The killer application of skills-based hiring is being able to hire people without skills.
Sounds stupid I know…
Understand your Jobs
…but if you do an analysis of your organisation’s jobs, you will find that those jobs require some fundamental abilities (at a cognitive level), a certain level of interest or predisposition to certain types of work, and maybe some wisdom or knowledge that can only be acquired through life experience or extended study. Some of this will go under the banner of skills, but can also be called traits, interests, experience or abilities.
Your job will also likely require other skills which can be relatively easily and quickly acquired, such as user-level knowledge of software.
Hire at 80%
A good rule of thumb is to hire with a degree of growth and stretch designed into the job. You can think about it as hiring someone with 80% of the capability for the role, and allowing them to meet their personal need for growth through learning the balance of the job.
The 20% gap should be skills which can be acquired within the acceptable ramp-up period for the job, which means you need to understand what fundamental abilities and knowledge you need your new starter to bring with them, and what skills can be quickly acquired after commencing.
Don’t be this person!
The irony is that most recruiters will start their candidate sourcing search with the least important, most easily acquired skills.
Imagine you decide to hire someone with Skill A, probably the ability to use a particular software tool, and there are 100 people with that skill in the workforce.
But you also kind of need them to know a second software system, Skill B. In my experience it is unusual to be more than a 30% overlap between two different skills, so now you have 30 folks in your pool.
But you also need someone who has a particular Body of Knowledge and has the associated certification, call it Skill C. 1/3 of 30 makes 10 potential candidates.
Lets be optimistic and say that 10% of the people with the three skills are actually open to work, reachable and interested in your job. That's right, you now have ONE candidate, or 1% of the total Skill A pool.
You missed out on your best candidates!
But I only need one candidate you say? I would argue that your best hire is almost certainly among the 99% of candidates you already ruled out of consideration. The skills you used to filter your pool are easy to identify and find with a key-word search, but are they ultimately that important?
It is the underpinning abilities and motivation that are far more important, and you never even considered those in your search!
So what do I do?
Get in touch on our Contact Page for assistance with your recruitment strategy, or subscribe below so you don’t miss out on more skills-based hiring content.