Work smarter, not harder: how half a dozen skills-based hiring experts are redefining the future of TA
Arctic Shores
Helping disruptive TA leaders navigate a new era of recruitment with task-based assessments
Over the past month, we've spoken to voices from across the TAD community about how they’ve gone about building skills-led organisations. So this week, we’re bringing you lessons fresh from the front line –– shared by the likes of Recruiting Brainfood’s Hung Lee , ex-Travelex Head of TA Dominic Joyce , former global TA leader at VMware Andrea Marston , Institute of Student Employers Chief Executive Stephen Isherwood , John Sisk’s Head of Talent Iain Lindsay MSc FCIPD , and Molson Coors Head of TA EMEA and APAC Joe Sidley .
The main theme? Keep skills-based hiring simple. Let’s dive in.
1. Prioritise evaluating candidates' ability to acquire new skills
Skills-based hiring has got a bad rep recently –– with some people arguing it’s simply just LinkedIn hype.
But our disruptors shared that skills-based hiring is more than just the flavour of the month and that it can –– when executed well –– help us to solve skills shortages, manage increasing volumes of AI-enabled candidates, and give us far more accurate insight into candidate potential than experience-centric hiring methods.
So why the bad reputation? The reality is most companies (and vendors) are thinking about skills-based hiring the wrong way –– adding layers of complexity with extensive, expensive skills taxonomies, looking for candidates with exact match hard skills that are in short supply (exacerbating existing skills crises), and only sifting on hard skills that will inevitably date quickly –– with no eye on a candidate’s ability to refresh and acquire new skills in the future.
That’s before we even mention the fact that traditional recruitment methods like CV-based sifting create a paper ceiling.
🌱 The key to getting it right? Effective skills-based hiring focuses on evaluating candidates based on their core strengths and ability to acquire new skills (we can think of these as skill-enablers) as much as their current skills. This ensures future talent will be able to survive and thrive as tech continues to evolve at a rapid pace.
A successful skills-based hiring process gives candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their learning agility, resilience, adaptability, critical thinking, and curiosity.
It doesn’t just focus on what they can do now; it focuses on the potential of what they could do in the future.
2. Work smarter, not harder by simplifying your approach to skills taxonomies
🤖 Ever feel like you need an Enigma machine just to understand skills taxonomies and how to map them to your roles? As we’ve already touched on, the common thread between all our disruptors’ conversations is that skills taxonomies generally overcomplicate skills-based hiring.
A misconception is that you need to create a skills taxonomy before you can get started –– when in fact you don’t.
If you’re focusing on what truly matters – a candidate’s skill-enablers which dictate their ability to acquire new skills – you know that candidates will be able to develop the skills you need them to in the future, even if they don’t exactly match the hard skills requirements you have right now.
So instead of spending 100s of hours or £100s of thousands on developing a new skills taxonomy now, you can make that a ‘to fix later’ problem.
3. Opt for pilot not pronouncement to win over even the trickiest of stakeholders
In a recent article for SHRM, president of the Burning Glass Institute Matt Sigelman, shared that “it’s a lot easier to change policies than practice”. He pointed out that often a CEO will decide their company should adopt skills-based hiring, but their attention will shift to something else before the organisation has made enough of a mindset shift to truly make the transformation happen and see the results… and then question why they’re still facing skills shortages 😬
So how do you help everyone understand the reality of what has to be done and bring them on the journey?
💡 For many executive stakeholders, pilots speak louder than words.
Molson Coors’ Joe Sidley shared his secret for getting strong senior stakeholder engagement: start with a pilot, get the data to prove to tricky stakeholders the value of shifting your approach, iron out the process so you can talk about it in a case study and show results before vs after.
Dominic Joyce shared that forming a skills council allowed him to get buy-in for a pilot in retail roles at Travelex, establishing clear lines of communication with him and other stakeholders –– skills-based hiring then allowed them to open up talent pools for a notoriously tough market.
