I didn't say it was the only criteria, just that it is one.

My point is that these criteria are largely meaningless. It all depends on what you're working on. In some jobs, you'll occasionally need to write a recursive function. In others, it's probably a benefit if you can't.

I never personally used it in an interview (that's generally not how I do interviewing) but for someone experienced having not heard of recursion (and it's not such a complicated subject, you wouldn't need much "experience using recursion" to be able to understand it) would mean they haven't really dug into the art & craft of programming.

Just like I'd expect a moderately senior developer to be able to program in procedural, object oriented & functional styles even if they strongly prefer one to the others (and how would they know if they haven't tried all of them?).