Hiring Beyond the Resume: The Case for Skills-Based Hiring
Even when done well, there’s a lot of uncertainty in hiring.
You can scan every resume for keywords; verify years of experience and degrees; you can do culture fit interviews, skills testing, behavioural interviews; you can do all of that, and still come out with a bad hire.
Why?
Because that resume you screened isn’t the person who’s going to do the job—nor is the voice you heard in the interview, or the slide deck that was made for your workplace assignment.
At the end of the day, you are hiring a person, not a set of qualifications and interview notes. And that’s why sometimes, despite our best efforts, hires don’t work out the way we want them to.
And while it might not be possible to take the guesswork out of hiring entirely, it is possible to make better guesses. That’s why today, more and more companies are employing Skills-Based Hiring (SBH) as part of their process.
Want to learn more? Read on!
Skills vs credential-based hiring
Credential-based hiring is pretty straightforward—if you’ve ever hired a human on planet earth, you’re probably familiar with the process.
Candidates are screened and hired on the basis of their qualifications on paper:
- Their degrees and certifications
- The quality of schools they attended
- Their years of professional experience
- The reputation of previous employers
- Etc.
The real gambit in credential-based hiring is whether a candidate’s paper skills are representative of their actual skills—even if you can verify they went to great School X and worked at amazing company Y, there’s no guarantee those qualifications are going to translate into meaningful deliverables at your company.
That’s because credentials are an estimate—an educated guess that if a person has done X,Y and Z in the past, they will be able to do A and B in the future.
If you add in some behavioural/culture fit interviewing and some workplace testing or assignments, there’s a good chance that you’re making a decent hire.
But this system is far from perfect. Most hires are judged by similar criteria today, and we still see 30% of hires not making it through the first 90 days—despite the majority of those people being qualified for their jobs (on paper).
Skills-based hiring offers an alternative way of assessing candidates, where instead of using credentials to predict someone’s ability to do a job, you test their ability to do the job directly.
With this method, candidates are given real, practical workplace projects or scenarios and asked to provide solutions and deliverables—exactly what they would be doing on the job.
So rather than asking someone how they would structure a curriculum, you ask them to film themselves teaching a class you’ve designed; rather than asking them how they would fix a bug in a computer program, you give them the code and watch how they do it.
Why is SBH getting popular now?
There’s two factors driving the popularity of SBH today:
- Large amounts of hard to fill technical roles
- Advances in automation
- Potential for fraud
First—we all know that AI is changing things in tech, but it’s also having a huge impact on tech hiring.
With new technologies advancing so quickly, it can take a long time for the candidate pool to learn those skills and keep up with demand. Combine that with a remote first workplace where competition for workers is extremely high, and it becomes really hard to find someone with the perfect credentials, because so few people have them—and the ones that do are in high demand, and command high salaries.
Second—automation has made skills testing easier, as we now have systems that can automate much of the process, which means recruiters don’t need to spend hours and hours going through assignments
Instead, we can use standard, measurable tests for every applicant, like the kind Raise’s SkillsProject uses—each applicant completes the same assignment and receives a score based on custom workplace scenarios. Then they record an explanation of their solution (to prevent fraud and technical assistance). All hiring managers have to do is review the highest performing candidates, saving time and effort.
The best way to adapt to that situation is to focus on skills rather than the qualifications—by hiring someone who can do the job, regardless of their degrees and work experience, you open up a new and larger candidate pool.
While every field is different, skills based hiring increases talent pools by 9% according to LinkedIn’s Skills First Report; it can also increase the tenure of hires by 9%.
Third—with the rise of generative AI, candidate fraud is on the rise. Skills-based testing is an essential tool in preventing and detecting candidate fraud.
Testing and Validation
The most, most, most important part of SBH is the skills test—it needs to be:
- representative of the work candidates will be doing
- measurable
- resistant to outside assistance (such as AI)
Balancing those priorities can be tricky, which is why it can be time-consuming to make custom tests for new roles. But when done right, a validated job test gives you an exceptionally accurate view of how a candidate will perform in the work environment—no guesswork involved!
That said, SBH is most effective when measuring a very specific set of technical skills—something that can be demonstrated and recorded.
In other words, if you’re hiring a generalist, or someone who needs to learn a lot on the job, adapting to new tasks and problems as they arise, skills-based hiring will be difficult to use effectively.
Removing Barriers
Another big upside of skills-based hiring is its ability to address bias in recruitment.
Even if your recruitment process is unbiased, credential-based hiring privileges people who have the social and economic advantages required to complete post-secondary education. This leaves a group of people who, despite having the skills and work experience to do the job, are excluded from candidate pools because they don’t have the right degree from the right college.
SBH levels the playing field, by making sure that the ability to do the job is the real priority.
What it doesn’t do
There are lots of thing that can go wrong with a hire—candidates don’t like the commute, they don’t get along with the manager, they find another job that pays more.
Skills based hiring can’t fix any of that. You still need to make sure the culture and work environment is a fit.
But the upside of SBH is that both you and the candidate know what’s involved in doing the job on day one. That means they’re more likely to be satisfied with the work, and more likely to stay on longer because there are fewer surprises about the job and the expectations.
Candidate experience is also a consideration in SBH. Typically, you are asking more time and effort from a candidate. This can reduce your total volume of applicants, but this can actually be a good thing, because those without the necessary qualifications are more likely to drop off early.
Putting it all together
Different versions of skills-based hiring have been on the rise for years. With new advances in technology, there are more accurate and powerful tools available than ever—tools that can help you screen and qualify dozens of candidates quickly and accurately.
Want to get started on your skills-based hiring journey? Check out SkillsProject, Raise’s skills-based IT Hiring platform—it can open a whole new group of qualified candidates for your tough-to-fill IT roles.
