You are an organization builder. A key resource curator. You take pains to bring together the best of talent for your company, but as they join your company and start contributing, you find a lacuna between your expectations and their actual performance. While the common adage ‘hire for attitude and train for skills’ may have its relevance, an emerging company like yours cannot afford to spend a lot of training time and cost on a new hire.

This is where organisations need to rethink their hiring strategy. How do you ensure you hire the best fit for the job all the time? That’s a common question that has been around for ages. With enormous changes happening in the world right now, hiring based on what the candidate can readily apply, transfer and contribute is vital to survive and thrive in this new normal.

If you’re sceptical about compromising on degrees for skills, or wondering if changing your hiring strategy to a skill-based hiring is worth it, keep reading, We’ve got news for you.

Degrees vs Skills

To get candidates to contribute meaningfully in the job from day one, should you consider more experienced candidates? Not necessarily. They may come with an inflated cost and may or may not bring the baggage of their previous experience to your freshly curated workflow.

The same applies to people who have more qualifications, or formal degrees than their peers. Degrees aren’t proof of competence, they are simply proof that a person has undergone training, and has been resilient enough to complete what they started. Previously, the common notion was that degree holders went through the complete learning curve. Hence, graduates pertaining to the job role were hired.

But, the one thing most companies and recruiters failed to notice was how the graduates applied their learning to real life situations. Many had redundant skills from college, but did not possess the crucial skills needed for the workplace. This led to resentful unproductive working, sometimes counterproductive as well. This clear mismatch is due to a skill gap.

It’s no surprise that companies have to reskill at least 1 billion people by 2030 to adapt to workplace changes. 54% of companies have a difficult time finding skilled employees. Leadership teams have begun realising the importance of a skilled workforce, to ensure results and are willing to fix its roots.

What’s All the Hype About Skills?

Skills are purely learnt and applied by the individual, driven by their own motives and interest.

Skills are proof that the employee has put themselves through a new experience, resisted the temptation to leave, rectified their mistakes and applied what they learnt. People who think on their feet, are agile and adapt themselves are the most desirable employees for businesses. These are the people who can stand any change and take it up as a challenge to renew themselves.

85% of all industries prefer their employees to have at least one transferable skill and why is that, you ask? Keep reading and we’ll tell you:

What Difference Do Skilled People Make for Your Business?

Let’s talk about skills and skill-based hiring from a human resources point of view. As a talent manager, your focus is on people and the business. You need to gauge every business decision based on its merits and then plausible impact on your people. Rest assured, skill-based hiring is a huge win-win for both stakeholders.

Learn Fast

Candidates who have upskilled themselves, or honed their skills with experience, know what material or stimuli they respond to. To a certain extent, they know how to relate new information with what they already know, aren’t afraid to ask questions, to fail and to learn better. The thing with skilled candidates is that they are used to practicing extensively while learning. Hence, even when trained on a different aspect upon hiring, they keep practicing and utilising every opportunity they get, thus boosting their learning pace.

When compared to their peers who simply participate in training and forget what they learnt, skilled employees apply their learning almost immediately.

Not Afraid to Try New Things

We’re talking about people who went ahead and acquired something new and got better at it. Hence, their thirst for knowledge, newer things to learn is far higher than those with vast experience or degrees. They don’t tend to shy away from opportunities to try and learn something new. You can count on them to learn something from scratch and you won’t be let down.

Like others in the organization, they don’t need constant reminders to finish that training, or complete their self paced learning module. They will eagerly do it themselves.

This will come in handy, when you’re faced with a unique requirement in a client project and you have to decide between hiring someone for the task or doing it in-house. In those times, candidates whom you prioritised as part of your skill-based hiring will readily take up the challenge and deliver astounding results.

Champion Change

More often than not, organizations struggle with having people who inspire and spearhead new changes in the company. Even if the leadership team is highly inspiring, you need people from the ground up, to champion the change, show others that the new change doesn’t have to be feared and to welcome it with open arms. Who better than skilled people to face uncertainty head-on and ace the challenge?

They’re resilient and lifelong learners.

When you’re implementing a new work system, or a new HRMS that works completely differently from your previous one, these skilled people will be the first ones to try out the new app, give you feedback and help others with their concerns or queries, thus becoming an in-house champion of your change management initiative.

Be an Asset to the Team

Skills, especially soft skills such as effective communication, leadership, networking, rapport building, persuasive speaking, negotiation, collaborative working, analytical thinking and decision making are absolute musts for any team to have. If you have team members with these skills, they are an absolute asset to your team, organization and workforce.

They can take up anything you place in front of them, gel with people who know the trick, experiment relentlessly and get you the results you want.

They can work with anyone, represent your team anywhere, win trust and show results with their skills. Hiring for skills will give you employees whom your business truly needs and can’t grow without.

