It’s Time to Move From Skills Assessment to Proven Skills-Based Recruiting

Evaluating candidates according to their skills and not their CVs is the new consensus.

Everyone agrees that skill-based assessments are the best way to guarantee a qualified and skilled candidate that is more likely to have a better retention rate and suitability for the work environment. That will ultimately become a valuable asset for the company. This type of approach guarantees long-term success for both parties– the employer and the employee and results in tremendous time and cost savings translated into a beneficial relationship with the concept of recruiting. Therefore, those processes should be performed in a well-thought-out and clever manner. 

With the enormous progress in innovation, how can we move forward from asking people about their needs to assessing them even before applying for the job? 

Where can a candidate display their skills and show what they truly are worth in today’s recruiting platform?

So what are those elusive skills that we fail to identify through hundreds of thousands of CVs? How can we differentiate between the candidates that seem good on paper and those that can do the job? In a world that is used to seeing new hires through their CVs and cover letters alone, constantly mounting with irrelevant information, inevitably building discriminative stereotypes and misconceptions, it is easy to miss out on the right person. The existing sourcing tools are old school, and accordingly, HR teams realize that skills-based screening is the way to go. 

The high-tech world learned asking about skills is not enough and developed performance evaluations tests to help identify the right candidate. They have much higher salaries and greater resources when sorting through new candidates, and can afford performance-based evaluations in various areas. While it sounds promising, these evaluations are performed only after the candidate sends over their CV and interviews, which means they didn’t rectify the current sourcing method. They use the old ways and add more tests along the road, eventually selecting from the same tall pile of candidates. 

Another platform we recently started seeing many skills questionnaires appearing on is the various social media channels. It might seem like a way to address larger audiences, but it doesn’t reflect any qualifications because people can list anything they want about themselves. It makes those questionnaires more a test about a candidate’s judgment rather than their abilities. They think about what their potential employers want to hear and act the part. To get that specific job, there is still a long way to go. 

To shift the perspective from CVs to skills, an employer looks at a list of a candidate’s skills and still learns very little. It goes without saying that a candidate’s background and advantages will help them do their job, but those attributes can shine during an interview. The bottom line, is all of those skills sourcing solutions are just too little, too late. HR teams know that the current process is not enough, but they don’t have the proper solution yet. And the issues begin from the get-go. When the initial screening process is far from objective or efficient, all those add-ons will never be good enough. 

Rethinking the whole process makes you realize one vital thing– altering the current funnel is inevitable. If you want to hire someone for a job, let them try and do the job first. There is no clearer picture than the complete picture when a candidate tries out the job, feels the environment, and can function and perform their skills in the most objective manner. Both the candidate and employer will quickly know if the job is theirs to have or not. And, of course, the candidate’s chances of sticking with the company are increasing significantly. 

When introducing cutting-edge AI tools to the process, the advantages of skills sourcing will not get lost into another pile. AI, incorporated with accumulated HR knowledge and advanced technology, gives us the chance to deliver a performance-based evaluation for a specific job. And that is what matters. Since every job requires a different set of various skills, the crucial thing to know before hiring someone is how they perform within desired skills. It is not only if they hold those particular skills but realizing how those skills manifest. And that is the latest message in sourcing: Instead of being only skills-based, it is about performance-based sourcing. 

HR industry with AI technology

Think of the countless opportunities created when combining years of professional experience in the HR industry with AI technology. The novel solution born out of this combination takes skills and performance assessment to the next level. Tailoring performance evaluations for specific jobs using the technology is easier, faster and more fitting to each company’s needs. The skills evaluated with AI can immediately affect a candidate’s performance and abilities, reflecting multiple virtues of their expertise. 

Another considerable advantage of AI-based skills assessment is its objectivity. When the technology is structured to look for particular features, it is blind to others. It ignores color, race, gender, age, experience and any disability or irrelevant limitation. This blindness ultimately creates a much more diverse and inclusive workplace. It can also help in one of the most common phenomena of Covid-19: job mobility. Using an intelligent skills-based test, candidates can realize that they fit into positions they think they cannot do because of a lack of experience. A performance assessment could open a window in new hiring options for those individuals according to their vetted qualifications. 

The story of screening is the story of hiring.

The approach towards screening is shifting from the information a candidate testifies about themselves to their actual performance. The new strategy calls for new solutions that will help HR move forward to the next step, creating an efficient win-win platform where candidates and employers take control over the process. Harnessing AI technology brings the advantages of performance testing to the front seat with every single candidate, every position and every company out there.

Authors

Maya Huber

Maya Huber is the CEO & Co-Founder of Skillset. Skillset is an e-recruiting platform that transforms the "old" model of CV-based recruiting to an effective skills-based assessment and matching new approach. By testing and validating job seekers' skills and actual performance as the first recruiting step, Skillset can best match job seekers and recruiting companies. Skillset delivers the most qualified candidates for the role to companies, therefore shortening the recruiting cycle and improving overall retention rate and diversity hiring. Maya holds a Ph.D. in occupational therapy, with primary expertise in the fields of job analysis and the future of work. Maya has 15 years of practical and research experience managing HR companies focusing on the inclusion of vulnerable population groups.