Skill-Based Hiring: Moving Beyond Resumes with AI-Driven Assessments

Days when you had to present the entire summary of your life to get a job are gone. The hiring patterns are now morphing owing to the revolutionary technologies surfacing in Industry 4.0. Organizations are utilizing AI to perform the whole candidate screening and vetting process. It's simply not all about bulky resumes anymore. Knowing what to expect when you apply for your next job and preparing for the same can turn the tides in your favor. Without further ado, hop on to this mini guide to understand what skill-based hiring means and the role of AI in it.

What exactly is skill-based hiring?

These days, it’s all about what you can bring to the table, i.e., what you CAN do and not what you have ALREADY done. Organizations are hyped up to find candidates who fit the bill in terms of skills alone, irrespective of their flamboyant degrees. Skill-based recruitment, in particular, is turning out to be fruitful for job seekers and hiring managers alike. Skill-based hiring, in essence, is a recruitment strategy where the candidate's skills and competencies are given priority in comparison to the previous work experience or academic credentials, unlike the traditional methods.

To illustrate, say there’s an opening for a digital marketing role in XYZ Company. There are two candidates: one without any formal degree and the other one a freshly graduated marketing major from a prominent university. The only difference here is that the first candidate is apt at performing social media management, content creation, and SEO implementation. Indisputably, the company will opt for hiring the former candidate without any academic excellence but relevant proficiency. Hiring via this technique ushers companies towards bringing aboard a competent workforce that bridges skill gaps and economic demands.

Merits of skill-based hiring

Skills-based hiring practices are proving their mettle in countless ways. For one, these practices present a broader network of talented individuals. For the other, these strategies set the pace for organizational efficiency in the long run. Highlighted are some noteworthy benefits of skills-based hiring.

Job-relevant hiring enhances employee performance, engagement, and retention.
There’s a tone down on bias related to race, names, geographical locations, familiarities, and more.
It’s a quick-paced recruitment procedure that lowers ramp-up time, initial training costs, downtime resulting from inadequate skills, etc.
This strategy reinforces job adaptability and ease of workforce development through upskilling and reskilling and fosters innovative decision-making.
The quality of work, team cohesion, workplace diversity and inclusiveness amplify when companies employ applicants solely on their skills.
Through the competency-based hiring process, businesses can accommodate individuals from various generations by forsaking bias.
The quick tempo of such an employment method cuts down on costs that might emerge from restructuring a team or multiple hiring and rehiring in the long run.

Challenges surfacing in competency-based hiring

Skill-based recruiting, without a hitch, is a fool-proof practice of staffing a talented workforce. Nonetheless, owing to its novelty, certain misconceptions and challenges surface innately. Some of the apparent ones are outlined below.

HRs and Stakeholders are reluctant to incorporate skill-based hiring into recruitment methods.
There’s a time crunch when it comes to evaluating large volumes of resumes for role-specific skills.
Lack of clarity in defining the set of skills essential for a role.
High employee turnover pertaining to mismatched expectations, insufficient upskilling initiatives, and unbalanced team synchronization.
Absence of skilled individuals for the roles mandating utilization of advanced technologies.
Subjective human prejudice in testing and validating skills.
A steep in costs owing to the integration of tools and systems to screen competent applicants.

How AI can revolutionise skill-based hiring

The aforementioned setbacks put a damper on talent sourcing, leading to hesitation and recruitment uncertainties. Here’s where AI comes into play. Loaded with responsive algorithms, NLP methods, and more, AI software can weed through exhilarating volumes of data in minutes without compromising on accuracy. This minimizes the time consumed by the entire hiring cycle. Unconscious bias related to subjective preferences, geographical factors, and more can be omitted by utilizing AI in hiring. Scrutinizing candidate resumes repeatedly can lead to mental fatigue in human resources, leading to unintended errors down the hiring cycle.

With AI, it gets easier to filter through the applications to flag unqualified candidates or eliminate falsified resumes. Smart software like chatbots that answer applicant queries promptly enhance a candidate’s overall experience, which boosts brand creditability. Moreover, artificial intelligence can exclusively pinpoint job-specific skills and devise customized assessments to validate the competencies of prospective employees. To top it off, AI tools can predict individuals’ performances through adaptive learning methods, trend analysis, and examine public portfolios for precise evaluation. Generative AI, in particular, is a buzzing technology that objectively improves skill-based hiring procedures and nudges exceptionally proficient candidates down the hiring pipeline.

Closing remarks

Skills-based hiring can be augmented via the integration of AI tools to rigorously vet and screen applicants solely on their competencies. The assimilation of AI eliminates several challenges like time constraints, precision level, downtime taken to evaluate large volumes of resumes, and more. Nonetheless, organizations still fall short in upskilling and reskilling their human resources, which hampers their employee retention streaks. Discerning these requisites, Garranto Academy offers exemplary courses in high-demand skills to upskill organizational workforces and career-oriented individuals.