Is Skills-Based Hiring In Danger of Being Over Complicated?

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about skills-based hiring and its potential to bridge the skills gap and diversify talent pools. But it seems to be pulling me in two different directions. We’re supposed to focus on skills when there’s a shortage of skills—it feels like an oxymoron to me. And implementing this approach seems fiendishly challenging, or is that just me?

Even among my peers, there’s no consensus on what exactly constitutes a skill or how to measure one, making things even more confusing. Skills should be part of the assessment process, but not the whole focus. We need to understand how someone uses their current skills combined with their core traits, and for roles requiring domain expertise, how they’ve used them in the past to get things done effectively.

If talent acquisition is going to keep up in this fast-moving employment landscape, we need to move away from relying too much on education and past experience. Instead, we should focus on core traits that will be the foundation for learning and developing future skills. Do we need a huge skill taxonomy to do this? I don’t think so.

Here’s what we need to do instead:

• Understand the Trigger: Know why we’re moving towards a skills-based hiring process.
• Structured Assessment Process: Have a clear and consistent way to evaluate candidates.
• Performance-Based Job Adverts: Outline what success looks like in the role and what candidates can expect to achieve in the first 12 months.
• Applicant Demonstrations: Let candidates show “I can do this and would enjoy doing this” instead of “who I must be to apply.”
• Involve Hiring Managers: Get them to actively sell the role to potential candidates.
• Focus on Growth Potential: Ask hiring managers about their best hires—they’re usually the ones with the most growth potential, not necessarily the ones who hit the ground running.
• Behaviour-Focused Interviews: Shift the focus of interview questions to behaviours rather than past achievements.
• Job-Based Simulations: Design simulations that reflect actual job tasks.

By the time I got to number 8, I had a light bulb moment. This is exactly what we do at Connectr and have been doing for the past couple of years. It’s not that complicated—just a different mindset on what looks good and how to assess it.