Bridging the Skills Gap with Skills-Based Hiring

At a time when the skills shortage has never been more acute, how can employers fill open positions with top talent? Skills-based hiring can help employers find hidden talent through objective measurement of skills.

As the HR function embraces the promise of data-driven decision making, skills-based hiring can no longer be dismissed as just another hiring fad. A typical engineering position takes an average of 60 daysOpens a new window to fill in the U.S. With over half a million engineering jobs open in the country, it’s clear that the skills gap is real and will only continue to widen.

We sat down with Tigran Sloyan, Co-founder, and CEO of CodeFights to discuss how technology can help plug the skills gap at the UNLEASHOpens a new window America conference which took place in Las Vegas, last month.

The real problem with the traditional credential-based hiring process is that it doesn’t tell you much about an individual’s workplace skills. **Artificial barriers like a four-year degree from a top-name school or an impressive work background with big brands reveal little about an applicant’s qualifications**. What’s important is the match between specific job requirements and an applicant’s measurable skill set to perform the tasks.

When it comes to hiring, I believe that the space just needs more data and more objective data. Otherwise, it’s simply guesswork. You have resume processing technologies, but that’s not enough because we are just not good enough at assessing our own skills. Like you don’t have a frame of reference to say I’m great at this and I’m not good at this

CodeFightsOpens a new window developed a data-driven job marketplace that quantifies both a company’s recruiting process and the technical skills of a candidate, to match the right talent to the right opportunity. With over 1 million users globally and $12.5 million in funding, CodeFights aims to level the tech-recruiting playing field.

A 2017 Accenture studyOpens a new window found that business leaders often tend to view college degrees as a “proxy” for both hard and soft skills, effectively shrinking the pool of viable candidates.  **Moving from a degree and pedigree-based hiring process to a skills-based evaluation can help organizations broaden their talent pool**. More often than not, a candidate’s core competencies aren’t assessed until the final round of interviews – too late for non-degreed, skilled applicants who self-disqualified due to educational or work experience related pre-conditions.

Tigran acknowledges that skills-based hiring is not always an easy sell. Speaking about the education challenge in the industry, he said “It’s a deep educational process for us to get them (recruiters) to stop thinking of people as their background. Stop valuing only those that went to a good school or worked at a brand-name company. But we can’t blame the recruiters, they’ve been doing this for like 30 or probably more years. You just can’t change behavior overnight. So, in a lot of cases, even when empowered with a ton of objective data, they still tend to default to ‘I’ll get by us by backgrounds’. So, it is a big educational process for us to prove the worth of objective measurements and get them comfortable.”

As with any new initiative, a switch to skills-based hiring needs buy-in from other stakeholders as well. “If you’ve got a recruiter bought into it, but the hiring manager isn’t, the recruiter will lose their voice – One look at the candidate’s profile and the hiring manager will ask ‘why did you even consider this person?’ So, we have to educate the hiring team as we call it. Right from the recruiters, to the hiring managers to make sure they’re all bought into it. And the way it has been working for us is starting small.  Start with a small team and you get both recruiters and the hiring managers bought into it. The best part of it though is that candidates who don’t have pedigree tend to be more loyal and be more for you. Just give them a chance to succeed and they’re so grateful to god, they put the extra effort into succeeding at the job for us.”

The keys to plugging the skills gap in the tech industry are to 1) upskill and, 2) match the right candidate to the right position. The explosion of online learning resources like Udemy, EdX, and Lynda have democratized learning to a great extent. Coding bootcamps that offer a more hands-on approach to technical knowledge are also a great way to upskill. The second challenge, i.e., getting the right person for the right job is a little more challenging. “The problem you’ve got has two sides to it that are looking to find each other, and they cannot because of all the noise and segmentation”. While online job marketplaces like LinkedIn have brought the two sides – the talent and the employee, together, they still haven’t been able to solve the matching problem. That’s where skill data comes in.

Armed with skill data from platforms like CodeFights, recruiters can easily find the right person for the right job. Companies like IBM have already started relying on skilled-based assessments to rope in top tech talent. Joana Daly, VP of Talent at IBM says, “About 15 percent of the people we hire in the U.S. don’t have four-year degrees, there’s an opportunity to broaden the candidates to fill the skills gap.”

For many organizations, the shift away from a university degree is taking hold. As more employers realize that skills are the currency for success in the digital age, they can hope to bridge the skills divide.