Beyond the resume: skill-based hiring for the modern workforce

Skill-based hiring is changing the recruitment landscape. The changes are sweeping, swift and are here to stay.

This really means that the humble, ubiquitous resume must reinvent itself in a skill-based hiring market. In other words, you just can’t have a good-looking, updated resume and expect to land a job that you like. Recruiters want to know more about your skills, how you acquired them and how you are capable of delivering high performance using those skills.

Enter skill-based hiring

Conventionally, resumes have highlighted three significant aspects of an individual. These are their qualifications, job titles that they have had and the work experience gained at these jobs.

But what about the candidate’s skills? Their technical and soft skills – both? These skills also make up a candidate’s competencies. What about them? Why are they not evaluated? Well, they are not evaluated immediately because they are simply not evident in the candidate’s resume.

Consider this scenario: A candidate holds a master’s degree in computer science, has held various positions in the marketing department of several IT majors and has an overall work experience of 15 years. This candidate is an expert in digital and social media marketing. They have run several successful campaigns for the companies they have worked for. This candidate is also an excellent communicator, relationship builder and negotiator. Their competency is in conceiving and executing online campaigns for IT brands. But their skills are not immediately evident in their resume. The head of marketing at an IT company recruiting this candidate will never quite know this candidate’s worth by just looking at their resume.

This is where skill-based hiring acts as a value creator. It helps the recruiter know of a candidate’s skills immediately, even as the recruitment process begins. And it helps the candidate showcase their skills adeptly at an early stage.

The benefits of skill-based hiring

A survey conducted by LinkedIn in 2022 found out that 72% of the respondents, mostly recruiters and talent managers, believe that skill-based hiring is gaining a lot of acceptance in the job market. They expect this preference to peak by 2030.

There are a few important reasons why skill-based hiring will be the new norm.

Immediate and unbiased assessment: Through practical tests of a candidate’s skills, the recruiter gets a quick and in-depth overview of the candidate’s competency. This helps with instantly evaluating the candidate’s fit with the role.

Inclusive: Not all skilled candidates come with great qualifications or remarkable work experience. When a candidate is selected based on skills, the company manages to bring on board diverse talent – powerfully skilled and competent. Therefore, inclusivity will spur and deliver high performance. A recent study by a leading management publication found that companies practicing skill-based hiring saw gender diversity go up by over 40% and ethnic diversity go up by close to 35%.

Improved efficiency: When potential candidates are evaluated on skills, the time to hire them drops dramatically. This improves the efficiency of the hiring process. Companies have reported a 30% saving on time when they have chosen to do skill-based hiring.

Guarantees high performance: When people with specific skill sets come on board, a team can be more sure of achieving its performance goals. Which is, in other words, skill-based hiring helps predict high performance very sharply.

Implementing skill-based hiring

Recruiters have to learn to be creative with devising their own skill-based hiring methods. There is no one way of doing it.

A company must understand what kind of skills it needs on board to achieve its business results. Then it must set out to look for talent that have those skills. This is done through a combination of multiple avenues:

•   Practical tests: Both technical (subject-based) and psychometric tests are available to help assess a candidate’s skills.
•   Situation-based tests: These are administered to evaluate a candidate’s ability to showcase how they will employ their skills in a given business situation. Some companies may even use a real-life problem situation and ask the candidate to solve it. These tests help with understanding the candidate’s critical thinking, problem-solving and creative skills.
•   Collaboration tests: Sometimes, a company may place the candidate along with other candidates or in a functional team to see how the candidate fares in a group environment. Specifically, they are assessed on how they communicate, lead, think and deliver in a collaborative context.

Conclusion

The focus of skill-based hiring is three-fold:

•   Hiring right.
•   Hiring quick.
•   Hiring for high performance.

In an ever-changing, highly competitive world, companies do not want to lose time and opportunity by making recruitment errors. It is true that some of the most experienced and qualified professionals may not always have the right skills that a role may require. Also, some highly skilled people may not have too much work experience or academic proficiency to showcase. Therefore, skill-based hiring is the only way in which companies can move faster to bring the best available talent on board. Resultantly, this is also the only way a company can stay competitive and focused on high performance.  

For the candidate too, the days of presenting a conventional resume are clearly over. What a candidate may want to do instead is for their resume to also talk about:

•   What is the unique set of skills that they bring to the table?
•   How did they acquire these skills?
•   What have they delivered for other employers with these skills?
•   What they can potentially deliver for their new employer with these skills.

Any resume with this kind of a ‘skills showcase’ will be a recruiter’s top pick. Because it speaks the language of skill-based hiring. And it addresses a critical need for a company that is hiring: Getting skilled people on board who can hit the ground running and deliver high performance.