⚖️ Next up –– we all know one of the most crucial stakeholders to get on board early is hiring managers.
Andrea Marston and Dominic Joyce recommended encouraging hiring managers to look for skills they don’t have in their team –– for example, if everyone can do x and that skill is in short supply, why don’t we look for y instead to offer additional value?
They also recommend explaining the limitations that sifting for hard skills and experience places on the size and shape of talent pools –– for example, by referencing BCG research showing just 13% of graduates have the skills to start a job right away, or asking managers to think about the best hire they ever made (they will often talk about a person who grew the most vs having all the right skills from day one). These tactics can make it easier to demonstrate how fundamentally flawed traditional hiring practices are.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Finally, our disruptors suggested starting your pilot in functions where you know you can impact change –– for example, where there is a leader with strong passion for DEI or a major skills shortage. Starting here will give you the data to get buy-in from other stakeholders and give you the impetus for a wider rollout across other areas of the business.
4. Make sure you give candidates the opportunity to show their capability, not just tell you about it
John Sisk’s Head of Talent, Iain Lindsay is under no doubt that a spike in Early Careers applications in the past 12 months is down to the AI-enabled candidate.
The reality is that the Early Careers talent pools we’re fishing in feature the most AI-enabled candidates in the market. That changes not only what we need to assess candidates on, but how we assess them too.
John Sisk have designed a process to evaluate candidate traits that can’t be taught or demonstrated by ChatGPT - in their case, they prioritise evaluating skill-enablers like resilience and adaptability.
Secondly, they prioritise asking candidates to showcase their abilities –– not just talk about them. Not only does this ensure they’re seeing the real candidate, not just how good they are at using ChatGPT, but it also gives them an opportunity to open up talent pools to more diverse candidates.
Our disruptors suggest adopting the ‘show not tell’ approach not only in the sifting process, but all the way through to the final interview stage –– for example, instead of asking someone how they might perform in a certain scenario, get them to show you by giving them a task to complete (just remember to probe them to ensure you can assess their true capability not ChatGPT's).
Many skills-based hiring processes still rely on candidates self-reporting their level of skill. But this approach has a negative impact on diversity –– for example, women are more likely to underestimate their capabilities vs men in a self-report scenario. So if we just take a candidates' word for it that they have the right skills required for the job, we risk: 1️⃣ Hiring someone who doesn’t actually have the level of capability they think they do and
2️⃣ Overlooking under-represented talent who perhaps don’t know how capable they are (in a skills crisis, this is an especially big risk)
To avoid this, we need to give candidates the tools to show, not tell us about their capabilities and motivations.
And there we have it –– four practical lessons from pioneering TA Disruptors who’ve been there and done it all before.
If you want even more practical advice, you can check out the seven-step process for adopting a pragmatic approach to skills-based hiring in our latest playbook – built using inspiration from many of the disruptors we’ve referenced today.
Want to watch our webinars back to hear more from the experts?
3 nuggets of wisdom to take into next week 💡
🎧 Bright Network CEO James Uffindel joined this week's episode of the TA Disruptors podcast to share the details of their latest report which delves into the mismatch between what employers and candidates expect from one another, and what to do about it, how to overcome tech skills shortages and managing candidate usage of GenAI. Check out the full recording here or wherever you get your podcasts.
🤖 'GPT-4 is the dumbest model any of you will have to use again…by a lot.' - these were the words of OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman in his lecture at Stanford University last week demonstrating just how transformative AI will be for recruitment in the next decade. Read Techopedia's 5 point summary of his lecture here.
📰 The impact of AI on recruitment continues to balloon: in Recruiter Magazine, academics and members of the APPG outline how employers need to be more transparent with candidates about their stance on AI usage to ensure a level playing field for all.
If you have any thoughts, reflections, or questions, drop a comment below. Or sign up here to get the newsletter every week.