Years of experience are not a good metric to assess someone's ability to do the job

You can spend ten years doing the wrong stuff over and over or barely getting out of your comfort zone, or you can spend two years being exposed to a wide range of problems, always learning and refining your skills.

A better way would be to have a look at problems solved in the past and results achieved and discuss them (which makes it very important for candidates to share them on their CVs, rather than a list of languages and frameworks they know)

A better think to assess would be the person's mindset as for the definition in Methods, methodologies and mindset

Spoke about this in this LinkedIn's post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7170364678785613824/