Have you ever considered shifting to a skills-focused approach when hiring new employees?
Most employers don’t realize that candidates’ skills for one job can be transferred to another. Take food servers, for example. More than 70% of them have the skills needed to succeed in customer service, which is currently one of the most in-demand jobs on LinkedIn.
Had servers and people hiring for customer service specialists known they already had many required skills, we may have seen a significant shift of out-of-work food servers into in-demand roles instead of seeing those positions go unfilled.
So, if you are desperately looking for new employees and can’t find any, maybe you are looking in the wrong places. Evaluating employees and new hires based on their skills instead of their work history will help you fill the missing positions in your business and realize the talent you already have.
Taking on a skills-based talent strategy is the future of hiring and development. In addition to hiring new talent, you’ll be highly benefited if you contribute to their nurturing and development.
Organizations that fail to hire new talent and nourish their development will be left behind, forced to deal with unsatisfied and unmotivated employees, and significantly less innovation overall. So, to avoid that outcome, here are a few ways your company can upskill and reskill its existing workforce and take a skills-based approach to hiring new employees.
Support New Career Paths For Your Employees
There are two main reasons why employers highly focus on upskilling their current talent.
The first is to prepare talented employees and help them adapt to changing work. The second is to attract more gifted employees because talented professionals want to work for a company that will help them build skills and knowledge to further their careers.
Here are some strategies you can apply to show your workers that the company supports their desire to grow professionally and pursue career advancement:
1. Take a personal interest in employee career goals. Communicate frequently with your workers and help them outline a potential career path within the organization so they can better visualize their future at the company.
2. Promote virtual training and learning. Encourage employees to pursue relevant business courses and workshops to advance their careers.
3. Encourage mentoring and job shadowing. Establish a formal mentoring program so the senior staff member can offer hard-earned insights and professional guidance to less-experienced colleagues.
4. Support work-life balance. Encourage employees to work smart, maximize efficiency, and leave time and energy for their non-work interests. This advice is essential for remote team members who may sometimes find it difficult to keep work and life separate.
5. Paint the big picture. Remind employees of their unique contributions to the company’s mission to add meaning to their role and increase their motivation to expand their responsibilities and advance in the organization.
Shift To A Skills-based Approach When Hiring
Shifting to a skills-based approach will be a long road, but one that will be worth its time.
Recently, companies have been more intentional about hiring for a candidate’s future potential, not their history. The issue with this is that our traditional recruiting process still emphasizes certain types of education, experience, or personal referrals that can lead to a homogenous workforce.
So the first step to start this shift is to:
Rethink your job descriptions
Instead of creating unnecessary barriers to entry, like requiring a four-year degree, to reach more candidates, you should focus on the results you’d like to see and highlight the desired skills you want your candidates to have.
Without those barriers, more and more skilled candidates will be knocking on your door.
Once you have removed the unnecessary barriers, you’ll still need a skills-based way to assess candidates and find your finalists. So, that raises the question of what you should evaluate.
There are plenty of ways to gauge a candidate’s ability to perform without relying on their education or experience as proxies. You can stay focused on your candidates’ skills by applying some hard skills evaluations, like coding tests, and innovative soft skills assessments to “job auditions.” Even asking unexpected interview questions can let you see how a candidate processes information and problem-solves in real-time.
Employers who take a skills-based approach to the hiring process can increase the size of their talent pools and strengthen employee retention. This is the best way to pinpoint quality applicants for hard-to-fill roles.
And remember, once you’ve hired them, create a learning culture to keep your employees engaged and your company ready to adapt to changing demands. This is how we’ll start hiring and developing talent for the future, not the past.
See more articles by Ender Cárdenas.
