Years-of-Experience Requirements Are Filtering Out Your Best Hires

At 9:12 on a Monday night, a battery engineer opened an application for a Senior Battery Systems Engineer at an EV startup. The third screen asked one question: how many years of battery pack design experience do you have? The dropdown offered four choices, and the posting said eight or more. She had five. Three of those five were spent at a startup that took a pack from a whiteboard sketch to start of production, through two cell supplier changes and a thermal redesign six weeks before launch. She picked the honest answer. The rejection email arrived at 9:16.

On Tuesday morning, the hiring manager for that role sat down with his recruiter for the weekly pipeline review. The req had been open for nine weeks. He had seen four resumes. Two came from large OEMs, with long tenure on a single subsystem and no launch on their record. He said what managers in his seat say every week: "I just need someone who has actually shipped a pack." She had. He never saw her name.

Nobody in this story did anything wrong on purpose. The candidate told the truth, the recruiter configured the screen the way the posting read, and the manager asked for what he wanted. The number in the middle quietly decided the outcome for all three of them.

From the candidate's chair

To a candidate, a years requirement looks like the one objective line in the posting. Responsibilities are vague, the culture paragraph sounds like every other culture paragraph, but "8+ years" is a number, and numbers feel like rules. So candidates do arithmetic. Five is less than eight. Close the tab.

The candidates who keep going face a worse choice. Many application systems now turn the years line into a knockout question, and the candidate can see the trap while filling it out. Answer honestly and get filtered by software. Round up and start the relationship with a stretch that will come out in the first phone screen. Most good engineers answer honestly, and that is exactly the group the filter removes.

What candidates usually get wrong is assuming the number was chosen carefully. They read it as a considered judgment about the minimum depth the job requires. It almost never is. It is usually the number from the last posting, or the tenure of the person who just left, or a figure HR attached to the word Senior in a leveling grid built for a different department.

What they cannot see is the conversation behind the posting. They cannot see that the manager would trade three years of tenure for one launch in a heartbeat. They cannot see that the last person hired into the role had six years, not eight. From the outside, the number looks like a wall. From the inside, it is often a guess that nobody has revisited.

From the hiring team's chair

For the hiring manager, years are a shortcut, and the shortcut exists for a real reason. He is trying to describe judgment: someone who has seen a design fail, knows which tests matter, and will not need hand-holding in a design review. Judgment is hard to write into a posting. Years are easy. So "has made enough mistakes to know better" becomes "8+ years," and the translation feels harmless.

The recruiter inherits that number and has to defend it. When a candidate with fewer years goes forward and stumbles in the panel, the first question in the debrief is why that person was sent. A recruiter carrying a heavy req load, often well beyond what any one person can screen by hand, leans on the years line because it is the only filter that can be applied in seconds and defended afterward. Turning it into a knockout question is the logical end of that pressure.

What the hiring team usually gets wrong is treating tenure and experience as the same thing. Eight years at a large OEM on one subsystem can mean eight repetitions of the same year. Three years at a startup through a launch can mean a dozen problems most engineers never see. When I helped scale Fisker from under 300 to 1,700+ people, some of the strongest hires I made came in under the posted number, and some of the weakest cleared it easily.

What the hiring team cannot see is who never applied. The applicant tracking system shows the people who made it through. It does not show the engineers who read the number and left, or the ones who answered a dropdown honestly and were rejected in four minutes. A thin pipeline looks like a talent shortage. Often it is a filter working exactly as configured.

Where it breaks

The break is that both sides treat the number as a measurement when it is a proxy. The manager wants evidence of judgment. The candidate has evidence of judgment. The number sits between them and checks neither.

The board shows how much weight that proxy carries. Of the 29,600+ open roles on the Mobility Jobs Board, close to half carry a seniority word in the title itself: senior, staff, principal, lead, manager, director. About one in four say senior or Sr outright. Fewer than one in ten carry any marker of an early-career role, and that count includes internships. Across the 181 companies on the board, the industry is asking for experienced people far more often than it is building them.

That would be manageable if experience were plentiful. In much of mobility it is not, because the industries themselves are young. Autonomous trucking, electric aircraft and humanoid robotics have not been commercial businesses long enough to produce a deep bench of people with a decade inside them. A posting that asks for ten years of humanoid robotics experience is describing a short list of people, and many of them are founders who are not looking. Meanwhile the adjacent talent, the aerospace test engineer, the automotive controls engineer, the defense systems integrator, gets filtered out because the years were spent in the wrong industry by name.

The second break is timing. The years number is set in the intake meeting, when the role is imaginary and every candidate is ideal. It is enforced weeks later, by software, against real people the manager would have wanted to meet. The person who wrote the number and the moment it rejects someone are separated by a month and an algorithm, so nobody feels the cost.

What to do differently

If you are the candidate

• Translate your years into outcomes before you apply. Write one line that answers the question behind the number: "Took a pack from concept to start of production in three years" is a stronger claim than tenure, and it belongs at the top of your resume.
• Treat a gap of two years or less as a reason to apply, not to quit. If you clearly meet the substance of the role, the number is negotiable more often than it looks. A gap of five years in a role that needs it is different, and you will know the difference.
• Answer knockout questions honestly, then go around them. Find the recruiter or hiring manager on LinkedIn and send three sentences: the role, the launch you shipped, and the gap you know about. Naming the gap yourself reads as judgment.
• Count adjacent industry years out loud. Six years of flight test in aerospace is relevant to eVTOL. Say so directly, because the screen will not make that connection for you.

If you are the hiring team

• Replace the number with the evidence it stands for. Instead of "8+ years," write "has taken a battery pack through at least one production launch." Candidates can self-assess against that honestly, and so can your recruiter.
• Remove years from knockout questions. If a dropdown is rejecting people in minutes, audit what it rejected last month. Pull ten of those applications and ask whether you would have taken the phone screen.
• Set the number from your own team, not from the last posting. Look at the people already succeeding in the role. If most of them came in under the number you are posting, the number is wrong.
• Give your recruiter written permission to flex. Agree in intake which lines can bend and by how much, so the recruiter is not forced to choose between your stated bar and your real one.
• Name the adjacent industries you will accept. Write them into the posting. "Automotive, aerospace or defense test experience welcome" opens the pool more than any sourcing campaign.

The battery engineer took a job three weeks later at a company whose posting asked for launch experience instead of a number. The req she was rejected from was still open at week twelve. The manager was still saying the same thing in the Tuesday pipeline review: he just needed someone who had actually shipped a pack. She had. The number made sure he never found out.