The Benefits of Skills-Based Hiring for Talent Acquisition Leaders

AI, in-person work mandates, DEI — talent acquisition leaders have enough challenges to contend with in 2024. Let’s make at least one of your responsibilities easier — empowering your recruiters to fill roles through skills-based hiring.

According to Korn Ferry, skill-based hiring is one of the top talent acquisition trends for 2024, and with good reason. Skills based hiring can help talent acquisition leaders fulfill the organization’s DEI goals, while also narrowing the technology skills gap that so many CIOs say they have.

In this post, we define skills-based hiring and how talent acquisition leaders can leverage it to improve their teams’ efficiency and effectiveness in attracting applicants, filling roles quickly, and populating the organization with key skills that drive performance.

What is Skills-based Hiring?

Skills-based hiring emphasizes a candidate’s abilities or skills as a basis for hiring. Instead of the more traditional role-based focus that emphasizes a candidate’s formal education or prior roles, skills based talent acquisition focuses on what a candidate can do.

Though not a new concept, skills-based hiring has recently been more widely embraced in technology talent acquisition. One of the most common approaches is to do away with four-year college degree requirements. Skills-based hiring in tech may also involve looking outside of the IT department for technology talent. Doing so can help talent acquisition teams grow their volume of applicants with people who have the right skills but perhaps do not have the “right” degree or the “right” roles history.

What are the Advantages of a Skills-based Focus for Talent Acquisition Leaders?

We talk about the general recruitment advantages of skills based hiring in our latest resource: How to Source Top Tech Talent More Effectively: A Guide To Skills-Based Hiring. These include the ability to quickly fill your candidate pool with more, and more diverse, candidates, as well as the ability to emphasize soft skills — a growing priority in technology talent acquisition.

There are also specific advantages for talent acquisition leaders, including:

Elevating Your Value as a Strategic Partner to the Business

As the talent acquisition partner to business units and executive leaders, you are in a position to advocate for and implement new approaches to developing the organization’s talent pool. As we highlight in our new Technical Recruiter’s Guide to Building an AI Team, AI is upending all areas of business and driving a gold rush for AI talent — and that is just one factor making technology talent more expensive. Bringing new ideas of finding and recruiting talent contributes value and elevates your status as a key partner.

Don’t underestimate the mindset shift you are also in a position to help your business partners navigate. Even organizations that have declared a commitment to it often make little progress, in part because they fail to change their talent acquisition practices.

By clearly communicating its advantages and building buy-in with business unit leaders, you set the stage for hiring managers to consider non-traditional candidates with an open mind.

Empowering your Team

You know better than anyone how much pressure your talent recruiters are under to fill open roles. If you are primarily looking at the metrics but not helping them mastermind new ways to drive efficiency and effectiveness into the recruitment process, then you are a source of stress, not an alleviator of it.

In contrast, your support for and embrace of skills-based hiring can translate into collaborating on pilots and programs that help your technical recruiters experiment, and coach them on acclimating hiring managers to interviewing and onboarding skill-based candidates. Over time, your entire team will learn more about when a skills-based lens works best and which situations require a different approach.

Expanding Your Impact

Like many talent acquisition leaders, you’ve probably been asked to take on additional responsibilities in the past few years. Maybe DEI is under your purview now, or internal talent mobility, or talent development.

A skills-based approach helps you excel in any of those areas. Research shows that a skills focus can lead to a more diverse candidate pool in tech, since both women and many BIPOC candidates are less likely than white men to have STEM degrees.

A skills emphasis also helps organizations build a “talent marketplace” to staff projects or initiatives based on the talent they have anywhere in the organization. Unilever has embraced this model as a way to lower siloes and maximize the value of the talent they have.

How Can I Apply a Skills-based Lens to my Recruiting Process?

Embracing a skills-based approach as a talent acquisition leader will require attention both up and down and sideways in your organization. You will need to manage up to educate the executive leadership team about the advantages, manage down to empower your technical recruiters to adopt a skills-based lens, and manage sideways with your business partners to establish the talent acquisition strategies. Consider these elements:

Work on Mindsets

If you’ve read our Guide To Skills-Based Hiring you’ll know that mindsets are a major barrier to effectively adopting skills-based hiring in tech. Both talent leaders and business leaders have been looking at education and past roles as filtering criteria for years. That will be hard to overcome. It requires focused change management, including a test-and-learn approach to trying and adapting how you apply a skills-based lens.

Adapt Your Assessment Approaches

Degrees and past experiences functioned as proxies for skills. In their absence, talent acquisition leaders will need to provide new ways for recruiters to assess whether candidates have the skills they say they do at the level your organization needs them. Hiring assessments, already a popular tool, will play a bigger role. So too will interview techniques that prompt candidates to show, not just tell, how they use their skills in practice.

Adjust Your Tools and Metrics

Your first efforts at applying a skills-based lens will probably be small scale and your impact measurement manual. At some point, however, making the skills-based approach part of how you do business will require integration into the tools and systems you use to facilitate talent acquisition.

A skills taxonomy is one of those tools. This is a cross referenced list of all the technology skills in your organization, including hierarchies and relationships. Ideally, a complete taxonomy will also include the skills you are likely to need in the future. A taxonomy is particularly helpful for defining skills using standard language, and populating an internal skills database documenting what you have and the gaps that still exist.

You will also want to adapt your performance metrics to make sure the skills based approach is delivering the result you want and that it outperforms traditional approaches based on its impact on business priorities.

Let Dice Help

Putting skills first is easy to do on the DICE platform. Listing skills is how your recruiters find candidates for your open roles. We also provide tools for you to stay up to date on hiring trends, post your jobs, and elevate your brand with desired candidates.