What is Skill-Based Hiring?
Skill-based hiring is a talent acquisition method that cuts through bias by focusing solely on candidate competencies in role-related skills.
The Issue with Traditional Interviews:
Typically, most of the information gathered in an interview is subjective, opening up opportunity for biases. Traditional interview methods rely heavily on social nuances and communication skill, leading interviewers to primarily evaluate arbitrary “interview skills” such as story telling, friendliness, humor, and eye contact.
To quote an anonymous neurodivergent survey respondent, “Job searching is basically playing a game. It is very hard to figure out the rules of the game if you are autistic.”
Why use skill-based hiring?
- Avoid bias: Many interview processes are vulnerable to being influenced by layers of unconscious bias.
- Skill assessment: Shift from primarily focusing on the candidate’s communication skills towards the skills that are most critical to the role.\
- Clear interview data: Gain objective data on candidates’ aptitudes to ensure you are selecting the right hire.
- Better fit: Improve retention and success rate by accurately assessing candidate skills and ensuring their ability to meet your team’s need.
Key Elements of a Skill-Based Interview
✔ Identify skill criteria
Determine the concrete, objective skills required for success in the role and use these to determine what you will ask of candidates and how you will evaluate them.
✔ Create structure
Create a consistent agenda, talking points, primary questions, and requests for the candidate to prepare in order to gain a set of data that can be more objectively and easily compared.
✔ Enable preparation
Share the details of the interview in advance with candidates so that they will be able to prepare everything you need and present their best to you.
✔ Direct questions
Be clear and direct about what you want to know from each question asked. Vague, ambiguous, or deliberately misleading questions create stress and confusion for the candidate while getting in the way of providing meaningful information on the candidate’s abilities.
✔ Skill demonstration
See direct examples of each candidate’s applied experience by incorporating time to share past projects or by assigning a small project for candidates to complete on their own time. Nothing is more clear than seeing a candidate’s completed work to understand their strengths, interests, and quality of work. It is better to “show” than to “tell.”
Implementation:
Depending on the newness of this topic to your organization, your personal leverage to change the interview process, and your organization's general readiness for change, you may not be able to completely overhaul your interview process at once. That is perfectly understandable, and there are ways to incorporate meaningful changes to your interview process in realistic increments. We find it helpful to think of skill-based interview methods in three tiers, from easiest-to-implement to most-significant-change.
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Skill-Based Q&A Format: Take a skill-based approach to redesigning your interview questions and assessment criteria, increasing clarity and effectiveness of the Q&A style.
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Demonstrating Skills by Showcasing Past Work: Plan on incorporating a portfolio showcase or past-project demo in the interview agenda in order to directly see skills in use.
- Demonstrating Skills Through a Custom Project: Design a small project/exercise based directly on the work done in the role and ask candidates to work on this project for a few days and present their work in the interview. This yields the most direct data on role-specific skills and leads to highly effective hiring decisions.
Important Note:
No matter which elements of skill-based interviewing you are implementing, providing clear, detailed information and expectations in advance of each interview round is essential to ensuring accessibility and equitability among all candidates.
Key Points
➊ Biases become prevalent in traditional interview formats which rely disproportionately on communication skills to be the medium by which candidates convey their technical abilities.
❸ Showcase key skills by allowing candidates to share past work examples or by providing a small role-specific exercise to candidates, requiring use of the exact skills needed in the position.
❹ Improve outcomes from your hiring process, reducing turnover and skill-gaps, by assessing candidates in the most objective and effective way.
To continue with further steps in the Skill-Based Hiring process, return to the Skill-Based Talent Management Guide
We offer these tips and more in our e-learning course,
Neurodiversity At Work: From Bias to Belonging