Attracting and keeping a skilled workforce is crucial to the success of any organisation. Yet many employers are struggling. However, there’s good news. By adopting skills-based hiring, you can start to address the challenge by focusing on the skills candidates bring to the table, rather than relying solely on their qualifications and past job titles. This approach can help you bridge the skills gap and find the talent needed to achieve long-term goals and objectives.
In this article, we explore the key benefits of skills-based hiring and offer practical advice on how to get started.
What is skills-based hiring?
Skills-based hiring shifts the focus away from traditional metrics like educational achievements or past employers assessing a candidate’s actual competencies and skills. This approach recognises that a candidate’s ability to excel in a role isn’t solely determined by their academic background or job history.
Instead, skills-based hiring evaluates candidates based on their technical skills, cognitive abilities, personality traits, and other soft skills crucial to success. By concentrating on these practical and personal attributes, skills-based hiring allows employers to find candidates who can meet the demands of the job, creating a more inclusive and effective recruitment process.
Benefits of skills-based hiring
As outlined above, skills-based hiring offers a transformative approach to the recruitment process by focusing on a candidate’s skills and competencies. Let’s break down the most important benefits.
1. Expand talent pools
A major benefit of skills-based hiring is that it opens up the talent pools available to employers. That’s because by focusing on specific skills and competencies rather than traditional criteria like degrees or job titles, you can extend your reach to a broader range of candidates, including:
– Self-taught professionals
– Career changers
– Those with non-traditional educational paths
Expanding your talent pool can also lead to a more diverse workforce. When you consider candidates based on skills, you’re more likely to hire people from varied cultures, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds.
2. Improve quality of hire
Skills-based hiring can improve the quality of hires by focusing on role-specific skills candidates need to excel in a role. This approach allows employers to find candidates who are more likely to hit the ground running and help drive improvements in organisational performance.
Furthermore, a skills-based approach to talent acquisition often involves assessments that evaluate a candidate’s practical abilities and problem-solving skills. This hiring method helps you distinguish between candidates who just look good on paper and those who can genuinely deliver. This helps employers by reducing the rate of unsuccessful hires and boosting overall productivity
3. Mitigate bias
Traditional hiring methods, which rely heavily on qualifications and past work experience, can inadvertently perpetuate biases in the recruitment process. Implementing skills-based hiring can help you mitigate these biases by focusing on what candidates can do rather than where they’ve been. This shift reduces bias related to factors like:
– Age
– Gender
– Race
– Socio-economic status
Skills-based hiring also promotes more inclusive hiring practices. By using objective assessments and structured interviews, you can ensure that all candidates are evaluated fairly and consistently. This approach helps you build a workforce based on merit and capability, not just pedigree.
4. Boost employee retention
Skills-based hiring can boost employee retention by ensuring a better fit between candidates and job roles. When employees possess the skills and competencies required for their positions, they’re more likely to succeed and feel satisfied in their work. This leads to lower turnover, as employees are less likely to seek other opportunities elsewhere.
In addition to this, employees hired through skills-based methods are more likely to feel valued and recognised for their unique abilities. This sense of recognition can lead to:
– Higher levels of engagement
– Increased commitment to the organisation
– Reduced future recruitment costs
– A more stable workforce
Getting started with a skills-based approach
As highlighted above, transitioning to a skills-based approach to talent acquisition can be transformative for employers. However, it’s important to consider that this requires careful planning and execution.
Let’s look at how you can get started with skills-based hiring.
Identify key skills and competencies: In traditional hiring processes, there is often an assumption that important skills and competencies will come as a result of enough prior experience. However, this can be misleading, as it overlooks the wide variety of skills that contribute to success in any given role.
As a result, the first step in moving to a skills-based approach is identifying the specific skills and competencies required for each role. While most employers have a general idea of what they’re looking for, it can be useful to formalise this into a structured framework. Consider three categories for skills:
– Hard Skills: Tangible skills like software proficiency, programming, and data analysis.
– Soft Skills: Interpersonal skills such as communication, teamwork, and adaptability.
– Cognitive Skills: Reasoning and problem-solving abilities, including numerical, verbal, and logical reasoning.
By outlining these categories, employers can begin to create benchmarks for evaluating candidates, laying the foundation for skills-based hiring in the process.
Find ways to measure these skills: After identifying the skills and competencies required for a role, the next stage is finding appropriate assessments that accurately measure them. Since skills vary in nature, you may need different types of assessments to evaluate candidates effectively.
Each of the skill types outlined in the previous section has a number of different assessment methods you can utilise. Let’s take a look at some of the most common:
– Hard Skills: Job knowledge tests, software skills tests, and work sample tests.
– Soft Skills: Personality questionnaires, behavioural assessments, and emotional intelligence tests.
– Cognitive Skills: Numerical, verbal, and logical reasoning tests.
Revise the interview process: While a skills-based approach relies on assessments, interviews remain crucial to the hiring process. To ensure that interviews align with a skills-based approach, consider adopting a structured interview process with consistent questions for each candidate. This approach provides consistent and fair results, reducing bias in the process.
This can involve using questions that focus on hypothetical scenarios instead of past experiences to avoid favouring candidates based on their experience alone. Furthermore, ensuring that interviewers are well-trained in conducting structured interviews can significantly improve the accuracy of your recruitment process.
Embracing the benefits of skills-based hiring
Adopting a skills-based hiring approach offers a host of benefits that can help transform your recruitment processes and overall workforce. By focusing on skills and competencies during hiring, you can look to expand your talent pools and improve the quality of hires while actively working to reduce bias and boost retention. Done right, the result is a team that is more capable, engaged, and better suited to helping your organisational meet its long-term goals and objectives.