Hiring candidates can be cumbersome and challenging. Companies often face difficulty finding the right talent for a specific role. Employers tussle between the two methods of recruitment: traditional degree-based or skills-based recruitment. Both strategies have their own sets of merits. However, the approach of skill-based hiring is gaining ground in the current business landscape because it offers a more lucrative way of recruitment.
As the job market is continuously evolving, businesses shift towards fairer and talent-based recruitment. Here, the employers focus on the skill sets of the candidates rather than their education and years of experience. Most of the businesses that embrace this method get the right fit for their projects because the traditional recruitment process overlooks the abilities, talents, and potential of the candidates. Instead, the age-old recruitment prioritizes too much on candidates' degrees and experience levels.
Skills-Based Recruitment Versus Traditional Recruitment
Most of the reputed businesses are shifting towards skills-based hiring, while others still rely on the traditional recruiting strategy. Let us compare the two strategies of recruitment to have a thorough knowledge of both the models.
The Concept of Traditional Hiring:
Many companies embraced the traditional hiring strategy over the years, but it is losing its popularity in the present market scenario. In this method, the hiring manager evaluates the candidates based on their resumes , interview performance, job titles, course certificates and educational qualifications. Their qualifications primarily include their educational degree, certificates, and the number of years they worked for a specific role or in an industry.
Primary features of traditional recruitment strategy:
Let us understand some of the main features of traditional recruitment.
- Prioritizes the resume : Candidates spend a whopping amount of time, even money, in designing a catchy resume.
- Hiring based on the degree and education of candidates: Candidates from premium universities and institutions have a better chance to be picked.
- Structured interview processes: Focuses more on stereotyped questions and discussions. This doesn’t comply with anything out of the box.
- Selection often depends on intuition: Candidates are often screened based on their previous experiences, educational qualifications and institutions.
Skills-based recruitment strategy:
In skill-based hiring, recruiters focus primarily on the candidate's competency and ability to perform specific tasks, rather than relying on their education and past job experience. Such an approach aims to seek those candidates who are fit to solve the practical issues facing the organization.
The candidates might possess the necessary skills for their roles from their past experience or from pursuing a course. Employers mostly embrace this strategy in technical areas like coding, data science, cyber security, etc. This also provides candidates with equal opportunity to prove their skill set.
Significant aspects of competency-based hiring:
- Emphasizes a specific skill: This provides an opportunity to candidates who are singularly focused or talented in specific skills.
- Performance-based: Candidates are judged based on their performance in some practical assignments during the selection process. This is effective in reducing future layoffs due to inefficiency or underperformance.
- Less priority on degrees or experience: While degrees and years of experience do count, they are considered a benchmark for eligibility. The actual selection process highly focuses on their efficiency in the required skill.
- Ability to learn further: This mode of hiring primarily concentrates on the candidate's consistency, capabilities to grow in the specific role, their ability to contribute to the company’s progress.
Why is skill-based hiring a game changer for companies?
The traditional hiring system is largely resume-oriented. This optimizes the requirement of having a well-developed resume, which becomes the entrance for good positions.
Talent-based hiring, on the contrary, can be a blessing in disguise for candidates who may not have been good academic performers. It neutralizes the chance where everyone has a fair opportunity to prove their worth. For instance, an efficient coder may not necessarily be a good communicator. Hence, it is unjust to trace his communication ability and overlook his performance on his coding skills.
Competency-based hiring opens the door for all those who have the necessary skills, thereby contributing to higher productivity and retention. Let us have a glance at the significance of this recruiting strategy in today’s business landscape.
- Healthy Environment:
It promotes a positive environment within the organization as it focuses primarily on the relevant skills and talents rather than on degrees or previous job roles.
- Reduces bias:
It solely practices hiring on skills and talents. So there is less chance of hiring on the grounds of unconscious bias related to education or previous experience.
- Improves job fit:
When employees fill the position relevant to their skills, they remain confident and deliver better performance and results.
- Unlocks the hidden talent:
As this strategy is not limited to selection based on resume and education, it brings before us a pool of talents that otherwise remain unseen in traditional candidate screening methods.
How is talent-based hiring beneficial for both the employees and the employer?
Recruitment based on hiring talents is a two-way win-win situation, where both parties evolve simultaneously.
