By: Sue Ebbers, Ph.D.
A new hiring strategy has emerged over the last year that has attracted the attention of many large companies like IBM, Dell, Bank of America, Walmart, Toshiba, Liberty Mutual and Bristol-Myers-Squibb who are seeking to deliver results on their business process improvement promises with skills-based hiring. Skills-based hiring is a hot topic right now, because of the tight labor market. Businesses and nonprofits, including associations, are searching high and low to find alternative pools of qualified new hires outside the traditional four-year degree and “years of experience” that populate so many current job descriptions. Read on to learn how to better fill your candidate pipeline and avoid pitfalls with non-credentialed professions, by properly harnessing skills-based hiring.
Benefits Of The Skills-Based Hiring Approach
In the past, hiring requirements that included college degrees implied that the people being hired with those degrees had learned key skills, such as problem solving, critical thinking and complex decision-making, while in college. Over time, you’ve likely learned that is frequently not the case. Additionally, restricting your pool of candidates to individuals with degrees instead of skill means eliminating over half of all potential hires.
Skills-based hiring means you hire people based on specific demonstrations of required skills. Rather than being considered eligible for hire by arbitrary qualifications related to degree completion and related experience, and without diving more deeply into a specific skill demonstration, the skills-based hiring approach enables you to recruit new staff who can hit the ground running in terms of demonstrated abilities.
In fact, HBR has found that those hired on skill will work harder and are more motivated, and are often more loyal to their employers. They are also 20% more likely to remain with the organization, and when ready, explore other opportunities within, rather than search for job advancement outside the organization.
However, there is a non-trivial cost for renovating the hiring approach from traditional qualifications to a skills-based hiring approach. Therefore, we recommend first piloting this approach within your organization with a few in-demand roles to iron out the kinks in the process, before deploying enterprise-wide. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on the instructional design skill set for organizations that require a strong cadre of professional development professionals to complete their mission.
How Does Skills-Based Hiring Work?
There are several steps in the skills-based hiring process. These include:
Competency Model and Job Description: Utilize a competency model as the foundation for the rewritten job description. Next, rewrite the job description.
Skills Assessment: Develop a skills assessment to assess the various ways applicants show up with their demonstrated skill set.
Identify Skill Demonstration Tactic(s): Identify from options the best way for the job candidate to demonstrate effectiveness.
Level Set Interpretation: Level set how those conducting hiring for a position interpret demonstrations of skill.
Score Applicant-Provided Proof of Skill: Review and score each applicant’s demonstrated capability.
Obtain References and Interview: Determine fit in terms of organizational culture, as well as obtain additional insight into the candidates you are considering for the position.
STEP 1: Identify the Competency Model
A competency model is the foundation for job description development. Done well, it provides a large list of performance task statements that describe each important aspect of the skill set. For example, you may have the following task statements regarding an instructional designer, taken from IBSTIPI (The International Board of Standards for Training, Performance, and Instruction):
Communicate effectively in visual, oral, and written form.
Update and improve knowledge, skills and attitudes pertaining to the instructional design process and related fields.
Identify and respond to ethical, legal and political implications of design in the workplace.
Identify and describe target population and environmental characteristics.
Analyze the characteristics of existing and emerging technologies and their potential use.
Use an instructional design and development process appropriate for a given project.
Organize instructional programs and/or products to be designed, developed, and evaluated.
Design instructional interventions.
Develop instructional materials.
Select or modify existing instructional materials.
Revise instructional and non-instructional solutions based on data.
These performance task statements next need to be consolidated into finite categories, called “competencies”. These consolidated groupings of performance task statements are given specific titles and reside under the main competency. For example, for a junior instructional designer, you might have the following performance task statements under “Develop Instructional Materials” that are relevant to the use of technology:
Develops eLearning modules with Articulate Storyline.
Develops icons and other images utilizing Adobe Photoshop.
Develops storyboards in Articulate Rise.
Lastly, there will be a grouping of these groupings, hierarchically, so that you will have a list of 5-7 “Domains” that include several relevant titles such as “Professional Foundations”, “Planning and Analysis”, “Design and Development”, and “Evaluation and Implementation.” In this example, “Develop Instructional Materials” would fall under the Domain titled “Design and Development”.
As is the case for instructional designers, where IBSTIPI provides a somewhat generic competency model for this skill set, another useful site to find competency models is called the Competency Model Clearinghouse. Not only does this website offer a large number of complete competency models, but it provides the resources to enable you to build your own.
