​Skills-based vs role-based hiring

The hiring process for businesses is constantly evolving with new practices and priorities when looking for candidates. More businesses are taking the leap towards skills-based hiring to encourage a more diverse talent pool, with 54% of employers planning to make the change.

What is skills-based hiring?

Skills based hiring is the process of focusing on a candidates relevant skills, rather than their academic success in attempt to create wider opportunities in the workplace with more talent to choose from. This process is becoming favored for reasons that have been proven by research, such as 78% of candidates admitting to misrepresenting themselves in their job applications and interviews. Additionally, making this transition and carrying out skills assessments will contribute to solving the issue of having skills gaps at work, with two thirds of leaders thinking that their organization faces skills gaps.

What are the benefits?

Having a skills focused hiring process will improve the time-to-hire and will create a wider talent pool. Having an efficient hiring process will eliminate the common issue of there being a long time to hire problem and also will help with avoiding ‘mis-hiring.’ The aspect of having a wider talent pool is exciting as it is providing candidates with opportunities that previously might not of had access to. Avoiding this bias and focusing on the positives of having transferrable skills will also improve your employee retention rate as employees without college degrees tend to stay in their roles 34% longer than those with degrees.

What sort of skills are prioritised?

Cognitive skills, technological skills and social and emotional skills are of high importance for hiring managers, more specifically:

• Critical thinking and decision making

• Leadership and managing

• Data analysis

• Adaptability

• Initiative

These skills could be considered as fairly generic and not precise to a specific role, which people would generally assume would re-ignite the issue of ‘mis-hires’ and a longer time-to-hire. However, this is easily avoidable through removing unnecessary information from the job ads and creating an interview process that targets specific skills.

Improving job ads and targeting skills

Removing unnecessary information and requirements from job ads will erase the possibility of candidates not applying because they feel as though there are too many requirements that they don’t meet, they need to get the impression that you are open to considering transferrable skills.

Altering your interview technique to target specific skills will also be beneficial as conducting a structured interview with pre-planned, skill specific questions will allow you to establish the requirements you have to both yourself and the applicant. These questions can be created and altered based on your needs, and the job-seekers CV. This will decrease the chance of potentially hiring the wrong candidate due to promoting hiring for generic skills as having a structured interview will help you delve deeper. Incorporating your skills assessment during this stage would also be suitable for testing quick-thinking skills.

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