How Skill-Based Hiring Elevates Talent

Imagine you’re a part of a hiring team looking to fill job openings in your company. You post your job description and your requirements. You go through the recruiting and interview process with a certain number of promising candidates, some of whom turn out to lack the requisite soft skills you’re looking for in spite of their experience. Then, you narrow it down to a few lucky candidates who get onboarded as new hires, only to find out that, despite their education, they need a significant amount of training and handholding, or, worse, they don’t actually have the skills they need to succeed! So much time was spent in the process, and you couldn’t find the right talent. 

Well, what if there was an alternative to this kind of hiring? Read on to learn more about how skills-based hiring can help your company find the right employees! 

What is Skills-Based Hiring?

Skills-based hiring is a new method of finding employees that eschews the traditional requirements of formal education or direct experience. Instead, HR departments find alternative ways to evaluate skills—primarily through skills assessments—in order to determine a prospect’s qualifications. Previously an unconventional method of hiring, skills-based hiring is becoming more and more common, especially as some Americans begin to turn away from pursuing traditional four-year degrees. 

Finding Qualified Candidates Who May Have Been Overlooked

Skills-based hiring offers the primary benefit of connecting hiring teams with talented individuals who may have been overlooked due to a lack of direct experience or education level. Skills and experience can be gained in many indirect and unconventional ways, so it may be to your business’s benefit to consider candidates with unconventional backgrounds! 

What are the Benefits of Skill-Based Hiring Strategy?

From improving your talent pool to boosting skills within your workplace, this type of hiring process can bring many benefits for your business. Let’s explore some of these advantages below. 

Wider Talent Pool to Choose From

Since skills-based hiring lowers the barrier-to-entry by eliminating certain restrictions for applications, HR teams have a much wider pool of talent to choose from. This doesn’t mean more work sorting through dud applications, either—skills assessments and certain AI functionalities can be leveraged to help sort which candidates really have the capabilities and aptitudes that you are looking for. 

New Hires Can Hit the Ground Running

When your job descriptions, pre-onboarding assessments, and early employment scaffolding all emphasize particular abilities, your new hire will have a better idea of what the job entails and may require a little less training throughout the training process. Even better, they may be able to tune up their skills at home earlier on and hit the ground running! 

Increased Ability in Your Workforce

Unfortunately, having direct experience or the requisite degree doesn’t always mean employees have the aptitudes or abilities that they ought to have. Skills-based hiring only focuses on ability, meaning that, hypothetically, fewer members of your workforce will be working jobs that they are ill-suited for. 

How to Implement a Skills-Based Talent Search

Interested in trying out a skills-based hiring process for some vacant roles at your company? Follow the basic steps below to begin implementing these recruitment practices for your business! 

Plan in Advance for What Skills Your Company Needs

Perhaps the most time-intensive part of transitioning to skills-based hiring is determining the skills involved in every role for which you have a vacancy - this can be done in many ways. You may decide to conduct research on what skills-based hiring looks like for similar roles at other companies. It might also be helpful for hiring managers to speak with teammates who work in similar or collaborative roles at your company and survey what they think is important for an employee conducting that type of work.  

Once you’ve made a list of all the skills involved in a particular role, it can be helpful to determine which of these skills are non-negotiable. Some skills can be learned with appropriate training and scaffolding, some are ingrained, and some are a mix of both. Opt to test for unteachable skills or aptitudes upfront and allow for some flexibility in the teachable ones.

Similarly, you may want to sort all skills into either skills that are integral to the role or skills that would be nice to have but are ultimately not necessary. Some soft skills in certain career fields would be nice to have, but a candidate may be missing them and still get their work done in a timely, productive manner. In the end, you can narrow down what will work best for your company. 

Optimize Your Job Postings

Once your company has made the transition to skills-based hiring, you can no longer rely on the job postings you have traditionally used for similar roles, many of which are likely to emphasize degrees of education or years of direct work experience. Instead, you’ll need to make it clear which skills you require, how you define these skills, and how you may evaluate candidates based on these skills.  

Be Open to Different Candidates and Their Experience Levels

When the talent acquisition world has relied on education and experience as a demarcation of talent for so long, it can be hard for hiring teams to change and adjust to the relatively free-wheeling world of skills-based hiring. However, you can miss out on a lot of excellent, well-matched talent by balking at a lack of experience, a lack of degree, or a completely different career history! Look for indications that candidates possess the skills they claim, whether that be by assessment, by portfolios, or something else, and be open-minded about hiring candidates who might not have the experiential background you’d expect. 

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