The debate comes up in sports all the time: do you pick the wily, old veteran who may have the experience but may not be as skilled anymore?  Or do you select the raw, young rookie who may have the skills, but not the experience or nerves of the veteran?

"Teams tend to lean toward the old guys, the veteran guys who can manage the game and not make mistakes, especially mental mistakes," former Seattle Seahawks general manager Bob Ferguson said in USA Today in 2004. "The game has become as important mentally as it is physically, because of the premium on possessions, and you just can't afford to make mental errors at that position — and that only comes with experience. Most personnel guys would love to play our rookie quarterbacks right away, but we understand how many mistakes they make. Athletic ability doesn't always get it done."

In 2004, of the 32 projected starting quarterbacks for the regular-season openers, 23 had a minimum of five years NFL experience, and the average age was 31.  We see that head coaches look for experience when trying to select their quarterback.  Though, big football fans will quickly retort that before this season was done, rookies Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger were starters, and the draft class from the year before featured Carson Palmer, Byron Leftwich, Kyle Boller, Rex Grossman, and Chris Simms — all starters this past year with less than three full years of experience.

While age is certainly important for many sports, for it’s usually the veteran teams who get deep in the playoffs, the recent success of several Major League Baseball World Series teams winning the fall classic, all with rookies, has shown that youth can help reenergize a team.  The Anaheim Angels soared to victory in 2002 with John Lackey and Francisco Rodriguez, the Florida Marlins in 2003 with Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis, and the Chicago White Sox last year with Bobby Jenks as their closer.

So what does all this sports stuff have to do with a Human Resource department?

Well, everything. There has been a pretty lengthy debate in Human Resource departments whether they should value experience and, if so, how much to do so.

Let’s start with one side of the spectrum: you’re young and you’ve just come out of college. You’ve had a couple of internships but are applying for your first job.

This was the case of Austin who wrote to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for guidance: “I'm a recent college grad who's having a hard time finding a job. Most openings require three to five years' experience, whereas I have only one year as an unpaid intern in publishing.”

Kate Wendleton, the founder of The Five O’Clock Club, a national career counseling network, gave the advice that: “The good news is that you have a year of experience. Right away, that makes you stand out.” Dale Dauten, the founder of The Innovators’ Lab, related what Hugh Hanson, an executive recruiter in Huntsville, Alabama, told him: “The only new grads that I have a prayer of placing with a nice company in manufacturing are the ones with job-related internships. Companies are much more apt to snatch up kids with some hands-on experience walking out of school.”

So how do college students penetrate one of the hardest entry level markets in the past 20 years AND also what CollegeGrad.com calls the “experience wall”?

According to Brad Krueger, author of College Grad Job Hunter, “work is work and experience is experience. If you have 37 months as an intern, you have 3 years (and 1 month) of experience in the field. You should list your work experience as just that — work experience. Do not discount it in any way, but treat it as the cornerstone of your resume. Your degree is important, but your experience is equally important. Does that mean that you will compare equally with someone who has 3 years experience beyond their degree? No. But you will meet the basic requirements of the position. At that point, it will be up to you to sell yourself to the potential employer.”

But Marvin Walberg writes in the Sacramento Bee that recent college graduates should follow up on those opportunities that ask for two to five years of experience. “Consider that [their] completed degree work gave [them] experience, and if [they] completed any internships, summer work or volunteer work relevant to [their] degree, isn't that also ‘experience’? Semantics, you say? Perhaps, but if it helps get [them] interviews so [they] can sell [their] skills, passions, energy and accomplishments, and help get [their] career started, it works for me.”

In many industries, that experience is huge. “Five years after the dot-com bubble burst, job growth has returned to Silicon Valley,” wrote Pui-Wing Tam of the Wall Street Journal. “But it's a different kind of growth than in past recoveries, favoring higher-skilled workers.”

PR Week wrote earlier this year that after enduring the slump of a few years ago, “‘it's the Golden Age of PR,’ Korn/Ferry Senior Vice President Don Spetner declares. And what's good for the industry overall is good for the PR job market. This is especially true for candidates in the five- to-10-year experience range.”

Some people feel that the emphasis has totally leaned towards the experience and that the degree you earned in college loses value over time. Especially if one changes career, that degree seems to mean nothing to some people, as expressed by William McBee on a blog on the Graphic Design Forum: “Does it really even matter that I have a degree when I have the ability and almost 10 years of professional experience combined with about 6 years of experimentation.”

Extra years don’t help a candidate either. If the job calls for 3-5 years experience and the candidate has 10 years, they may not be considered for that job because of being too old, too costly, or too set in their ways. Some employers really love young, energetic college graduates who can be molded to fit the company’s way of doing things, are willing to work long hours, and, most importantly, will work for less.

But Human Resources needs to make sure to be careful with this practice because it could be confused with age discrimination. Yet, according to CBS MarketWatch, cases of age discrimination in hiring are not usually pursued by shunned applicants: “It's probably one of the lowest number of charges filed with the EEOC, not because it's not prevalent but because they don't have the proof,” said Laurie McCann, a senior attorney with AARP. “They might have a gut feeling that they didn't get hired because of their age, but they're on the outside looking in and they don't know in most cases who got hired instead of them, what that person's age is and how their qualifications compare to that person’s.”

So how do you decide how to choose how much experience to look for in a position? That really depends on experiences your organization has had with the people in that position. If you feel that a position could be done by a college graduate or someone with experience, picking the college graduate could save your company quite a bit of money. On the other hand, if the position needs experience, hiring someone with that experience saves you the time and money that would have to be spent to train the college graduate to do the job.