“Do They Have the Experience?”
Shouldn’t Be Answered by a Job Title.

A job on your team has been open for weeks. And someone good on your team is doing two jobs to cover it. Their own work, and the open job's work, every single day.

Then the applications start coming in. You sit down with your recruiter, and somebody asks about one of the applicants, "Do they have the experience?" And the answer comes back as a job title. Either this person has held this exact job somewhere else, or they haven't.

When a job title answers that question, people who did the work under another title get set aside. So when somebody asks "Do they have the experience?", that question shouldn't be answered by a job title. In this episode, I'll give you what to answer it with.

This is The Autistic Leader Podcast. I'm Uday Kiran Bolusani. Each week, I take one piece of advice every leader already gives, and I give you one skill that makes it work for every kind of mind.

Here's the advice you hear the moment a job opens. "Find someone who can hit the ground running."

And that's good advice. Every week a job sits open, the work still has to get done. And the person covering it does that work on top of their own. And someone who spent years in work close to this one knows things that help. They've already handled a lot of what the job will ask of them. So years matter. And it makes sense to want someone who can start strong.

Say you're hiring a field operations manager for a company that installs solar panels on people's homes. That manager gets each home's permit and inspection done, orders the panels, and keeps the installers safe up on the roofs. Your job description lists all of that work. And then it asks for five years as a field operations manager.

Your director tells you, find someone who can hit the ground running. So you and your recruiter read the applications looking for people who've held that title at another solar company.

One applicant spent six years as a production manager for a touring theater company. Every week, the show moved to a new city. In each city, she hired local stagehands. She worked with each venue's own staff. She kept her crew safe while they worked high above the stage. And when equipment showed up late, she still got the show open on time.

Her title was production manager. So you set her application aside. Eight weeks later, the job's still open, and your lead installer is still covering it.

You and your recruiter were careful here. You followed the advice exactly the way it's given when a job opens. And that job description is probably a lot like the ones for the jobs you hire for.

So what were those five years supposed to stand for? Were they for the permits? For keeping people safe on roofs? The job description listed the work and left that part for you to guess.

So you, your recruiter and the applicant all had to guess. You and your recruiter looked at each title and guessed who could do the work. And she guessed which parts of her six years you'd count. Should she lead with the stagehands? The late equipment? The safety? She had no way to know.

That guessing is cognitive load, the extra mental effort people spend when no process or tool lays the answer out. Reading résumés and interviewing are part of hiring. That guessing is the extra effort on top. A written list of what those five years stood for would have taken that load off of you, your recruiter and the applicant.

Many organizations run jobs that sound different and need similar core competencies. By that I mean the same kinds of work and decisions. A touring theater company and a solar installer sound nothing alike, but both need someone who keeps a crew safe up high and opens on a date that can't move. When you and your recruiter screen for the exact title, people from jobs like hers get set aside before anyone weighs what they actually did.

Before I read a single résumé, I write down three things. And once they're written down, I can tell what someone is able to do, whatever title they held before. You'll see the same idea on one AI company's careers page. It says the company cares about what a person can do, not where they learned to do it.

As I go through the three things, keep the job you're hiring for on your team in mind, or the last one you hired for.

The first thing is the competencies the job needs at its level. A competency is a piece of work the person will do, or a decision they'll make, written as a plain sentence. And by its level, I mean what this particular job needs, the way a director's job needs more than a coordinator's.

I write five kinds. Knowing the work of the job itself. Leading the people who report to them. Leading the people who don't report to them, like the other teams they need things from. Thinking ahead. And building the culture. I write that as work too, like how this person wants their team to treat a customer.

For the job on your team, that's five sentences.

That's the first thing. The second thing is a question for each of those sentences, about a time the person did that work. And you ask it in four parts. What was the situation? What did you need to get done? What did you do? And what happened?

There's a 2021 study by Katie Maras and colleagues that looked at questions asked in parts. In mock job interviews, people who didn't know who was autistic rated autistic adults' answers to the standard questions lower on average. About six months later, the questions were asked in parts, with prompts for what to cover and the questions printed out. And the gap narrowed until it was no longer statistically significant, which means it could have been down to chance.

When a question comes in parts, every candidate, autistic or not, hears what a full answer covers. So nobody sitting across from you has to guess how much you want to hear.

And the third thing is one real problem from the job. It's the same problem for every candidate. You send it to them before the interview, and they work on it on their own time. Then in the interview, they walk you through what they did, and why they did it that way. Sending candidates a real problem from the job is something I've seen good employers do. I do it when I hire, and I push for it.

For the job on your team, the problem is one the person you hire will face in their first month.

Writing three things down can sound like a lot before you've opened a single application. It's a few lines, written once for the job. And every application gets read against the same lines.

