Have you ever applied to a job and known you wouldn’t get a call back? Not because you couldn’t do the work, but because you were missing 1-year of relevant experience, or didn’t have a degree or certification mentioned in the job description?
If so, you’re not alone.
Today, most jobs receive dozens, if not hundreds of applications. And most employers will use keyword searches to narrow down their enormous pools of applicants. Some of the most common things they screen for are years of experience, degrees, and software/platform experience.
Sometimes those qualifications are really important—like having a journeyman license and safety qualifications in the trades, or having a degree in medicine for surgeons.
But sometimes those credentials matter less, and don’t reflect how well someone can do the job.
Does it matter if Ruth A. Jobseeker has 2 or 3 years of experience in Excel, provided they know how to make pivot tables? Probably not. But the person reviewing resumes for that job will still use it as a keyword, and will probably screen out a handful of candidates who are qualified for the job while having slightly less experience—because it is easier to screen for qualifications on paper than skills in real life.
Skills-based Hiring (SBH) is a growing practice where candidates are assessed on their ability to do the job, rather than the words they have on their resumes.
There are lots of different ways of doing this, but in general, it involves doing a test or assignment to help understand how candidates will perform in their roles. Sometimes these will test one core skill, but can also be very complex assessments that imitate real workplace duties and deliverables.
For example. If you were hiring a teacher, a skills-based approach could be a multiple choice or short answer test on how to handle classroom disruptions, and how to deal with bad behaviour.
But it could also be a trial lesson, where the teacher does an entire class as if the interviewers were students.
What are the different kinds of SBH?
Today, most employers use some sort of skill-based assessment in their hires. Here are a few different types you’re likely to encounter in your next job search:
- Content/knowledge tests – these are pretty straightforward, standardized tests. Candidates will answer questions, and the more they get right, the higher they score, and more likely they are to be interviewed and/or hired. Sometimes these tests are so standard that they can be researched online.
- Workplace assignments—often written by the employer themselves rather than a third-party system, these aim to test the candidate’s skill at a specific task or deliverable. If you were hiring a proposal writer, you’d give them some information, and tell them to write as good a bid as they can with the info provided.
- Custom workplace scenarios—these are much more involved workplace assignments that will test a variety of skills. Rather than ask you for one deliverable, the assignment will imitate what the actual job is like much as possible. These tend to be more involved, more technical and take more time, but are also strong predictors of on-the-job success.
Screening vs validating
The difference between screening for skills and validating skills depends on when the assessment comes in the hiring process.
If you get a skills assessment before a formal interview, it is probably being used to screen candidates from many to few—every person, and there could be dozens—who make it to that point in the hiring process is given the same assessment. Those who pass will be selected for interview.
If, however, you receive an assessment later in the hiring process, probably after 1 or 2 formal interviews (not phone screens), then the test is trying to validate the skills you’ve claimed to have in your resume and in your interview. This is used when hiring committees are trying to narrow down their final 3 or so candidates.
What SBH can do for candidates
When done right, SBH hiring can show an employer that you’re able to do the job regardless of experience. Really, it can level the playing field for applicants while also helping employers make better hires.
It can also reduce competition, while helping candidates understand what the job is really like. After all, if there is a time consuming and involved application process, only well-qualified candidates are likely to stick with it. And the ones that do have a very good idea of what the job will be like, and can choose to withdraw if they want.
Recruitment Bias
One of the biggest upsides of SBH is that it isn’t caught up in all the biases of systems and institutions that provide qualifications like degrees, certifications and awards. For example, people who experience barriers to education and employment are less likely to have the qualifications included in many job postings.
Of course that doesn’t mean that unqualified people should be considered for jobs just because they didn’t go to school. Rather, it means that things like degrees can end up discounting a pool of folks that are qualified but are being overlooked because they weren’t able to attain a credential that wasn’t relevant to the job in the first place.
This is most common in technical fields like software, where hobby coders and developers gain expertise in their fields without attending or finishing college programs, or without working for major software companies where professional experience is prized.
Making SBH work for you
When you apply for a job today, odds are your resume will get screened for keywords that hiring mangers think are important before you get the chance to show your skills. Sometimes those hiring managers will be right about the importance of those skills, and sometimes they won’t. This kind of credential-based hiring is by far the most popular way of doing things today.
But things are changing quickly, especially in high-demand fields like technology.
If you’re confident in your skills but find yourself missing some of the requirements listed on jobs, take a look for more progressive companies that might be using skills-based hiring tools. Try to find out more about their hiring processes, maybe on social media or their website.
And if you apply to a job that asks you for an assessment, keep an open mind, even if you think it will take a little longer to complete. These opportunities can give you the chance to show that you are capable of more than what is written on your resume.
