Five Years of React Experience Required Is Why Your Team Is Mediocre

The job description requires five years of React experience, three years of TypeScript, two years of GraphQL, one year of testing frameworks, and "experience with CI/CD pipelines." React was not even popular five years ago among many of the engineers you want to hire. You are not filtering for experience. You are filtering for age.

The engineer you actually want has four years of total experience, genuinely understands component architecture, has shipped things users love, and learns new tools in a week. Your job description filtered them out in the first automated screen.

What Experience Requirements Actually Select For

Years-of-experience requirements are a proxy for capability when the hiring organisation cannot measure capability directly. This was understandable before the tools to measure capability were accessible. It is no longer understandable. A take-home project in a domain relevant to your codebase, a code review exercise using a real PR from your history, a pairing session on a real problem from your backlog — these measure what actually matters in a few hours. Years of experience measures duration of employment in the industry. These are not the same thing.

The person who spent five years doing mediocre React work at a company with no code review culture and no senior engineers has five years of React experience. The person who spent three years building ambitious projects with a strong team, learning from exceptional engineers, and shipping products with real user feedback has three years. Your filter promotes the first candidate over the second.

The Market Effect

When every company in your hiring market posts the same inflated requirements, the senior engineers who meet them become a small, expensive pool. The companies with the strongest employer brand, the most interesting problems, or the most money win access to this pool. Everyone else gets the candidates the winners did not want.

Companies that deliberately hire on demonstrated capability rather than credential accumulation access a completely different pool: ambitious engineers who are growing faster than their years would indicate, career changers who bring domain knowledge from adjacent industries, and people from non-traditional backgrounds who were never going to have the linear career history your requirements assume. These candidates are less expensive, often more motivated, and frequently more innovative than the credential-cleared alternatives.

What to Write Instead

Replace "5 years of React experience" with "has built and shipped production React applications." Replace "strong CS fundamentals" with "can explain why their architectural choices were right for the scale they were working at." Replace the credential requirement with a demonstration requirement. It takes more work to evaluate. It produces dramatically better hires.

The companies that changed their hiring to capability-based assessment years ago are now the companies with the most interesting engineering cultures. The change is not just philosophical. It is a competitive advantage in a market where everyone else is sorting the wrong pile.