As a job seeker, you may be familiar with the rise of skills-based hiring. But what does this recruitment term mean, and, more importantly, what impact does it have on a prospective candidate’s outlook on today’s employment marketplace?
Skills-based hiring is the increasingly powerful practice of screening job candidates for specific competencies rather than focusing on other factors, such as past degrees, job titles or years of experience. In the wake of the global pandemic and the resulting Great Resignation, organizations have reassessed these limiting hiring practices to help fill skills gaps, build more innovative and resilient teams and create more equitable workplaces.
How Skills-Based Hiring Benefits Both Employers and Employees
Shifting to a skills-focused approach is a viable solution to an evolving and pervasive workforce dilemma — more demand for talent than available supply. This progressive and proactive approach to recruitment helps hiring managers focus on what candidates know how to do, not where they learned it. It values all relevant skills for the role at hand, whether they were acquired in the classroom, on the job or on one’s own.
In the past few years, LinkedIn has seen a more than 20% increase in job postings highlighting skills and responsibilities in place of qualifications and requirements in the U.S. Additionally, LinkedIn research has found that talent pools expand an average of 10x when employing a skills-first approach.
Skills-based hiring allows organizations to cast a wider net in their talent acquisition initiatives, removing the barrier of entry for more individuals who can fill gaps in competencies and provide more agile solutions to company-wide needs in today’s highly competitive landscape, regardless of an employee’s past work or school experience.
To create truly equitable organizations, this development in sourcing talent is significant. Evaluating new hires based on their skill sets instead of their school history or work experience can help level the playing field and make workplaces exponentially more inclusive.
A skills-based approach to hiring advances these objectives by:
- Making it easier for those who do not have traditional educational and/or employment backgrounds to demonstrate that they have the skills to compete for jobs, thereby expanding pools of potential applicants and removing barriers for underrepresented communities
- Helping hiring managers accurately assess a candidate’s knowledge, skills and abilities by relying more on professionally developed competency-based assessments and less on occupational experience
- Supporting prospective applicants as they shift between sectors, utilizing transferrable skills
- Assisting current employees as they chart a professional development journey that keeps them in jobs and growing over their careers
Finally, a skills-based hiring approach improves applicant and manager satisfaction. Applicants have a clearer understanding of what the job requirements are and how their skills align to them. Hiring managers are more satisfied with the quality of the candidates they are considering for positions, streamlining a successful job-sourcing experience for all.
What Skills Are Valued Most in Today’s Workplaces?
As technology and continual disruption transform the global economy, rapid shifts are also changing the skills necessary for success in jobs more quickly than ever before.
Job candidates need to consider the difference between hard skills and soft skills — hard (or “technical”) skills refer to training and expertise, i.e., finance and accounting, engineering, sales, IT and the like. However, as we’ve covered here before, soft skills such as leadership, communication and teamwork are increasingly what organizations are looking for in their employees, which is good news for anyone looking to change jobs or careers.
The Future of Jobs Report 2023 by the World Economic Forum identified analytical thinking and creative thinking as the most important skills for workers this year and beyond. These cognitive skills recognize the growing importance of workers’ abilities to adapt to disrupted workplaces and stay productive and engaged in the face of constant change.
Soft skills such as problem solving, analytical thinking and adaptability are cross functional, empowering candidates with a strong mastery of these capabilities to apply them in a wide range of industries and job functions.
The Future of Talent Attraction, Development and Retention
Workers often don’t realize that the skills they have for one job can be easily transferred to another — nor do employers.
To win today’s raging talent wars, forward-thinking organizations have adopted a new approach: Skills-based hiring enables companies to build their teams around the competencies that are needed to ideate, innovate and inspire. The result is more opportunities for job seekers and stronger, more diverse teams for organizations.
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