The Winds of Change

In this current job market, there are often hundreds or even thousands of applicants for a single job vacancy. At other times, there may be only a few applicants for a time-critical vacancy. Regardless of the volume, there is always room for improvement in processes which generate quality candidates for open vacancies. One of the improvements that can be made is through implementing skills-based hiring. This type of hiring prioritizes an applicant's skills and experiences over traditional resumes and cover letters . When implemented, skills-based hiring allows you to source better quality candidates for your roles. 

The Evolution of Online Recruitment

Since the early 2000s, countless online recruitment platforms have emerged offering companies the ability to promote vacancies and recruit job seekers. These platforms have also allowed companies to promote their vacancies to targeted markets – offering a much wider applicant pool to grow their businesses.

From an applicant perspective, these platforms have enabled job seekers to cast a wide net and apply for as many vacancies as they can find – every day. In one week, a motivated job seeker can apply for hundreds of jobs. It does not matter if they are qualified or not – in their mind, it's just a matter of time before they are likely to receive a positive response and interview.

Limitations of Traditional Hiring Methods

Most online recruiting platforms facilitate the traditional way of recruiting where a job description is created (or recycled) and posted on a company's website, 3rd party job sites, and possibly across a few social media channels. This leads to countless hours spent sifting through resumes, applications, accreditations, certifications all before conducting interviews, while checking references and selecting the right candidates for a job vacancy.

The Skills-Based Hiring Advantage

Skills-based hiring changes the game dramatically by reducing effort across the whole process — and applying focus only where it is needed. Instead of needing a resume/CV to evaluate an applicant's work history, experiences and education – or scanning for keywords and search terms that match a job description, skills-based hiring focuses on an applicant's skills and abilities required for the job, the team they will be working with and the company's culture.

 Benefits of Skills-Based Hiring

By re-focusing selection and hiring criteria on skills, businesses benefit from the following:

1. A more diverse and qualified candidate pool

Skills-based hiring allows people from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences to be seen, because of their skills – and not to be prejudged by arbitrary requirements such as, the lack of name recognition in an employer, an educational institute or other requirements.

2. Objectivity when evaluating applications

Skills-based hiring uses scenarios, assessments, simulations and other objective measures to assess applicants – which effectively removes personal biases.

3. Faster and greater efficiency in qualifying applicants

Skills-based hiring allows applicants to demonstrate both the depth and breadth of their skills directly, resulting in saving time and resources.

4. Improved employee retention and business performance

With hiring based on skills that are most relevant to the job, there is more likelihood of getting a great fit. That can lead to higher employee retention rates, as well as increased productivity and profitability through new hire satisfaction rates.

5. Adaptable and integrates with ongoing professional development and with performance management

Skills-based hiring is flexible, allowing companies to identify the specific skills and abilities that are most important for a particular job and the company's "ways of working".

Talent Ocean: A Skills-Based Hiring Platform  

We’ve established just how effective skills-based hiring is to both hiring teams and candidates. To recruiters and hiring managers, the next step is to implement  skills-based hiring processes. Seeing the need for this solution across industries, we created a platform to better connect recruiters with professionals using a skills-based approach.

On Talent Ocean, professionals have access to create their Story Page, a page that tells the story of their skills, experiences and qualifications with options to include their resume and other media as part of their page. Professionals have the option of taking Skills Assessments that vary in topic to showcase their industry knowledge.

Recruiters have the capability to post roles on Talent Ocean and choose required or optional Skills Assessments for each role. They are also able to browse Story Pages to view potential candidates for the roles they are hiring for. You can discover more about TalentOcean here

Conclusion

Skills-based hiring may not be right for every company but it's worth considering to attract and retain the top talent on the market today. Once skills-based hiring processes and methods are in place, there will be time savings for both the effort and resources required. This also not only results in cost reductions in assessment and selection processing but also results in an exponential increase in the quality of a new hire.

Learn More

Take a look at our Study Guides for: Orchestrating your Organization | Nurturing your Talent | Managing your Employees | Defining Business Goals | Distributing Business Goals | Knowledge Transfer and Attrition