Skills-based hiring: why traditional hiring methods don’t work anymore

Skills-based hiring is a new buzzword in the HR field. Does this mean that skills-based hiring will change the way we hire people forever? Are there any tangible benefits for businesses and employees? Let’s find out in our new blog post.

The concept of skills-based hiring is straightforward. It’s a hiring approach that concentrates on a candidate’s practical skills and performance rather than formal qualifications.

Feel the difference: HR managers would focus on fitting a candidate to a job profile in the past. They would sift candidates through prerequisites like education degrees, pedigree, personal referrals, and other employer requirements. In the end, the candidates that passed the most checkboxes made it to the interview and got an offer.

The COVID-19 pandemic put things in perspective. For example, in May 2020, 73% of the US domestic workers experienced negative impacts like reducing working hours or complete job loss. Domestic workers weren’t the only category of workers that were left behind. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated that the pandemic would leave more than 140 million people without their jobs.

Therefore, the pandemic became a turning point in employee upskilling and reskilling. In 2020, LinkedIn launched the Career Explorer tool to help dismissed workers find possible career transitions based on their skills. The tool mapped the available candidate’s skills and detected extra skills candidates could learn to switch their occupations.

It turned out that workers and employers wouldn’t realize their upskilling opportunities. A vivid example of workers with a great upskilling potential included food workers. Waiters, hostesses, and other workers involved in the food industry demonstrated up to 71% similar skills to customer service specialists.

That’s a win-win situation for both employers and potential employees. For example, employers could quickly fill in positions and save costs on training and onboarding. Employees, in their turn, could seamlessly transfer to new positions without losing their income.

That’s the essence of skills-based hiring. This approach focuses on hiring people for their actual skillset, not their past careers, working history, and track records.

Does it mean the revolution in degree-based hiring? Not really. We must admit that many job roles still require formal certifications, education degrees, and considerable experience. Therefore, skills-based hiring is a perfect strategy for low- and middle-skill jobs.

The following section will touch upon the tangible benefits of skills-based hiring for employers and workers.

41% of surveyed HR managers admit that entry-level positions are among the most challenging vacancies to fill since candidates often lack four-year college degrees or relevant working experience.

Businesses are playing themselves to a corner by requiring four-your college degrees. The reality is that recent college graduates ask for higher salaries to cover their education expenses and investments and perform on the same level as their colleagues without college degrees.

Thus, it makes sense to refuse a traditional linear hiring approach and widen the talent pool with a matching skill set and great reskilling and upskilling potential.

According to the HRForecast data, the average time-to-hire in Germany is 70 days. One of the reasons why businesses can’t fill in positions faster is that they review skills at the latter stages of screening interviews. Thus, they miss out on the vast pool of candidates, focusing on college degrees and years of experience instead of actual competencies.

Therefore, it makes sense for organizations to technically lower their entry bar by accepting candidates without formal education degrees and pedigree in the first place. This strategy helps employers tap into a wider talent pool and fill in the positions faster.

A bachelor’s or master’s degree doesn’t always guarantee that candidates received skills-based education and enough competencies to get the job done. By addressing the skills offhand, employers can save their costs on training and employee onboarding in the long term.

According to LinkedIn research, candidates without four-year college degrees stay with companies 34% longer than their peers with degrees. One of the contributing factors to higher retention rates is the candidate’s engagement and readiness to give back.

Skills-based hiring also helps businesses get a more diverse, inclusive workforce – like veterans or people with disabilities – on board. For instance, 62% of the American population over 25 years old don’t possess a college degree. Having this requirement in your job posting puts off a considerable part of minorities and vice versa. You can open these opportunities by focusing on skills, not degrees.

Startups never launch their products without hypothesis testing with real users. You don’t need to redefine your whole recruitment and hiring process either. Start with vacancies with the highest time-to-hire and turnover rates. Thus, you can find the root cause (like skills gap) and test a new hiring approach.

Jobs descriptions are a front door of a hiring process. HR experts recommend rewriting your job descriptions in a way that helps candidates focus on the merits, competencies, and skills.

According to LinkedIn, job descriptions that highlight responsibilities instead of formal requirements get 14% more incoming CVs per view. Thus, replace the “Requirements” block with “Responsibilities” to indicate the actual tasks a candidate will face in their job.

To specify your requirements, better concentrate on the results you want to see. For example, highlight quantitive KPIs for a job role or actionable results you want to get from candidates.

It doesn’t sound surprising, does it? Once you’ve decided to step on the skills-based hiring track, leverage techniques like skills-based assessments and coding tests to elicit candidate’s practical soft and hard skills. Step away from the candidate’s education, working experience, and testimonials. The idea of skills-based hiring is to check the current job-related skills without too much weeding out candidates because of their irrelevant work background or lack of it.