How Skills-Based Hiring Can Transform Your Organization

Executive Search Consultant

With global economy undergoing a massive change, skill based hiring is coming on the forefront. Gone are days when people used to get jobs on the basis of their education and degrees.

In modern day workplaces what is most important is what skills do they have, what talent do they have, what they can bring on the table.

We agree that there is lots of talent out there that can excel at a particular job, but are being hindered to meet their fate just because someone educated from a nice college comes and takes that place, based purely on their educational background. Things need to take a turn now.

How does it work?

Skill based hiring takes both soft skills and hard skills into consideration, and eliminates the chances of a candidate getting left out just because of their background, which is the traditional way of hiring. Organizations of modern day workplaces enable skill based hiring, through assessment of skills of the candidates before they start their job.

This could be easily done by giving candidates some assignment, or make them take part in some hackathon in case of Tech hiring. Based on their knowledge and performance in skill assessment the job offers could be made henceforth.

How does it differ from traditional hiring process?

Traditionally the hiring process includes the screening of the candidates by analyzing their resume. IT purely depends on what candidate has mentioned in their resume as their past experience. IT depends on what education they have had, which eventually makes a base of their merit to do the job.

But the question is, if this method is right. Does having an educational degree vets that a candidate will be able to perform all the job duties, no it can never do that. There could also be instances where the candidates have juts exaggerated their experience. IN such a case how would a traditional HR recruiter confirm if the candidate is apt for the role? This is where skill based hiring comes in.

Why is Skill Based Hiring penetrating in the Recruitment world?

The best way to fill the talent gap is to hire the best talent available in the market, and all the best talented people are skilled. This is one of the reasons why skill based hiring is coming on the forefront.

manufacturing-skills-gap — In manufacturing, a rising skills gap could leave 2.4 million positions unfilled, according to Brookings

Another reason why skill based hiring is taking the recruitment world by storm is, that HR recruiters actually get to assess the skills of the candidates before hiring, which is a great boon for Recruitment Industry. They actually will not have to rely on their past experience to make a well balanced decision while hiring a candidate, as the assessment of the candidate will speak for itself.

What are the benefits of Skill based hiring?

The foremost benefit is that it reduces the recruitment cost, by enabling the recruiters to hire the right talent in the first time. This reduces the chances of organization making a bad hire which doesn’t lasts long due to performance related issues.

Every organization is unique, and so are the challenges it poses to its employees. Hence assessment of skills is a great way of knowing how far the candidate will go in journey of the organization. BY making assessment to judge the technical skills of the candidates, the emotional intelligence of the candidate, and behavioral attributes of the candidates, it makes it easy for the recruiter to see if the candidate aligns well with the job requirements and the culture of the organization, even before the joining of the candidate. It is similar to a demo of the candidate.
By removing the conventional bias such as education and flashy job titles of the past, skill based hiring also ensures that the best talent comes on board irrespective of their background. With such a hiring process in place, often people from under represented background find the way to jobs at reputed organizations, which otherwise would not be possible because of their background. So in short, Skill based hiring also serves the purpose of bringing diversity on board the organization.

Skill based hiring also has an underlying advantage of improving retention rates of the candidates. Yes people that get an opportunity despite of their un recognized educational background, will treat the jobs as a life time opportunity and not only will they do their best and cling on to it. Recruiters have found that people with a four year degree are more likely to leave a job before than a person who doesn’t has a proper educational background, and are at the same position as them.

Skill based hiring also enable the HR recruiters to hire at scale. Imagine the pain of going through thousand of resumes, and then imagine the recruiter to be able to shortlist candidates just on the basis of the score of their psychometric test. Obviously the latter one sounds more relieving.

Better skills on board

Skill based hiring not only enables the organization to bring in the most skilled person on board, but it also activates the practice of life long learning. To be able to thrive in an organization that now works with skills and not educational jargons, motivates the workforce to actually keep skilling themselves, and keep re skilling themselves. This small practice changes the entire environment of the organization.
It is not just the employees, but by choosing the skill based workforce, the organizations also volunteer themselves for the practice of skilling up and re skilling. By working in such organization you can expect learning allowances, and regular training programs. Skilled based hiring process brings in the culture of learning to the organization.

As per LinkedIn around 97% of the employees in top organizations across the world want to continue their learning and up skilling while on the job. Certainly Skill based hiring is ramping up the change how talent should be acquired by organizations, and is also adding value to the organizations through its process. But on ground it has many more miles to go.