What is Skills Based Hiring?
If you spend more than five minutes on LinkedIN or regularly read any HR or Talent Acquisition publications, you’ve probably come across stories and headlines about “Skills Based Hiring”. Every HR guru, magazine, consultancy, and vendor has put out articles on how it works, why it’s important, and how to do it (from an HR perspective). Briefly; Skills Based Hiring is a methodology that focuses on candidate skills instead of “qualifications” like work history, education, degrees, etc. Usually employed from entry-level to junior management positions, it allows organizations to move away from hiring candidates based on paper attributes and focus more on their actual ability to do the job, based on the skills they present.
I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds of how Skills Based Hiring works at an organizational level or what the benefits are (Boston Consulting Group published a very detailed analysis here), instead I want to focus on how Velocity can help you to leverage your talent acquisition technology to adopt a successful Skills Based Hiring methodology. To do it properly requires buy-in from your entire organization, and change must be championed from the top of the HR pyramid, but without a clear strategy to accommodate these changes in your ATS and other recruitment tools there is no chance for success.
How to add Skills to the mix
Making the decision to adopt a skills-based hiring workflow is the easy part. Truthfully, the configuration probably won’t be that difficult either- more on that later. The really hard part, is figuring out what “Skills Based Hiring” means for your organization specifically. Job/Skill Hiring is not a binary, it’s more like a spectrum:
- On one end you have organization that has a structure based on job titles, those titles have clearly defined roles based on strict professional/experience qualifications, and all hiring is aligned to one of those qualifications. The prospective hire will be assessed purely for their suitability for the role, entirely on their work history and paper qualifications.
- On the other end your organization has examined the skills it needs to be successful across all areas of the business, and then quantified those skills and segmented them as necessary. Every time the business grows or changes, or someone leaves or moves within the organization, the business evaluates how the skillset of its workers aligns with the needs of the business, and looks to add new people to cover any identified skill gaps. The prospective hire will be assessed purely for the skills they bring, address any immediate shortfalls, and how they can contribute to growth long term.
Almost all businesses sit somewhere between these two ends of this spectrum; historically a lot further towards the former than the latter. In recent years, the needle is starting to move more towards the middle; organizations still value qualifications and the structure/hierarchy that traditional job roles provide, but are understanding that incorporating skills into that structure is beneficial for growth and stability. Figuring out where your organization sits in this spectrum is the first step in the process of adopting skills, and is definitely the hardest. This requires intervention and buy-in from senior leadership, HR, Talent Acquisition, so that all hiring authorities understand the goals and buy in to the changes. Essential in getting this is an experienced project team that can coordinate, document, and explain the strategic, design, implementation, and operational changes that are required, and the benefits they will bring. Velocity has experienced project professionals that can stickhandle those conversations.
The role of your ATS
At its most basic level, your ATS is designed to capture all of your recruitment data; jobs, candidates, applications, and hires. It is the centerpiece, and often the only piece, of an organization’s Talent Acquisition technology. As such, your ATS will be central to any work you do to adopt a skills-based hiring methodology. As the repository of your TA data and the home of your TA process, it must house all of the data about your organizations skills, and how they are used across the process. Some ATS will have the functionality to support this out of the box, others will have standard customization functionality that will allow you to build this out relatively easily, and some may require you to get a bit creative (perhaps with the help of some clever Consultants) in order to build out your workflows; but ultimately the ATS is where it will need to sit, so your TA team and the technology people that support them should be involved in the process from day one. Velocity can help you here: our multi-disciplinary team includes experts who have been working with these systems for their entire careers, as well as recruitment and HR professionals who understand the hiring process backwards and forwards, and can translate your Skills Based Hiring needs into configurable requirements for almost any ATS.
