Skills-based hiring
Also called skills-first hiring
Selecting candidates on demonstrated ability to do the work, rather than on proxies for it such as degrees, job titles or previous employers.
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In practice
The premise is that credentials are evidence about someone’s past access rather than about their present capability, and that the two diverge most for the people hiring most often overlooks: career changers, self-taught practitioners, and anyone whose career paused.
In practice a skills-based process replaces or demotes the resume screen and puts an assessment, a work sample or a structured interview in its place. The change that matters is not adding a test. It is removing the filter that ran before anyone looked at ability.
The common failure is declaring a skills-based policy while keeping a degree filter in the applicant tracking system. Several large employers announced degree-free hiring and saw very little change in who they hired, because the requirement had moved out of the job advert and stayed in the process.
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Predictive validity
The extent to which performance on a selection method actually predicts performance on the job, expressed as a correlation.
Work-sample test
A selection method in which a candidate completes a bounded, realistic task drawn from the job, and the output is scored against predefined criteria.
Resume screening
Reviewing submitted resumes to decide which candidates continue in a process, usually against criteria such as keywords, years of experience, education or employer history.
Read further
Longer pieces on this and the arguments around it.
What skills-based hiring actually is (and what it is not)
Skills-based hiring decides on demonstrated ability, not proxies like degrees or job titles. What it means in practice, where it fails, and how to run it well.
ReadDropping the degree requirement: what has to replace it
Removing a degree requirement without replacing the signal makes hiring more subjective, not less. What the degree was doing, and what to measure instead.
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