Traditionally speaking, when a recruiter is tasked with finding a new employee to fill a role, the role is defined by its title and responsibilities rather than in terms of the skills and abilities needed in the organization. While it’s easy to hire someone to fill a position, it may not be the most efficient path to solving a skill gap within the organization—in fact, it may not even be a viable long-term fix.
A clearly defined problem requires a well-curated solution. While soft skills add immense value to a workforce’s operation, hard skills are the backbone by which an organization functions. Being able to define and measure an employee’s ability to perform a task is crucial to company success—and there is no better way to ensure resources are being allocated efficiently to this end goal than with a skills taxonomy.
What is a Skills Taxonomy?
A skills taxonomy is a dynamically evolving list of soft and hard skills relevant to an organization’s objectives. Clusters of well-defined skills can be assigned to relevant positions, general teams, or at a company level, providing a transparent measure of ability saturation within different sections of the organization.
Not only is a skills taxonomy helpful to an organization’s ability to efficiently recruit and allocate resources, but it also provides a clearly defined set of prerequisites for current and future employees to grow their careers internally. As new technologies emerge and older platforms become obsolete, a skills taxonomy will also facilitate the flagging of such occurrences across multiple teams, and help coordinate recruitment efforts and training surrounding the new gaps in organizational skills.
Skills Taxonomies and Recruitment
It’s easy to focus on the job title when filling a role, but recruiting candidates that possess soft and hard skills that an organization needs can be just as—if not more so—important when searching for talent.
With skills taxonomies measuring current, quantifiable ability within the company, recruiters may find that their organization’s needs aren’t where they expected—or that they should prioritize internal talent. Skills taxonomies allow recruiters to evaluate which needed skills employees could be trained in against which would be best gained through adding new talent, depending on the difficulty and training cost.
This adds flexibility to the recruiting process. By searching for candidates who have the right skills, the talent pool opens up to those who are extremely qualified for the job without necessarily searching for the job’s specific title. This allows an organization to bring in critical, hard-to-learn skills, and then supplement these by training employees on skills that are easier to learn.
Using Skills Taxonomies to Boost Retention
As for retention, employees who have a clear career path are more likely to stay with a company, according to data from a Glassdoor study. By utilizing a skills taxonomy and being transparent with which skills are most valued where job seekers know exactly which skills they need to build up to be considered for advancement.
Not only does this provide peace of mind and define clear career goals for an employee, but it also encourages employees to learn skills that their organization already values, allowing for internal talent development in areas of need.
Using AI Recruitment in Conjunction with Skills Taxonomy
By using a skills taxonomy and identifying the skill gaps within an organization, filling roles is much less about simply finding a candidate with the requisite job title and experience—it’s about adding the skills needed to grow the organization. AI recruitment software, such as PandoExchange, can help get skills-based job listings in front of the relevant candidates.
AI software can accurately screen multiple resumes in the time it would take a veteran recruiter to get through just one. Taking over the menial work during sourcing allows your team to focus on dynamically optimizing your organization’s skills taxonomy, building the team you need rather than the team you don’t.