- Better hiring approach:
Recruiters can hire better through this approach as it enables only the candidate possessing relevant skills for the job roles.
- Speeds up the hiring process:
Hiring for talents is a speedy process where candidates are given practical tasks or assignments that are relevant to their job roles. Candidates’ selection for the specific roles depends entirely on their performance in such assignments.
- Cost-effective hiring:
It often reduces hiring costs by streamlining the recruitment process. It focuses on skills rather than screening numerous resumes and interviewing every candidate.
- Rise in employee retention rate:
Hiring based on competency gives access to a huge pool of talents. As candidates are evaluated based on skills, they are perfectly fitted for their roles. This leads to greater job satisfaction and employee retention rates.
How can you implement skill-based hiring effectively for your organization?
While skill-based hiring can be lucrative, it requires certain strategies to make it effective.
- Identifying the relevant skills for the specific roles: Identify the necessary skills and competencies necessary for particular job roles. Such skills might include soft skills, problem-solving, or technical skills.
- Skill assessment tools and platforms: Tools related to evaluating online assignments, and work samples can help to measure a candidate's skills and abilities. Platforms like Microsoft’s Codility test help to evaluate a candidate's coding skills. It perfectly assesses the candidate’s problem-solving skills, algorithmic thinking, and coding proficiency. Another platform to assess candidates’ skills is Vervoe. It helps the recruiters and hiring managers to match the candidates’ skills with the job roles by offering them to answer some questions. Thus, these kinds of tools and platforms will help to select the best candidates for the respective roles.
- Focus on job descriptions: The job posting should clearly point out the skills necessary for the respective role. Employers can collaborate with team leaders to ensure that the job description manifests all the essential skills required for the posts. One of the common mistakes of the job description post is when you mention the required number of experiences for the post. Instead, the description can mention the required proficiency in particular skills.
- Blind recruitment software: Blind recruitment tools and software help to remove unconscious bias from the hiring process. Identities like gender, age, educational degree, culture, etc., create a first opinion about candidates, which is unfair for talent-based hiring. Blind recruitment tools remove such types of sensitive data from candidates' applications, thus enabling inclusive hiring practices.
- Training hiring manager: The company must educate the hiring manager and others involved in the recruitment process about the significance of competency-based hiring. Train the hiring managers about how to assess a candidate on the basis of the skills they possess, which should be relevant to the role.
- Track key hiring metrics: You can track some important metrics like employee performance, how long candidates stay in their roles, consistency and how long it takes to hire someone. You can also seek feedback from employees and team leaders about how the new hires are performing. This helps to improve the hiring process over time.
- Implementing technology: For screening candidates for their relevant skills, use ATS (Application Tracking Systems) or AI tools. Such tools simplify and speed up the recruitment process, thereby making it more efficient and valuable.
Top companies that hire for skills:
Some of the top companies and MNCs have already started to hire candidates for their skills.
Technology: Companies like Google, Apple, IBM, and Accenture are focusing more on skills while very little priority is given to the candidate’s educational degree. Google has recently launched its “Google Career Certificate program,” which offers various online courses to candidates and students. These courses are either free or paid in the fields of AI and machine learning, data science, cybersecurity and many more. Candidates can enroll in courses that are relevant to their industry. Although a candidate may not have the four-year degree certificate, such courses will make him ready for jobs.
BPO and customer service: Some of the companies in customer service focus on skills like problem-solving. They evaluate the skills of candidates by placing before them a real-world scenario or problem and test their ability to handle such issues.
Health care: In the health care sector like nursing, talent-based recruitment allows candidates to assess their clinical abilities and certifications rather than their educational background.
Skills-based hiring and the future of talent acquisition:
The rise of skill-based hiring will grow further in the future as there is a demand for specific skills in the labor market. It helps businesses to put them forward in the competition because such recruitment enables candidates to grow and excel rapidly in their job roles. Most industries, especially the IT sector, have already embraced this model of recruitment for its numerous benefits.
Moreover, this strategy opens up several paths for candidates to shine in their chosen careers, whether they possess a college degree or not. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to attract and retain top talent for your company, ensuring a fairer system of candidate selection, thereby promoting diversity and inclusivity.
Do you want to modify your recruitment strategy and adopt skills-based hiring? Get in touch with us to experience a smooth and effective hiring based on talent.
