Skills-based Hiring

Stop overlooking the hidden gems in your talent pool.

Skills-based hiring helps to highlight top talent that might get overlooked based on resume alone. Learn how Criteria’s solutions support a skills-based approach to hiring.

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What is Skills-Based Hiring?

A skills-based approach to hiring focuses less on a job applicant’s education and past experience, and more on their job-related skills and abilities. In other words, it prioritizes a candidate’s overall potential and transferable skills. These skills can include both hard and soft skills, behavioral attributes, and any other abilities and aptitudes that might help a candidate succeed in a role.

The graph shows some of the main ways that organizations like yours have implemented skills-based hiring.

bar chart - what actions have you taken to implement skills-based hiring

Skills-Based Hiring: The Answer to the Talent Shortage

For those hard-to-fill roles, skills-based hiring widens the candidate pool by offering a way to find high-potential candidates who may not have the exact profile you’d expect. By stripping away unnecessary experience or degree requirements, you gain access to a more diverse, highly skilled set of talent ready to dive right into a new role.

More Objective. Less Biased.

Skills-based hiring works so well because it strips out irrelevant or weak talent signals and replaces them with really strong ones that are more predictive of job success. Education and experience are notoriously weak signals, especially when compared to things like aptitude, behavioral competencies, and other job-relevant skills. The result? Skills-based hiring helps you view all candidates on a fairer, more objective plane, so you can make a more informed decision about who to move forward with.

Skills-Based Hiring with Criteria

So you’ve rewritten job descriptions, removed some experience requirements, and stopped requiring a college degree for certain roles. How are you supposed to identify the top candidates? Criteria’s assessments, interviews, and development tools can fill in the gaps to help you build a skills-based hiring engine that delivers incredible results.

Assessments

Assessments are a key part of a skills-based hiring process because they help you uncover skills and abilities that wouldn’t be apparent on a resume. Criteria’s comprehensive suite of assessments are scientifically validated to predict job performance, offering a way for organizations to identify high-potential candidates even when they lack direct job experience.

Cognitive Aptitude Assessments: These help predict an individual's ability to solve problems, learn new skills, and think critically, which are key indicators of job performance.
Personality Assessments: These evaluate behavioral traits and tendencies that can influence how a candidate will fit within a team or organization.
Emotional Intelligence Assessments: These measure a candidate's ability to understand and manage emotions, which is crucial for roles that require interpersonal interaction and leadership.
Risk Assessments: These help to increase the likelihood that a candidate can follow rules and procedures, and uphold a safe working environment for all.
Skills Assessments: These are tailored to specific job functions and measure the technical skills required for a particular role.

When combined, assessments can deliver a powerful talent signal that indicates which candidates are most likely to succeed.

Learn more about Criteria’s assessments

Structured Interviews

Structured interviews are one of the best predictors of job performance because they allow interviewers to evaluate every candidate objectively. Structured interviews are such a powerful part of a skills-based hiring process because they require employers to take extra time to select a structured set of interview questions that are targeted and job-related, enabling the interviewer to understand a candidate’s qualifications faster, more effectively, and more fairly than a traditional unstructured interview.

Choose between two structured interview solutions when building out your skills-based hiring process.

Development

Skills-based hiring doesn’t just stop at the hiring process. To make skills-based hiring really work, organizations need to implement training, onboarding, and support to make sure that the skills that the candidate arrives with can blossom into the skills they need to thrive in your particular roles.

With Develop^TM, give new hires the tools to level up their skills with on-demand skill development, targeted coaching, and personality insights.

Learn more about Develop^TM