I was chatting with a very experienced woman recently about how her job hunt was going. “Oh, well, I get the ‘you are too experienced for the role’ response all the time – really frustrating,” she said. “Of course, HR people are smart enough to avoid saying that you’re too old for the team and so instead they say you are too experienced.”

In my book the concept of “too experienced” (so long as it’s not code for “expecting too much money”) is slightly bonkers. If you could hire someone with more experience then why would you not hire them? How can experience ever be a negative?

I found myself discussing this with another HR director in a different company: “I can see that – managers like to have people to manage, not people who can do their job”. Any company that employs managers with that attitude is sure headed for problems in my view. I expect managers to hire the most experienced person they possibly can for the budget. If the new employee slightly unnerves them because they might be higher skilled than them – better still.

If I was on Mastermind, I think my specialist skill would be surrounding myself with people who are better at all kinds of things than me. What’s not to like? I’m learning all the time, challenged by the team and confident that I have great counsel by my side.

I’m convinced that, when recruiting managers, if we all made sure that they could demonstrate they’ve hired people smarter and more experienced than they are, this is the fastest way to boost our economy.

I’m going to keep on hiring experienced people – what better way to keep on learning?