Professional Recruitment: Future-Proof with a Skills-Based Approach

Experience is often the first thing that talent acquisition professionals look for when hiring professionals.  However, it does not indicate whether the individual will successfully integrate into the team and how likely they are to stay at the organization. And the evidence suggests that the idea that candidates with more experience will perform better and go on to be long-tenured employees is unfounded. The more important takeaway should be – has the candidate learned from their previous experiences?  It’s vital that hiring managers evaluate how candidates have dealt with situations in the past. 

Often one of the reasons that employers look for candidates with experience is that they think previous jobs have helped those people build up knowledge and skills.  But we’d recommend focusing on the knowledge, skills and personality traits directly rather than using experience as a proxy for these.

We believe that candidates are so much more than their resume. A data-driven approach using objective measurement gives a full picture of the individual and enables you to understand their capability based on their readiness to do the job today, their fit with your organization as well as their future potential for growth and impact.   

We define readiness as the capability of a candidate relative to day one of a specific job role.  It comprises the hard and soft skills, and the knowledge that will allow the individual to be successful against the needs of the job right away. 

A candidate’s potential refers to their capacity to develop into something further — and it’s an important consideration if succession planning and promotability are important. 

Fit refers to culture fit, company fit and team fit and its importance increases if you need to tackle turnover, drive higher engagement, or add rigor to the cultural experience of your employees.   

By measuring all of these three elements in an experienced hire, you’re more likely to select the individuals that will thrive in their role and stay longer at your organization. 

And that’s in addition to objective measurement also helping you to remove bias from the selection process and making it easier to compare candidates against each other, removing the guesswork from hiring decisions.

One of the biggest challenges for HR leaders is the level of change in organizations.  Roles are evolving at an unprecedented rate which means that the shelf life of some skills is shrinking as new skill requirements come to the fore. This means that the ability to assess and understand an individual’s reskilling potential has never been more crucial, as the traditional skills that once guaranteed success are no longer sufficient. Even experienced hires need to have the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies in the future. 

That’s why we’ve built a measure into our professional hiring solution that will give you a comprehensive view of both the individual’s critical skills needed for today and their ability and willingness to pick up new skills for the future.  This foresight can be the difference between a workforce that thrives and one that becomes obsolete.

With experience under their belts, candidates are likely to have a clear picture of what they want from their career and their next employer. While they will have already been more selective with their applications, you can stand out on their shortlist by building a stronger connection with the candidate throughout the hiring experience.

With our hiring platform, there are two quick ways to build engagement early in the recruitment phases.  Firstly, showcase your company’s mission and values through videos of existing experienced hires which can be presented to the candidates at any stage in the hiring process.  And secondly, provide auto-generated personalized feedback to every candidate, immediately – helping them to feel that the process has been a valuable experience for them, whatever the outcome.

With hiring around the world in decline, we know that there’s an even higher focus on making sure that every hire is the right one; talent acquisition professionals say that recruiting high quality candidates is the number one topic that will shape recruiting over the next five years.  And yet one in three companies are not confident in their interview process and one in two companies have lost high quality talent due to a poor interview process.

If you’re looking to conduct focused, structured interviews when hiring professionals, our Smart Interview Professional Solution will help. Whether you’re conducting interviews face to face or virtually, this solution combines structure, science and analytics to transform interviews into a reliable and data-driven hiring tool.  From building structured interview guides to optimizing interviewer performance, every step is designed to improve fairness, consistency and hiring outcomes.

If you have an objective and reliable hiring process in place, you will have collected a large amount of data – probably more than you need for recruitment purposes alone. We recommend making the most of this talent insight by reusing it to build development plans for your new recruits, keeping these more expensive experienced hires engaged in the organization for longer.  

With our Professional Hiring Solution, you will generate development and motivation insights from the pre-hire assessments.  You can initially use this data to build a tailored on-boarding program; use the candidate’s strengths, areas for development, and motivations to assign their first projects and to enable success from day one.  And longer-term, hiring managers can support career-pathing conversations and employees can take ownership of their growth and development within the organization.