And those questions and that problem matter even more, now that AI is part of hiring, for the candidate and for you.

A candidate can use AI to make a résumé match your posting with very little effort. So a live answer to each question, in its four parts, is how you test what the résumé claims. And if you use AI to sort résumés, it can pass over qualified people. That happens when nobody has told it what the job needs, so it looks for the wrong thing.

A candidate may use AI on the problem from the job too. That's fine, but in the interview they have to defend their reasons, live. That's how you can usually tell whether AI helped them with the work, or did the work for them.

Where AI belongs in your hiring is a call you make. My AI Cognitive Strategy Matrix is my framework for deciding where AI belongs in a piece of work, and hiring is one of the places it applies.

Here are the three things for the solar job, written out.

Here are the five competencies. Knowing the work means getting each home's permit and inspection done by the date the customer was promised. Leading the installers means keeping them safe on the roofs. Leading people who don't report to the manager means getting the sales team to check how long a permit will take before they promise a customer a date. Thinking ahead means deciding which towns to take on next season. And building the culture means setting how installers treat customers when they're inside someone's home.

One of the five questions goes like this. "Think of a time equipment arrived late before a date you couldn't move." Then the same four parts. The situation, what you needed to get done, what you did, and what happened.

And the problem from the job is next week's twelve homes, with panels running late for some of them. Which homes go first, and why?

Now read the production manager's application again, against those five sentences.

She kept her crew safe while they worked high above the stage. That's leading the installers. She got each venue's own staff working from her plan, and none of them reported to her. That's leading people who don't report to the manager.

So this time, she gets the interview. The question about late equipment lets her tell you how she opened shows on dates that couldn't move. And the problem about next week's twelve homes lets her walk you through which homes she'd do first.

What does she still need? The solar part. Permits, inspections, and the safety rules for roofs and electrical work. In her first weeks, your team teaches her those, and she starts right away on the work she already knows how to do.

So she can still hit the ground running, just like your director asked. Same applicant. Same six years. This time you read them against those five sentences.

Here's how one competency and one question sound on two other teams, a library system and a food bank.

Say you run a public library system, and you're hiring a branch manager. Your job description asks for three years as a branch manager at a public library. One applicant has spent four years as the program director at a community center. She set the staff schedules and kept the building open every hour it was supposed to be open.

So you write one competency as work. Leading the people who report to the branch manager means keeping the branch open every posted hour with the staff the branch has. And you ask her, "Think of a time someone called in sick and you still had to keep a building open to the public." Then the same four parts.

And say you run a regional food bank, and you're hiring a volunteer coordinator. Your job description asks for four years coordinating volunteers at a nonprofit. One applicant ran a youth soccer league for years, where parents coached the teams, ran the snack table and painted the lines on the fields every Saturday. Not one of those parents worked for her.

So you write the competency. Leading people who aren't paid to be there means getting volunteers to show up for a Saturday sorting shift and do it the safe way. And the question is, "Think of a time you needed people who didn't work for you to show up and do something your way." Then the same four parts.

Here's how to try it on your own team. Pull up the job description for one of the jobs on your team, and find the lines that ask for a title or a number of years. For each one, ask yourself, what work or what decision is that line standing in for? Write it down as a plain sentence. And then ask, which of those could you teach someone in their first weeks?

Hire this way, and a person who did the work under another title gets read for what they can actually do.

The same way of hiring people helps neurodivergent people whose résumés show time out of work. Ask them about the work, the way you asked a production manager, and they can prove skills and ways of thinking that the résumé leaves out.

Hiring like this is part of what I call cognitive architecture, how an organization designs the way its people think and make decisions. And where hiring is designed this way, the person covering that open job gets to go back to their own.

Let me put the whole thing together. A job title stood in for her six years running a touring show's crew, so a good applicant got set aside and the job stayed open. Nobody wrote down what the five years stood for, so you counted on the title to tell you who could do the work.

Here's what changes. You write down the work the job needs at its level. You ask one question in four parts about each piece of that work. You give every candidate the same real problem from the job. And you teach the part that's specific to the job, like the solar permits and roof safety, in the first weeks. And you start with the job description for a job on your team.

This week's essay on my site has the solar job's five competencies written out, and a prompt you can copy into your AI to draft the competencies and questions for your own job description.

Here's my ask. I built this show to help leaders who think differently reach senior roles, by changing how organizations are designed. Every person who subscribes is one more leader this work reaches, every week. So subscribe to the Substack, and take each week's skill to your team.

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Monday, open the job description for a job on your team. Find every line that asks for a title or a number of years, and for each one, write down the piece of work or the decision that line stands for.