Skills -Based Hiring to Expand Diversity and Inclusion

By Ashley Dugger, DBA, SHRM-CP

You’ve likely heard of skills-based education and skills-based hiring, and perhaps your organization has already started utilizing a skills approach to talent development and succession planning. However, consider the impact that transitioning to a skills-based talent acquisition approach could have in terms of expanding your talent pool to reach more candidates and increase inclusion of a more diverse workforce. 

When hiring managers and recruitment specialists adopt a focus on relevant and transferable skills versus only looking for an arbitrary number of years’ experience or previous job titles matching very specific, exclusionary criteria, this severely limits your options for hiring a more diverse group of employees.

A skills-based talent acquisition approach focuses on evaluating candidates based on the skills they can perform to be successful in a particular role, versus only seeking out more traditional hiring criteria such as educational attainment by itself, prior career titles and years in a position, and whether someone has worked in the same industry previously. When you expand to a skills-based approach, you are seeking specific experience performing the skills needed for the role, transferable skills gained from other roles or industries even if not 100% aligned to your organization or job title you are hiring for, and allowing for strong quality of hires as you focus on competency for specific tasks needing to be performed in the job. 

 As Jen Dewar noted in a recent LinkedIn article, adopting a skills-first approach to hiring not only potentially increases the quality of your new hires, it can expand the talent pool to help fill talent shortages, reduce bias and increase your overall talent pipeline diversity, and improve retention of employees as they feel better matched to their roles. Specifically, Dewar noted that this type of approach allows “more women to apply to jobs they may not have otherwise applied due to a higher self-qualification bar” and that those from historically marginalized and underserved communities that are less likely to hold a college degree have much wider pools of opportunity versus traditional hiring practices. 

In a 2021 article for Bain & Company, the authors noted that prioritizing skills in the hiring process expands access to and inclusion of the roughly “76% of Black Americans and 83% of Hispanic workers” without a college degree. Active-duty military service members and veterans seeking to transition to the civilian workforce also gain access and wider consideration to fill open positions when we use a skills-based approach and can leverage the multitude of applicable, relevant and incredibly important skills they gained throughout their military careers. 

If your recruiters or applicant-tracking systems are only checking for keywords to align with past career titles, degree achievements alone versus the skills or competencies within a degree or outside a degree at all, or years of experience in past roles, you can be excluding a wide range of diverse candidates qualified to succeed in the positions!

Personally, I consider my own experience when I sought to transition to the field of HR. For six years, I was rejected from HR positions because I had not “worked in an HR titled role” specifically, even though I had an advanced degree and more than ten years of operational leadership, management and capacity-analysis roles with a variety of HR skills such as recruiting, performance management, training and development, and workforce planning that would have made me an asset to the organizations to which I had applied. 

I finally got a chance to work in the field when an HR director utilized a skills-based approach and evaluated me based on my transferable skills aligning to requirements of the role. We adopted that approach throughout the years as we worked together to bring on student workers and other professionals from departments outside of HR that were interested in making the move to an HR career. 

Consider within your own organizations how you might start to support a skills focus, not only in your hiring practices, but also in offering internships or volunteer work, perhaps special projects in departments to help students and other professionals in your communities, as well as current employees seeking development opportunities or career pathways to new roles. This gives them the chance to not only share existing transferable skills but also develop new skills along the way to open more doors for them in the future. Start by educating recruiters, hiring managers and other decisionmakers on the benefits of a skills-based talent-acquisition approach, and then work to spread these efforts to your learning and development, succession-planning and career-pathway efforts.