ventures that our conventional professional vocabulary struggles to recognize. The work is real. The skills are real. The knowledge is real. What is sometimes missing is not experience but translation. Employers have responsibility for learning how to translate. Why? Because we live in a society. We are responsible to help, encourage, and build up one another. That is the purpose of having a society at all. Otherwise, we might as well all just go live in the woods 10 miles from each other and never interact.

When hiring managers insist upon candidates whose histories perfectly mirror the position being filled, they may gain efficiency. They may also create intellectual monocultures. People who have traveled through the same institutions, learned under similar systems, earned similar credentials, and followed similar career paths are likely to share certain assumptions about what is possible. Those assumptions are not necessarily wrong, but they are incomplete.

Someone arriving from another industry may ask the question insiders stopped asking years ago. Someone without the conventional degree may have learned to solve problems through experimentation rather than theory. Someone from a small organization may have developed an unusually broad understanding of how functions interact because there was no specialized department available to hand the problem to. There is creative energy in difference. There is organizational value in intellectual migration. Ideas become interesting when they cross borders.

This is true in scholarship, art, science, theology, economics, and culture. Some of the most productive intellectual developments happen when someone carries a concept from one discipline into another and suddenly sees something everyone inside the original system had stopped noticing. Why would organizations be any different?

Yet hiring often rewards the opposite. We search for candidates who have remained within clearly defined professional lanes and then wonder why organizations struggle with imagination. Perhaps the deeper problem is that our economy has become extraordinarily good at categorizing people. They are credentialed or noncredentialed. They’re a manager or individual contributor. I often get accused of being nontraditional versus the clearly much more desirable traditional. These categories make administrative systems easier to manage. But human beings are considerably messier than job architectures.

A person is not the sum of their titles. A résumé is not a complete inventory of someone’s intelligence. Human capability rarely develops in the neat chronological order that our hiring systems seem to prefer. Economic justice therefore requires more than creating jobs. It requires interrogating the systems through which opportunity is distributed.

Who gets invited into the room? Whose experience is immediately legible? Whose knowledge requires explanation? Whose education is considered legitimate? Whose work must be translated before someone believes that it counts? These are economic questions because employment determines far more than what someone does between nine and five. Work affects healthcare, housing, retirement security, family stability, social mobility, identity, and the ability to participate fully in the economic life of a community. When organizations unnecessarily restrict opportunity, the consequences extend beyond a hiring decision. They become part of the architecture of inequality.

There will always be positions requiring specific credentials and specialized experience. We should not pretend otherwise. Surgeons need medical training. Engineers need technical competence. Certain accounting, legal, scientific, and regulatory responsibilities require knowledge that cannot responsibly be replaced by enthusiasm and transferable skills. But many job descriptions are far more rigid than the work itself requires. Perhaps organizations could begin replacing the question “Has this person already done this exact job?” with better, smarter questions. What problems have they solved? What responsibilities have they carried? What have they built? Perhaps most importantly: What might this person be capable of becoming if someone finally gave them the opportunity?

Hiring will always involve uncertainty. There is no credential, degree, job title, industry background, or number of years of experience that can completely eliminate it. Sometimes the supposedly safest candidate will fail. Sometimes the unconventional candidate will transform the organization. The difference may depend upon whether someone was willing to imagine what their experience could become. Because there is another kind of ceiling in our labor market alongside the paper ceiling. It is an imagination ceiling. Organizations may never know how much talent exists above it until they are willing to break through.