If you’re a start-up or emerging business, you need to adopt skill based hiring now, more than ever. With highly skilled and people open to upskilling in your core team, the structure of business will undergo a phenomenal transformation, win customers, establish trust quickly with their quick turnaround times and remarkably thorough work. Eventually, these people will grow to be inspiring, result oriented, leaders who will grow your brand substantially.

Early Signs Of Skill Based Hiring

There have been instances of large corporations taking to skill-based hiring and adopting unique methods of doing the same.

The advent of the gig economy is a massive indicator of skill based hiring. Talent is recognised beyond the boundaries of education, curriculum, nationality or experience. If you have the skill, know the job and can get results, you can get paid handsomely. With this skill-based employment picking up pace, more and more people are starting to venture towards it.

In this scenario, it’s only wise to switch to a skill-based hiring and attract the best talent to come for you. Based on your priorities and needs, you may even consider hiring skill-based part-timers for your job roles, who constitute only a part of the cost you need to shell out for a full timer, at the same time deliver accurate results time and time again. This is, however, up for consideration based on where your business is and what your future plans are.

Importance of skills for a job rather than degrees is advocated by top companies through different measures:

Google has introduced a skill test for hiring.

Zoho has formed a university to train 10+2 students in the skill and absorb them directly into the company.

EY, and IBM are also looking out for an alternate pool to find fresh talent with transferable skills.

Top 5 Reasons You Need to Adopt Skill-Based Hiring This Year

Since skilled employees take their learning into their own hands, they are motivated by a higher purpose and are able to discipline themselves to get results. This tendency in people comes with a variety of attributes that are beneficial to the organization, team and workforce in the long run.

High Growth Potential

Your skilled employees who already score high on the proficiency scale can begin teaching and assisting others in the team. Those who gain solid experience in your company along with diversifying their own skill sets can start training and mentoring new entrants to the organization. This will not only optimise your training budget, it will also serve as a yardstick to see if these skilled folks are ready to move up the ladder.

When the time comes when you have to identify a successor for a soon-to-retire or leave employee, you don’t need to look any further than the highly skilled, smart working, constantly learning and updating employee who makes a promising candidate for a promotion.

Create a Learning Culture Easily

Implementing a learning and development program has never been easier. If your workforce comprises self-starters and skilled employees who are eager to upskill themselves when the right opportunity arises, they will act as ambassadors on your behalf and spread the culture themselves. They will be a source of inspiration for others to see them win appreciation and rewards from you, the human resource team and the leadership team.

It also becomes easier to start an internal knowledge sharing forum, or create a knowledge bank, as these skilled employees will be ready and find it easy to share or transfer their skills to others, in bite sized, understandable portions.

Meet Market Changes Head-On

With a healthy learning culture, comes future readiness. The willingness to learn, unlearn and relearn is vital for a scaling start-up or an expanding corporation. With so many dynamic changes happening in the world, an agile and future ready workforce that can adapt themselves with minimum effort, maximum involvement and enthusiasm is sure to put you way ahead of your competitors.

Start Contributing From Day One

When you hire people for skills, they know what exactly they can do for your business, recognise you as the ideal place for them to transfer or put their skills to good use and grow. With an advanced, precise skill assessment with or without a job simulation enviornment/exercise in place during pre-employment testing, you can ensure the candidates you shortlist are actually capable of performing the job you’re hiring them for. This is not possible with respect to candidates who solely rely on their degree and experience to get them jobs. Regardless of the environment the education and previous employment provided, what really matters is whether the candidate utilised what was in front of them and earned valuable skills.

Since skilled candidates have successfully accomplished this goal, they know what exactly they are getting into when they choose to join you. You, on the other hand, know what to expect. This seamless alignment of expectations and requirements is a huge plus for you, as recruiters and HR managers and for the business as a whole.

These candidates can hit the ground running, require minimum time to get familiar with your current company and need basic onboarding or simple training for them to start performing for the role they were hired for.

If you miss out on skill-based hiring, you would then have to spend precious time, money and effort on training your new hires who are actually supposed to know their job well.

If you want to see results early, reduce waiting time and save initial training cost, you need to switch to skill-based hiring in 2023.

Increased Retention

Studies show that those who were hired solely for their skills stayed 34% more than their peers who were hired for their degrees or experience. This goes to show how the expectation reality alignment can come in handy to cement go-getters to your company, witness them become leaders of tomorrow and grow along with your company.

Convinced that you need to give your hiring strategy a spin? Do it right with Hire Quotient. Explore our vast skill library with 500+ skill assessments, with varying levels of difficulty for each level, job, grade and designation. For effective, fast paced hiring, you need an AI-powered, high end all-in-all recruitment tool like Hire Quotient to help you identify highly skilled candidates who can deliver on the job and take your business to new heights.

5 Reasons to Adopt Skills Based Hiring in 2024