Skills-based hiring can help us recruit for jobs that don’t exist yet

Transformation is in the air when it comes to the workplace. The technological advances of the past decade are culminating in an unprecedented mixture of excitement, uncertainty and anxiety and the future of work is hanging in the balance.

The World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs Report found that, on average, workers can expect that two-fifths (39%) of their existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated by 2030. This is something that professionals and organizations everywhere need to be ready for, but it’s hard to know where to start.

For both businesses and job seekers, this is a critical time.

Skills-based hiring and workforce planning can help us hire now for jobs that don’t exist yet — landing candidates the jobs of the future, and ensuring businesses are ready to meet the challenges and rise to the opportunities of. changing world.

By breaking jobs down and laser-focusing on the underlying skills needed for success and adaptability, employers can build fluid, future-ready workforces that – because they’re skills-based – can learn and adapt at the pace of change.

In recent years, conversations around skills-based hiring have boomed. It’s in HR and recruitment headlines weekly, and conversations about skills-based thinking and methodologies have broadened to include skills-based onboarding, skills-based pay and skills-based workforces.

Workforces traditionally revolve around jobs: specific roles and titles with associated responsibilities within a static organizational structure. Jobs have been at the centre of every HR function within an organization, including hiring, performance management, training, pay and internal mobility, for as long as any of us can remember.

More and more organizations are prioritizing skills, rather than roles or titles, in workforce planning and management. This is what’s known as having a skills-based workforce. Deloitte, which has conducted a lot of research into this shift, has described it as “Liberat[ing] work and workers from the confines of the job.”

A skills-based organization recognizes the range of unique skills, mindsets and capabilities that each of its people possesses and understands how they’re connected to success. These organizations view people holistically, beyond the confines of their job titles, which takes them from a functional hierarchy of jobs to, in Deloitte’s words, “a portfolio of ways to organize work, enabling greater agility and more fluid, meaningful packages of work including and beyond the job”.

But what has this got to do with the future? The term ‘future-proof’ gets thrown around a lot, but I don’t think it’s useful. The future will never stop unfolding in front of our eyes. The only thing organizations and jobseekers can be certain of is that there will be change.

Skills-based organizations are more agile. When skills, rather than jobs, make up your operational basis, then you end up with less bureaucracy, more autonomy and your teams are better equipped to adjust to change. Deloitte even reports that skills-based organizations are 57% more likely to be agile.

Making the shift from jobs-based workforces to skills-based workforces will undoubtedly be the shift that helps organizations to become as agile as the future requires. Employers will need to know what underlying, universal skills to look for if they want to hire someone they can upskill when skills change – rather than just hiring someone profiled for a certain role because they have six years of experience in the same role at another company.

Technical skills are coming in to, and then quickly out of, relevance. But skills-based workforces understand their people holistically, rather than just through the technical requirements of their job titles.

They know who’s skilled at forming relationships. They know who’s got the cognitive skills to pick up new tools quickly. They know who’s motivated by impact and who’s motivated by connection, who can seize ambiguity and move through it, and who needs structure to succeed.

At skills-based hiring platform TestGorilla, we use our own skills-based hiring platform to hire all of our people, which includes stripping degree and experience-specific requirements from our job listings.

The fact that everyone has been hired using our skills tests means that we know what skills people have when they join us. We know what people’s strengths and weaknesses are, and we can use that to plan learning and development or to resource certain projects.

I’ve seen teams take certain tests again, together, to plot their strengths and weaknesses then learn and grow together. And I’ve seen teams take personality tests together to understand each other and work together better. Skills-based hiring is the pre-requisite for shifting from a jobs-based to a skills-based workforce.

One example of this is internal mobility. Being skills-based has enabled us to feel confident approving internal moves – from HR to product, or sales to customer success, for example – because we know these people have the skills to succeed. It’s also enabled us to hire people from a range of non-traditional backgrounds in the first place – our social media specialist, for example, used to be a firefighter.

There are jobs that don’t exist yet. Think about them later. Hire now for the skills that equate to success and agility (the technical skills may change, but the human ones won’t), understand your people holistically, and when those new jobs come around the corner, you’ll have hired people who can adapt into them and succeed.