Having no experience or being inexperienced doesn’t always hurt your chances to get a job but the truth is that a lot of the time, it does hurt.
One instance when not having the required experience for a job hurts you is when you’re working with a recruiter. A recruiter of course get paid by the hiring company to find the right person to fill a job. So the general rule is that if a company is going to pay a recruiter to help them find a person for the job, the person had better be qualified otherwise why would the company want to pay the recruiter?
You might very well get the job applying directly to the company yourself since there is no recruiter getting paid in this case. But if you are working with a recruiter and want to apply for a job(s) where you are lacking in some important skills, it can be more difficult for a recruiter to “sell” you to the hiring manager because the manager normally has a mindset that in order to pay a recruiter for referring them to a job searcher, that job searcher had better be as good if not better than other qualified candidates that the company found themselves.
I can think of numerous occasions when I’ve found someone who is a pretty good match for a job but when I compare them to other candidates that my colleagues are submitting to a client for the same job, the person I found simply doesn’t match up well compared to these other candidates. In other cases the opposite is true and it’s me who has found someone who becomes the model candidate for the job, and lesser candidates aren’t submitted because they simply don’t match up to this person.
This happens quite frequently in the recruitment business especially when the recruitment firm has been allowed by the hiring company to only submit a limited number of resumes (ie. 3) for a particular job.
In some cases – usually when you’ve applied to a company yourself without use of a recruiter – you can find ways of making up for a lack of experience or where you are lacking certain skills that the job requires. Sometimes education can make up for it (ie. a particular degree, training, certification) but in other cases, a company will hold out and wait until they find the “perfect” candidate even if it means waiting awhile.
