The job market in the US will likely stabilize in 2022. According to a survey of about twenty-three hundred senior managers, 65% want to add new permanent employees during the initial half of the year. Another 33% are looking for work, with over 10.8 million job opportunities in the United States right now. As a consultant at the vanguard of inclusive employment, our client engagements have taught us one thing: traditional hiring processes are not a sustainable means of addressing workforce expectations. Businesses must update their approaches, to be competitive. This includes adopting skills-based recruitment.
As the most decisive aspect of employment performance, skills-based recruiting prioritizes applicants’ technical abilities and core competencies above degrees or credentials. To decrease prejudice in the recruitment process, the strategy demands recruiting teams to identify the needed and desirable abilities for a position, as well as precisely assess those skills.
Leading organizations, including several associated with OneTen, the Business Roundtable’s Multiple Pathways Initiative, the Markle Foundation’s Rework America Alliance, and others, are progressively shifting to skills-based hiring.
However, the motion is not without error. We cover some of the most common misconceptions about adopting a skills-based strategy — and how you can dispel them to promote a cultural change in your organization and beyond.
1. Skill-based employment is unjust to recent grads.
Skill-based hiring does not preclude college grads from consideration or reduce the entrance threshold. It is about expressing the exact talents for which the degree is supposed to be a proxy. As an outcome, both degree holders and candidates with alternative expertise can be considered for the position. This helps to democrat economic possibilities for everyone while also broadening the skill pool available to enterprises. This serves to democratize economic opportunities for everybody and broadens the skill pool available to businesses.
Degree inflation, or the desire for 4- year degrees in occupations that formerly did not require such qualifications, has created a prestige economy that is hurting companies. Many once upwardly mobile employment have become unattainable to all save those who can pay the rising expense of higher learning under this paradigm. As a result, talent from lower regions, particularly individuals of color, has been unfairly marginalized. Skills-based recruitment is a viable way to address this disparity and restore eligibility to the 66 percent of Americans without a bachelor’s degree, including more than 75 percent of Black people and more than 80 percent of Latinos.
2.Skill-based recruiting results in bad hires and harms the organization.
Using a skills-based strategy for applicant screening and hiring can result in more successful applicant screening and hiring. Hiring for skills predicts future output five times better than recruiting for a degree and 2.5 times better than hiring for job experience. Furthermore, many firms claim that employees without degrees are just as successful as college graduates.
Other benefits of skills-based recruiting include shorter hiring cycles, more employee involvement, and reduced attrition rates.
3.Skill-based recruiting is not a viable talent acquisition technique in our region.
Maybe it wasn’t in the past. Traditionally, recruiting teams have approached recruitment initiatives via a hyper-local focus. With the development of remote employment, employers may do broader applicant searches to identify people who fit the skills requirements of their sector.
On a larger scale, this may entail forming alliances with workforce development groups in underserved areas to create pipelines of talented diverse applicants to fill distant posts. Companies may promote both commercial performance and economic justice through these collaborations.
While developing and implementing skills-based recruiting takes time and needs deliberate learning and unlearning, your firm, workers, and society will gain in the end. Investment in skills-based hiring today will help organizations prepare for an expertise-driven future of employment, as well as establish an economy in which all Americans can fully participate.
Source: Forbes
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