Skills-Based Hiring Series: Preparation

What do you need to consider to prepare for skills-based hiring?

In my last post on skills-based hiring, I presented an overview of the skills-based hiring and advancement process. I’ll dig into each aspect of that in coming posts but before doing so, let’s look at preparing for skills-based hiring.

If you are at the stage of thinking about implementing skills-based hiring, there are some things to consider before you even start.

Deliver in-house or outsource?

Think about the resources you will need to deliver the process.

Will you develop and administer skills-based hiring entirely in-house or will you outsource some or all aspects of it?

Conducting the entire process with in-house resources will require members of your hiring team to be skilled in:

• Identifying and defining the skills you need

• Identifying how you want candidates to demonstrate their skills

• Testing for skills

• Reviewing evidence of skills

• Predicting job success using skills-based hiring methods

If you outsource some or all aspects of the process, consider:

• Your budget

• Can you deliver some aspects in-house and only outsource certain aspects?

• How you will evaluate vendors

Skills validation: push, pull or AI?

Think about the approach you will take to verify candidates’ skills.

How will you validate the skills of candidates and make sure they can do what they say they can?

Broadly speaking, there are two main and an emerging approach currently being used to deliver skills-based hiring:

1. Recruiter centric, where skills tests are controlled and administered by a recruiter

2. Job-seeker centric, where job-seekers submit skills credentials they control

3. An emerging approach where AI is used to trawl professional profiles and gather evidence of skills

One approach is not better than another and you do not need to choose one over another - in fact they overlap and can be mixed together. Thinking of them separately in terms of implementation is helpful, however, because they each have different implications.

When deciding how you will approach skills-based hiring, consider how you will validate the skills of candidates:

• Will you “push” your own created and administered skills tests?

• Will you “pull” evidence towards you, by asking job-seekers to submit skills credentials?

• Could you use AI to identify a pool of candidates with validated skills?

Implementation implications

How you approach skills-based hiring has different implications in terms of:

• Budget

• Resourcing

• Skills requirements

• Systems

• Operations

Think about if you:

• Can deliver in-house

• Need to outsource

• Could mix in-house and outsourced delivery

Consider:

• Your context

• What approach would work best for you

• How you could get started and then scale

Skills-based hiring series

This is part of a series of posts exploring skills-based hiring, with the aim of answering:

• Does skills-based hiring take more time than traditional recruitment practices?

And, whether it does or not,

• Is skills-based hiring worth the investment of time and changes required to make it work?