Earlier this year, Forbes released an article attempting to debunk skills-based hiring myths. Let’s look at how they did, but first, what is this fast-growing new take on hiring compared to traditional practices?
As the world is evolving, companies must keep up with the times- including how they choose to grow or replenish their workforce. Traditional hiring practices are based on degrees, titles, and credentials. While having an educational background or accompanying title relevant to a job is essential in many situations, it’s not always the most important thing! Millennial and Gen Z college students have grown up hearing how they won’t land a great job without a master’s degree (known as degree inflation) because of how hiring is trending, but skills-based approaches have challenged this notion.
Skills-based hiring is just that: what technical skills and competencies do candidates have that companies can apply to a job function? This approach forces hiring teams to explicitly list what they need a candidate to do for a role and then encourages unbiased evaluation during the hiring process.
Myth #1 goes right back to the college applicants. It’s been said that this new age approach to hiring eliminated college graduates from the selection pool because recent grads don’t have experience in their field yet. However, that’s just untrue, as the article describes. It’s simply evening out the playing field for candidates with no experience, allowing the term “qualified candidate” to be subjective.
Myth #2 encompasses the “bad hire” phenomenon, claiming that skills-based hires are bad and hurt businesses when the opposite is true. “Skills-based hiring is five times more predictive of future performance than hiring for education and 2.5 times more predictive than hiring for work experience,” according to Forbes.
Myth #3 discusses the geography debate. The myth states that skills-based hiring doesn’t work for the business’s geographical location; however, remote working allows new areas with new candidate pools to be explored. As a result, now more than ever, there’s more room to find the proper skill set and personality to fit your team.
After looking through these arguments, all are very solid and ultimately allow companies to be more successful with hiring talent. The fundamental understanding here is that hiring isn’t all about degrees, and it isn’t all about experience, either. It’s about what you can do and learn for a company.