For those roles in your organization that are rare, extremely job-specific, and/or hold high value, building your own competency model is a better option. When rigor beyond the Competency Model Clearinghouse specs is required, or when you want to build competency models for several levels of the same job (such as beginner, intermediate, advanced), or when the job pool is extensive (perhaps across the United States, North America, or the world), you should take the following steps:
1. If you haven’t already performed a job task analysis, start by interviewing up to 10 high performers in the skill set. Then qualitatively analyze to determine the wide range of performance task statements for each job level.
2. (Optional, for greater rigor) Conduct observations on site in several different locations, as well as interview others on site who can contribute to an understanding of the different job levels, in order to broaden the list of task statements. Again, qualitatively analyze this information to ensure capturing the broadest group of performance task statements.
3. Develop a survey for each of the job role levels to send out to the broader community of people in the target job role(s) to verify all performance task statements. Analyze survey data to determine the consensus from this large community and adjust your competency model accordingly.
4. (As discussed above) Combine all performance task statements that could be classified under a title, such as “Technology”, which then falls under “Design and Develop Instruction” for instructional designers.
5. Define each competency in a way that succinctly describes that group of performance task statements.
6. Combine all relevant competencies under what is called a “Domain”, which is a consolidation of competencies, their definitions, and their performance task statements that logically fit under that domain title. Develop a definition of each domain.
7. After assembling all performance task statements, their competencies, and their domains, conduct a validating focus group. These individuals should be expertly knowledgeable across all levels of competency, so that they can identify major and minor changes to domains. definitions, competencies, and task statements. This can require two or even more full and tedious days to work through everything. This activity will also likely require individuals to fly in to a central location for the effort, unless you have very patient individuals who will work together for 2 or more days on this via Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Developing your own competency model is a costly endeavor, but if your organization is in the right state of readiness for change and has high value, critical job roles, or several levels of a job role that are all high value, it is worth the investment for bottom-line financial performance improvement.
STEP 1: NEXT, Develop the Job Description
A job description has historically been a document that provides candidates with an outline of the main duties and responsibilities of the role for which they are applying, as well as an overview of your organization. A good job description is the first opportunity for a potential candidate to learn about your open role, and often, their first chance to learn about your company. And it is a useful tactic for attracting the right-fit candidates for your workforce, who will be best aligned to organizational results.
The central focus on the job description using skills-based hiring is the list of competencies required for, at least, minimal hiring success. It is here, in the job description, that you want to make sure that these competencies provide sufficient detail so that the applicant can say, specifically, “Yes, I have done this specific task, and I know how to prove it”.
STEP 2: Develop the Skills Assessment
To be effective, you must somehow assess all the evidence the candidate provides you against specific performance task statements in the competency model. A skills assessment is a useful way of doing this.
Developing a skills assessment for a single role, or two or more levels of a role, will deliver greater benefit when developed in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s because you can easily create a drop-down competency rating system (1-3 for low, medium, high; or some other rating system that could have 1-5 on the rating scale, or even more) to review each person’s skill demonstration.
step 3: Identify Skill Demonstration Tactic(s)
There are many ways for an individuals to portray their competency capabilities. It is up to the hiring organization to determine what will constitute competency demonstration and require one or more approaches that will give them the information they need.
When advertising the position, either internally or externally, list the 10-15 specific competencies that are most important. In as great a detail as possible on the job advertisement, be clear that the candidate needs to make available to you the skill demonstration that you have determined you want. Skill can be demonstrated in a large number of ways:
Portfolio Items: If the candidate has access to prior work that demonstrates one or more competencies, s/he can write a brief description of each portfolio item and how it demonstrates that group of competencies.
Interview: Perhaps the candidate does not have portfolio pieces because their current employer will not release to them the ability to share beyond the organization. An astute hiring manager who understands the skill set can ask the candidate to talk through projects they have been on that demonstrate some of the important competencies. Careful listening by one person who understand the skill set will reveal the candidate’s level of competency.
Capstone eLearning: If this is a high profile job role, one that requires hiring a lot of individuals over time, and one that doesn’t change much over time, it may be useful to design and develop a branching scenario-based capstone eLearning that is challenging and actually requires the individual to demonstrate their competencies at the required level of skill. Remember for this that you are not developing it for them to regurgitate their knowledge. It is an actual set of activities that demonstrates skill.
Harrison Assessments: Again, if this is a high profile job role where it is critical for you to verify their level of skill, this assessment tool not only determines different traits, but they align to up to 610 job roles via competencies. There is a cost associated with having the results interpreted, but it can be a very useful way of filtering through folks selected on the short list.
Recommendations: Of course, recommendations are a part of most hiring processes. The wrinkle here is to ask the recommender to speak to the candidate’s specific skill demonstrations and their accustomed culture.
