In a recent article we wrote about how AI is pushing client demand toward more experienced hires. That article asked whether experience is still the fastest route to impact. It's a fair question, and for a lot of roles, the answer is still yes.
But there's a second question worth asking, and it gets skipped too often: is experience the only fast route? A graduate, matched well and coached properly, can reach a genuinely senior level of contribution faster than most hiring managers assume. Not eventually, within the first year or two. The instinct to always hire the most experienced person available is worth a second look. Not because experienced people aren't valuable, but because they aren't the only way to get the outcome you're actually after.
There's a practical reason this question matters more this year than last. Robert Half's 2026 Belgian labour market report found that 66% of hiring managers still struggle to find the right candidate, even as the job market overall cools down. A shortage of qualified candidates remains the single biggest hiring problem for the first half of 2026. Agoria, the Belgian technology federation, separately counts around 22,000 open vacancies for digital experts nationwide.
At the same time, the people who make up today's pool of experienced workers are retiring earlier than the pipeline behind them can replace. SD Worx research from June 2026 found that Belgians are the least willing workers in Europe to keep working past retirement age. So the supply of experience is shrinking at the exact moment demand for it is growing.
“Clients often assume the safest option is automatically the most senior one,” says Lenny Sluyts, Account Manager at Projective Talent. “What we're seeing on the ground is that 'safe' is getting harder to buy at any price. The conversation is shifting toward: how fast can we actually build this instead?”
What we're seeing on the ground is that 'safe' is getting harder to buy at any price. The conversation is shifting toward: how fast can we actually build this instead?
None of this means experienced hiring is the wrong call. It means it is no longer the only lever worth pulling, and increasingly, not even the fastest one.
Belgian employers already seem to sense this. ManpowerGroup Belgium's 2025 Talent Shortage survey found that training (upskilling and reskilling) is the single most common response Belgian employers choose to address talent shortages, ahead of any other strategy, at 29%. The same survey found that financial and real estate employers report the toughest hiring conditions of any sector in Belgium: 80% struggle to fill open roles, even higher than IT at 74%.
That is not a coincidence. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that organisations expect an average of 39% of the skills their workforce uses today to change or disappear between 2025 and 2030, and that skills gaps are already the biggest barrier to business change, named by 63% of employers worldwide. Belgian companies that are training their own people are not just filling today's gaps. They are the ones least likely to be caught out by 2030's.
Some analysts have already given this a name: the “junior-hiring crunch.” If companies pull back from developing junior talent now, simply because experience feels like the safer bet, there will not be enough people with three to five years' experience to promote into senior roles a few years from now.
It's worth naming several distinct things here, not just one. The energy and fresh ideas graduates bring up in almost every hiring conversation are real, but that's not where the evidence is strongest. Three other effects matter more, and get talked about less.
The first is a kind of built-in critical distance. People who are new to an organisation notice things that long-time employees have stopped seeing. This is not a personality trait. It is a well-documented effect of familiarity: the longer someone works somewhere, the more blind they become to its inefficiencies, simply because those inefficiencies have become normal. People who are new to an organisation have not built up that blindness yet, according to classic research on how newcomers experience an unfamiliar workplace.
The second is what researchers call the protégé effect: when someone has to teach or explain something to a less experienced colleague, they understand it better themselves. A meta-analysis covering 65 separate tutoring studies found that tutors, not just the people they were tutoring, came away with a stronger grasp of the material. In practice, a senior team member who mentors a graduate does not just pass knowledge downward. They are forced to make their own expertise explicit, which sharpens it. Teams with that dynamic built in tend to work differently: more conversation, more checking of assumptions, less of the “we've always done it this way” drift that experienced-only teams can quietly fall into.
The third shows up in the team's energy, not only its knowledge. A meta-analysis of workplace mentoring research, found that people who mentor others report higher job satisfaction, stronger commitment to their organisation, and better job performance than those who don't. Giving senior staff someone to mentor doesn't just help the graduate settle in. It measurably lifts how engaged the mentor is too.
There is also a technology angle here, and it has flipped faster than most organisations have caught up with. Many of today's graduates encountered generative AI tools during their studies, sometimes for years, while plenty of experienced professionals are still learning the basics on the job. Deloitte's most recent Gen Z survey found that 76% of Gen Z respondents already use standalone AI tools at work, the highest share of any generation surveyed.
Some companies are now building this into how they work. Citibank uses reverse mentoring specifically to help senior leaders get comfortable with AI, automation and changing customer behaviour, pairing them with younger staff who already know the tools. Reverse mentoring itself is not new. What is new is the subject it is now most often used for.
None of this happens automatically, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. Every one of these effects, from the fresh perspective to the protégé effect to reverse mentoring on AI, depends on real structure: a coach, a development plan, and someone senior who treats mentoring as part of the job, not an inconvenience. Without that, a graduate is just a graduate. With it, the timeline to real impact gets a lot shorter.
So, is more experience really the only shortcut to impact? Experience still matters, and remains the fastest route for plenty of roles. But on its own, it is no longer the guarantee it once was, and organisations that treat it as the only route are competing for a shrinking resource on the hardest possible terms.
The real differentiator is no longer how many years someone has worked, but how quickly they are enabled to reach real impact, whether that takes two decades or two years. That is a genuine shift in how talent decisions get made. For hiring managers. And for graduates.
At Projective Talent, we believe the fastest route to impact is not always the most experienced hire. Sometimes it is the graduate who has been given real coaching to get there. Not instead of experience. Alongside it.
As part of Projective Group, Projective Talent connects ambitious professionals with leading financial services companies, opening doors to career-defining opportunities. Whether through traineeships that transition into long-term roles with our clients, or missions that offer flexible assignments, we ensure the right fit for both candidates and businesses.
With access to A+ clients, expert coaching, and a strong professional network, we help talent and companies grow together, fuelling careers, innovation, and long-term success.
