Are you...experienced?

When interviewing candidates, companies tend to ask that question: "Did you with work in this vertical, in this position, in this responsibility?"
And some companies even up the ante by filtering out resumes by keywords.

The question of experience in itself is a good one. Companies want to employ employees that have experience in that field. And, in my case, companies want to work with our agency because we have experience in their vertical.

But I think that experience can be overrated at times.

If you've worked in one field/industry for too long, you tend to stop questioning. You accept the Status Quo: "That's the way it is and that's the way it's always going to be." And suddenly you're too much aligned with the industry and just turn into a follower and a drone.

Clearly, when you don't have any experience in that specific field, you need to learn a lot. You have to understand the little things that make a company work, the backchannels, the nuances.

But it gives you an opportunity to approach this industry with a child-like nativity. You don't have the solution handy. You question everything, even the CEO.

So, next time you go to an interview, approach a new client, use your missing experience as a selling point. You just have to make sure that you can deliver on that promise.