Transitioning to Skills Based Hiring

If you spend more than five minutes on LinkedIn or regularly read any HR or Talent Acquisition publications, you’ve probably heard 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 essential, 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 their skills.

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.  Organizations require HR leadership to champion these changes and a top-to-bottom buy-in from stakeholders for the adoption to be successful. Still, there is no chance for success without a clear strategy to accommodate these changes in your ATS and other recruitment tools.

How to add Skills to the mix

Deciding 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 hard part is figuring out what “Skills Based Hiring” means for your organization.  Job/Skill Hiring is not a binary; it’s more like a spectrum:

• On one end of the spectrum, you have an organization with a structure based on job titles. Your job titles have clearly defined roles based on strict professional/experience qualifications, and you’ve aligned all hiring to one of those. 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 of the spectrum, your organization has examined the skills it needs to succeed across all business areas, quantified them, and segmented them as necessary.  Every time the business grows or changes, or someone leaves or moves within the organization, the company evaluates how the skillset of its workers aligns with the needs of the company, and looks to add new people to cover any identified skill gaps.  In this model, the company assesses the prospective hire purely for the skills they bring, addresses any immediate shortfalls, and understands how they can contribute to long-term growth.

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 has moved towards the middle; organizations still value qualifications and the structure/hierarchy that traditional job roles provide, but understand 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 adopting skills-based hiring, and it is the hardest.  This adoption requires intervention and buy-in from senior leadership, HR, and Talent Acquisition, so that all hiring authorities understand the goals and buy into 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, as well as the benefits they will bring.  Velocity has experienced project professionals who can handle 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. Your ATS houses all the data about your organization’s skills and their use across the business.  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) to build out your workflows. Still, 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.