What is skills-based hiring?
Skills-based hiring focuses on matching job candidates to specific skills required in a role, rather than by a prerequisite degree or experience. For many years, employers would rule out candidates who didn’t have a college diploma for professional roles. That’s changing.
Christine, Director of Competitive People Intelligence with Fidelity, describes skills-based hiring this way:
“If there is an open role, [we try] to match a candidate based on their competencies rather than their reputation or their pedigree. We used to think that their credentials spoke to their ability to do the role. Now, skills-based hiring would be a different mindset where you’re thinking, ‘what are this person’s specific role-based skills, personality, and soft skills? What is their proven capability to perform the unique requirements of this role?'”

Why is skills-based hiring becoming so popular among recruiters?
Several forces have converged to create the need for skills-based hiring recently.
One is that technology is advancing so fast, educational institutions can’t keep up with workplace demands. In other words, the skills and competencies learned in a four-year-degree program may be replaced by AI or other automated systems in a matter of months.
New jobs emerge as quickly as old ones fade, and companies are often scrambling to find people to fill those roles. That forces them to look outside their traditional pool of candidates—to people without a degree or with non-traditional career paths. Some reports show that using a skills-based hiring strategy expands the candidate pool up to nine times more than traditional hiring practices.
Another reason recruiters have embraced skills-based hiring is the increasing number of people working as freelancers or entrepreneurs. When recruiters overlook people who took part in the gig economy or worked as solopreneurs over the last several years, they severely limit the number of candidates available to them for open positions. They would also miss out on the unique strengths these candidates possess because of their non-traditional work experience.