You’ve finally graduated and have enough energy to take down a mountain. You start looking for a job, then you notice that almost all entry-level jobs require experience.
You’re just a fresh graduate, though. How on earth would you gain that experience? Read on to find the answer to the question: why do entry-level jobs require experience?
Why Do Entry Level Jobs Require Experience?
1. Employers Are Seeking Longevity
Employee turnover is time-consuming and costly, which is why all employers try to prevent it. Employers look for applicants who are there for the long run.
Employers can assure an applicant’s longevity by looking into your past experience. What was their performance in their previous company? How long have they worked there?
For entry-level jobs, some requirements can be waived. Neglecting most of these requirements, however, can put the company at risk of high staff turnover since some recruits may decide to leave at any time.
2. Hiring Is Not An Easy Process
With the rise of the internet, applying for jobs has never become easier. You can open a job hiring website and apply to hundreds of companies in just a few minutes with a few clicks.
These few clicks have a huge impact on each company you apply to. If you’d imagine the number of applicants applying for this one vacant slot, you’d be overwhelmed.
Companies have to go through thousands of applications and do multiple screening processes to find that one suitable applicant who will benefit the organization.
If the company doesn’t set some requirements in their job postings, they’ll have endless numbers of incompetent applicants.
3. The Job Requires A Particular Understanding
To drive this point home, let’s put it in the context of sales.
Persuading someone into buying a company’s product may sound simple. All it needs is some sales experience, right?
This can be correct of some sort, but the sales experience can only be 50% of the requirements. There’s a remaining 50% that you need to account for.
You still need to document the call, update the system with the new order, and adjust the stock count on the company’s system.
The software work that accompanies every sales call is just as important as sales skills. If you can’t back your sales pitch with some software interactions, you’re missing the remaining 50% of the requirements.
4. The Employer Is Not Offering Training
Some employing companies may not offer a training period for the company’s newly recruited employees. This can happen for many reasons.
Said companies may not have trainers available on hand to instruct the recruits. Maybe they don’t have the needed resources to establish a training department.
In some cases, the staff is focused on their jobs and has no time to train the new recruits. This is why such companies will ask for a lot of requirements for an entry-level job.
As long as you have a background of what the job is, the remaining experience can be gained from your co-workers.
5. Companies Try To Pinpoint Best Candidates
Companies became flooded with applications for every job position they offer. With too many applicants, it becomes almost impossible for employers to pinpoint the right candidate.
This is why companies tend to increase the requirements for an entry-level job to help filter out the process a little bit.
6. Companies Sometimes Exaggerate Requirements
In most job postings, you’ll often find a long list of requirements, whereas, in reality, that job only needs two of these requirements.
This happens when employers believe they should add more requirements than what is actually needed.
So, the requirements keep adding up until the result becomes a huge list of requirements for a simple entry-level job.
7. Job Posting Is A Template
Job posting is the way a company communicates to the public, and to make this process easier, they made it in the form of templates.
As an employer, you’ll only need three or four requirements for the new applicant you’re hiring. You write them down, but you still have 10 more slots of requirement left to fill the template.
The remaining requirements may not be that necessary, but a full template is what the board asked for. So, you just fill those slots with unnecessary requirements to please the board.
8. Hiring Is Discussed By Managerial Board
A decision to hire a new employee is always discussed with the board of directors. This is when managers and business owners gather in a meeting to discuss what the new position is.
Said meeting will include what they want the recruit to do, the requirements they need in order to get the job done, how they’ll benefit the organization, and so forth.
With different managers and different opinions, the requirements list will keep building up until each member of the board is satisfied.
9. Applicants Are Not Honest
A huge portion of the applications sent online have poor quality. Most of the time, people apply for jobs they just don’t qualify for.
As the internet simplified the concept of applying to jobs, people tend to abuse the system and apply for random jobs, hoping they can land one.
What this does is slow down the screening process for the remaining candidates and clutters the applications the hiring department has to go through.
This doesn’t include you missing some points from the requirements. We’re talking about high school dropouts wanting to apply as a surgeon here.
To learn more, you can also read our posts on why work is so boring, why mechanics are so shady, and why teachers are so rude.
Conclusion
For a fresh graduate, it can be frustrating to look for entry-level jobs and find a huge list of requirements you need to fulfill for this one job.
As frustrating as it can be, it raises an important question: why do entry-level jobs require experience? Hopefully, the information shared in this post has helped answer this question.
