The Shift to Skills: How HR and Recruiters Are Evolving

A More Dynamic Recruitment Function

Driven by the need to be more agile—traditional hierarchical structures focused on job-function or geography are fast becoming obsolete in favor of flatter, dynamic, work-centric structures, focused on teams and projects.

For HR, this has led to a fundamental shift in approach from that of a fulfilment center, where the focus is on hiring quickly, to a growth department, where the focus is on boosting productivity. This is done through skills development and internal mobility—placing people with the right skills in areas of the business where they can contribute most effectively.

We have also seen a shift in how recruitment functions operate, with closer alignment with the business on a strategic level to understand how company initiatives and goals will affect talent requirements. Another change is closer collaboration and flexibility between recruiters and their HR counterparts to decide if it is best to hire, develop, or mobilize talent to meet those goals.

“Companies that operate in a more dynamic, more skills-centric way are clearly outperforming their peers”

Josh Bersin

Recruiter Revolution: Role, Tools, and Data

In a closer-knit HR function, it is vital to have integrated tools that span the entire employee lifecycle, moving away from disparate solutions and siloed data. With the shift from a role-centric to a skills-centric model, modern HR leaders have transformed their use of technology to map skills to organizational goals, perform skills gap analyses, and measure business-relevant skills to inform talent decisions.

Not all data is created equal when making decisions about people. Measuring skills objectively and reusing the data for hiring, onboarding, development, and mobility decisions brings huge advantages for organizations that want to remain agile to change.

With the increase in skills data, there will be an emphasis from the business to track performance based on skills and report on the skills of the workforce. Traditional metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire may evolve to include measures of employee satisfaction, business performance, and skills proficiency.

In a recent SHL poll, ‘defining and measuring skills’ emerged as the predominant challenge for organizations, with 42% of respondents highlighting difficulties in this critical aspect.

Another expectation we’ve been helping businesses with is enabling HR leaders is to be their organization’s skills champion. This will include enabling managers with the knowledge to better develop, nurture, and manage their team members, but more significantly leveraging their understanding of powerful skills data to inform strategic decisions. Those decisions could be anything from assessing a team’s ability to execute growth plans, the capacity to innovate in product teams, or the impact of wider initiatives such as business transformation.

With these new processes, assessment tools and reporting being adopted, it is vital HR personnel are trained and upskilled in these new technologies. A skills-first approach will demand a stronger knowledge of skills requirements from recruiters so they can overhaul the end-end hiring process—from job advertisements to assessment and candidate interviews so skills are prioritized above everything else.

65% of hiring managers are open to hiring candidates based on their skills alone¹

Adopting a skills-based approach will rely on an agile, upskilled recruiting and HR teams to succeed. Collaboration internally and across the organization will be critical together with selecting the right tools to assess candidates and gather the right skills data to inform talent decisions.

Check out the replay of our recent SHL Virtual Summit to learn about the skills revolution and the impact on HR teams, including a keynote from industry expert, Josh Bersin.

References:

¹https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2024/06/13/65-of-hiring-managers-will-hire-you-for-your-skills-alone-study-finds/