Skills-First Hiring
December 5, 2024
“Skills-first,” or “skills-based,” hiring is hiring based on the abilities of applicants to do the job, rather than the commonly required four-year college degree, which may or may not indicate actual skill level.
Skills-first hiring can be advantageous for a capable applicant without the requisite college degree who has gained competencies through, for example, their military experience, helping with a family business, pursuing a self-taught hobby, or participation in a training program while incarcerated. After all, what’s important are the knowledge and skills to do the job, not how those skills were acquired.
Employers benefit from skills-based hiring by gaining employees who are most likely to hit the ground running and who require less training. This goes for internal hires too. Employers often lose out when they don’t allow otherwise-qualified current employees looking to make a move within the organization (one which they’re already familiar with and loyal to) to do so because they don’t have a four-year degree.
The first step to successful skills-first hiring is to identify the essential skills needed to do the job.
The U.S. Department of Labor, which endorses and advocates for the use of skills-first hiring, suggests the use of the following four key questions to help identify necessary skills and prepare to weigh them (from essential core skills to “great-to-have” skills) in order to find the best person to hire:
- What is the purpose of the job? Define what a successful person in this job does for your organization each day, month, and year.
- What are all the skills someone needs to be successful in this job? Not just basic competencies, but how successful workers use those competencies.
- How important is each skill to success? Some skills help an individual excel in a job, but they may not be required (core) to doing it—which makes them great-to-have skills.
What skills can be learned on the job? Teachable on-the-job skills could include:
- Basic data entry and management
- Gaps in technical skills
- Minor business and operational strategies unique to your organization
Most federal government hiring has become skills-first. And organizations of all kinds, recognizing its benefits, have moved toward taking a skills-first approach as well. For optimal, on-target hiring, consider skills-first hiring for your organization.