Hiring not mis-hiring using skills based hiring

Welcome to another weekend. I am happy I can always welcome you to the weekend, hopefully a time of rest. Please do take the opportunity to rest. There will always be work. Your grandparents did it and your grandchildren will do it also. I am not you’re your HR manager will like this advice I am giving but in today’s world, it is very necessary. Oh, and do go and vote. It is the start to the change you want to see.

Companies in all industries are engaged in a war for global talent. Our industries are not exempt from this. A war sparked by new opportunities caused by remote or hybrid working and growing disillusionment with traditional, biased hiring practices. All of which is causing casualties in terms of low employee retention and high rates of mis-hires.

This means HR teams across the globe are engaged in a daily battle to attract recruit and retain top talent (the best when possible) in the workplace. Also, they need to make sure employees are the right fit for their roles and manage effectively once on-boarded.

But it can be hard to outmanoeuvre competitors – and access talent with the right skill sets – when you’re competing on speed and responsiveness during hiring. Not to mention trying to understand a candidate’s potential and value-add from limited, two-dimensional resumes.

Skills-based hiring is your secret weapon to level the playing field. It helps you find the best people for the job, rather than focusing on connections, education, or previous experience.

In the tech world alone, hiring managers greed that finding qualified candidates was their biggest challenge. It is getting harder and harder for them to get in front of the most suitable professionals and accurately evaluate their skills and value. Not to mention, outflank other companies on hiring responsiveness, speed, and transparency.

Failing to attract and retain the right talent is costly. That is that you can lose your competitive edge and ability to grow and scale sustainably.

Hiring is not the only tactic you need to win the war. Not only is it potentially cheaper to retain, upskill, and promote talent internally, but there is also the fallout from the impact of high employee turnover on organizational performance and team morale when you fail to retain talent.

Staff attrition make it hard to maintain a stable company culture and ensure employee happiness and success. It is also more challenging to stay competitive during hiring if you are scrambling to find and interview suitable applicants and base assessments on a holistic understanding of each one. I know I am preaching to the converted.

Many industries are struggling to find and retain the best talent after Covid-19, especially in Nigeria, certain knowledge-based industries have been dealt a more severe blow. Some examples are, Engineering, Software development, Manufacturing, Finance and Healthcare. Essential services to cut a long story short.

Since there is a bigger demand for talent than workers, skilled job seekers are at an advantage when searching for the right job and company. if you are in one of these industries, you need to do more to win over candidates.

Read also: 2023 Hiring and salary trends for the legal field

In the next couple of weeks I will again highlight strategies. However over the time I have been writing this column I have been giving strategy after strategy.

To win the talent war, you need to differentiate your business from your competitors by aligning your hiring process with the skill sets you want to attract. You must ensure a fair and bias-free interview process.

This starts with adopting a talent-first mindset and using objective methods to make sure candidates have the right skills for the role before you start interviewing.

Skills-based hiring helps assess a candidate’s value-add to your organization through scientifically backed assessments that mirror on-the-job scenarios or feature skills-based tests. Role-specific tests measure soft and hard skills and skills related to programming , communication, leadership, and much more.

By contrast, tasks or assignments may involve asking candidates to submit a sample of work or complete a take-home project. This lets you assess their ability to handle role-specific situations.

This allows you adopt a talent-first mindset that benefits your organization and employees by promoting equality of opportunity, creating diverse teams, and widening the talent pool. Focusing on skill sets (hard and soft) over education, previous experience, or connections.

Improving the quality of hires and job performance. Increasing organizational efficiency and reducing employee turnover. Freeing up HR and hiring managers to evaluate more assessments and candidates. Embracing the potential of modern technology with automated, anonymized testing

Also, by helping you assess and recruit the most appropriate and qualified candidates for each position, this method gives you more time to focus on optimizing your recruitment and onboarding experience. This reduces the number of steps an applicant needs to take throughout the hiring process, so they are more likely to stay interested in your brand and offer.

Using this method you can reduce total time-to-hire, or how quickly you move a candidate through your hiring process. Also reduce total cost-to-hire or the cost of each new employee. Also reduce total mis-hires, or assigning an unsuitable candidate to an open role.

All this gives you more financial and organizational flexibility and the ability to gain a vital competitive advantage in the war for talent. And of course, better attract skilled, top-tier professionals.