Certificates and Badges: As long as you know where the certificate or badge comes from, that it is sufficiently rigorous in its listing of what the competency definitions and task statements are, and that it does indeed demonstrate the specific competencies you seek to verify, this is a useful shorthand for you to assess your candidate.
Certification Exams: We would not recommend that certification exam results be utilized for assessing candidates. While a great deal of money is invested in these exams, and they are necessary, many of them only test for knowledge, and not for skill.
Graduation from a Specific Degree Program: IF you know the quality of the higher education degree program AND you know the competencies that that degree program requires, then you can use this as a filtering device to determine who is a valid candidate.
STEP 4: Level Set Interpretation
You may be the only person assessing all potential candidates against the job competencies and performance task statements, or there may be a group of 2, 3, or even more people on your team who will all assess a group of candidates and their competency demonstrations. If you are the only one, then you are likely very clear on what to look for in each competency demonstration. If, however, there is more than one person involved in the assessing process, it will be useful to make sure each person assesses competencies in the same manner.
To do this, the best approach is to initially assess the same 3-4 candidates and their competency demonstrations at the same time, using the skill assessment and a drop-down menu of the three or more gradations of excellence (such as 1=poor performance, 2=fair performance, 3=good performance, and 4=excellent performance, if there are four gradations). After the assessment of competencies, add the scoring for each competency or task statement and then add them together. Then divide by the total number of performance task statements. This will give you the final score for that individual. Here is a simple example that portrays this for you using the IBSTIPI instructional designer competencies.
Next, meet with the other scorers and discuss in detail how and why you came up with each score. After that initial discussion, work together to determine how, in the next review, each competency would be evaluated to come to a greater uniformity in the competency and performance task statement scoring. Do this another two to three times to develop confidence that each scorer sees things the same way as the others. At that point, you can be assured you are sharing what is called the same “mental model” of what each performance task statement and competency looks like, leading to better hiring.
STEP 5: Score Applicant-Provided Proof of Skill
Once all candidates have been scored and the scores tallied, discuss with the hiring team your rankings and identify 3, 5, or even more individuals to be on your shorter list.
Step 6: Obtain References and Interview
Sometimes people can be very good at what they do, but they are still a poor fit for your organization. The last aspect of this skills-based hiring process is to be used to verify from others who have worked with the candidate that their competencies are sound and that they will fit in your organization’s culture. Paying for a Harrison Assessment on each final candidate will also help you in identify the right person.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Skills-Based Hiring: Scaling Up
Once you have piloted this approach with one or a few different job roles to determine its effectiveness in identifying the right people with demonstrated competencies that your organization values, it is time to calculate the cost of expanding adoption, by comparing what you’ve gotten for the effort. Knowing whether or not to join other credible organizations who have employed the skills-based hiring approach requires you to demonstrate its value to your key stakeholders.
As we said earlier, while extremely beneficial to most job roles, deciding to move to a skills-based hiring strategy also comes at a cost. In the table below, we have outlined for you the advantages and disadvantages to this new approach:
Caveats To Non-Degree Hiring
Despite this push for skills-based hiring without the mention of college degrees, most organizations will still need a portion of their job roles filled by those with the relevant credential. As long as you know for certainty that the competencies taught from the higher education institution are in alignment with the competencies you seek, that practice shouldn’t pose a systemic issue.
Instructional designers, for example. have historically been required to earn an Master of Science (MS) degree because of the depth of training in critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, evaluation, and other skills that are part of a full instructional designer skill set. Florida State University’s College of Education, for example, where the Master’s degree of the instructional designer skill set was first taught starting in the late 1960’s, continues to be at the high end of instructional designer degrees specifically because of the competencies students are trained to possess and their ability to prove their worth through their portfolios.
However, in recent years, the field has been muddied with Bachelor’s instructional designer degrees. Even if the competencies taught are proven, or you are personally familiar with the level of rigor being taught at the bachelor’s level, we strongly encourage you to instead rely upon other demonstrations of proof beyond the degree.
Summary and Additional Resource
Skills-based hiring is the newest solution responding to workforce growth challenges in a very competitive market. It is a extremely promising approach. Many organizations have switched to this approach and strongly attest to its value. The decision to move into this approach, however, should not be taken lightly. Piloting the approach will enable you to have the data-based backing you will need to convince leadership to support the effort to expand this initiative throughout the entire organization.
For more information on this topic, read this free article “Skills Verification is the Future of Talent Management” published by Chief Talent Officer (formerly Chief Learning Officer - CLO).
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Related Articles For Further Reading
Three Types Of Task Analysis That Are Relevant For Skills-based Hiring
How To Decompose Skills For Skills-Based Hiring
What Is A Competency Model And Why Is It Necessary For Skills-Based Hiring