Written by Laura-Kate Ruttle, Principal Consultant
As with any organisational change, moving towards skills-based hiring solutions does come with its challenges. As the saying goes, there’s often no gain without (at least some!) pain. To reap the potential benefits of such a move, you will need to overcome some hurdles. Knowing what these potential hurdles are upfront helps you to prepare, plan, and reduce the impact that they may have on the process.
I won’t make any promises that this is an exhaustive list, but here are four of the most common challenges we see when working with our clients to implement a skills-based hiring approach. Most importantly, there’s also information on how you can overcome them, too.
Challenges of implementing skills-based hiring solutions
1. Changing mindsets and gaining internal buy-in
Some people are naturally more open to change than others. After all, ‘openness’ is one of the Big 5 personality traits. When making the decision to implement skills-based hiring initiatives, you’re bound to have supporters, but the likelihood is that you’ll have challengers, too.
The degree of opposition to this change often depends on where you start from and what your hiring managers and recruitment teams are used to. If your organisation is already using standardised assessments for competency-based hiring, the shift to a skills-based approach may not feel disruptive. However, if your current process relies on CVs and unstructured interviews, the change may feel more substantial and challenging to navigate. Research has shown many hiring managers believe their ‘gut feeling’ is a strong predictor which makes it difficult to move them away from this intuition to a standardised and objective psychometric assessment.
To overcome these potential objections, I’d recommend the following tips:
- Involve your internal teams early. Getting hiring managers engaged in the process as soon and as much as possible can help. From role discovery and job analysis to asking for their opinion when designing frameworks or the reports that they will be using, ensure they’re involved and their feedback is valued.
- Share the evidence with them. Data talks, so demonstrate the psychometric credibility and scientific foundations behind the approach you’re putting in place, alongside the success stories demonstrating the operational benefits.
- Connect it to both personal and organisational goals. Whether it’s reducing the time spent manually considering candidates or broader metrics such as improving workplace diversity, show how the change can support meeting these goals.
- Conduct a pilot and share the story. Running a pilot can really help to build proof of success within your specific context. Sharing the story in an engaging way following the pilot will make it particularly persuasive to the necessary stakeholders.
- Equip and reward your teams. Make sure your hiring managers have all the tools and training they need to succeed. Specifically recognise early adopters, encouraging them to act as process advocates and mentors.
2. Mitigating risks
There is plenty of information available on the potential benefits of moving towards skills-based hiring practices, but there is less about the risks of getting it wrong. However, it’s important to note things can go wrong if the process isn’t well-designed, well-executed, and continuously reviewed. To avoid this, I recommend a structured approach. Following our six-stage model to go from planning to practice can help with this. Here are some key questions to ask yourself prior to implementation:
- Do we have a clearly defined skills definition and taxonomy that is truly representative of our organisation, roles, and company culture?
- Do we understand how different skills relate to our organisational goals and specific roles?
- Do we have a solid understanding of the skills strengths and gaps across our current workforce, allowing us to prioritise both hiring and mobility decisions?
- Do we have a reliable, valid, and fair way to measure relevant skills objectively throughout the hiring process?
- Are we collecting readily accessible data to assess the impact that the move has made?
If you can confidently respond “yes” to these, you’re in a much stronger position to avoid common issues that can arise with implementing skills-based hiring solutions.
3. Prioritising the right types of skills
A real danger is narrowing down the definition of skills too much. In doing this, you risk not measuring aspects that are still important, valid, and fair predictors of organisational or role-specific success. A useful way to avoid this is by thinking about three key pillars regarding skills, keeping in mind that a well-rounded, holistic view of a candidate’s future performance should include aspects from each:
- Transferable skills: These are likely to be relevant across multiple roles and levels and typically remain more stable over time as they are less impacted by industry shifts and technological changes. These types of skills are usually influenced by an individual’s characteristics (personality, ability, motivation, etc.) and life or work experience, as opposed to specific training.
- Job-specific skills: These are more specialised, role-specific skills that usually reflect areas of technical knowledge or expertise related to performing functional tasks. These types of skills are typically learned through specific training.
- Skills foundations: These are the aspects or characteristics of an individual that will influence their long-term demonstration of skills in-role. For example, a candidate may demonstrate great attention to detail in a high-stakes hiring assessment, but if their natural preference is to function at a ‘big picture’ level, they may struggle in a role that requires daily focus on accuracy and details. Skills foundations provide the missing link between skills proficiency and the consistent demonstration of skills over time, while also providing indication into how likely someone is to acquire new skills (their skills potential).
Not only what you measure, but when you measure it is important. Skills foundations are typically assessed early using an automated online psychometric process, especially for high volume recruitment. If you’re most interested in skills proficiency, then transferable and job-specific skills are better assessed later, for example in assessment centres where actual demonstration of the skill can be observed.
4. Measuring effectiveness
Finally, it’s time to collect the data! This is a big one as without it, you’re essentially just hoping for the best. You’ll need to put energy into the upfront design and implementation, so it’s important to invest that same effort into tracking the effectiveness.
Start with clarity. What outcomes are you expecting to see and which matter most? Take into account your organisational goals, current challenges, and what impact would most convincingly persuade your internal stakeholders of the success of this initiative. Once you have this clarity, ensure you have baseline data to compare against. For example, there’s little impact in sharing a time-to-hire for the new process if you can’t share the previous time to demonstrate the improvement.
Even if you implement a new process and achieve meaningful hiring improvements, it’s important not to pause your efforts there. Firstly, the data can be used to influence incremental changes to further enhance the success of moving to a skills-based hiring approach. Secondly, positive initial results aren’t guaranteed to continue. Technology evolves, industries shift, and these changes are likely to impact which skills are required. Ongoing monitoring and improvements (big or small) help to ensure the longevity of your success, keeping the approach relevant and effective.
Overcoming skills-based hiring challenges is achievable
Shifting to skills-based hiring solutions doesn’t have to be a mammoth task. There are always going to be challenges to tackle – getting stakeholders on board, managing risks, making sure you’re focusing on the right skills, and measuring whether it’s working – but none of these are impossible to overcome. When implemented with a thoughtful, clear approach, the shift can feel less like an overhaul and more like a natural evolution to smarter, fairer, and more effective hiring.
About the author: Laura-Kate Ruttle, MSc, is a Principal Consultant at Talogy who specialises in designing and delivering digitally-driven solutions, particularly in the high-volume and early careers space. She has experience partnering closely with clients across industries to understand their unique challenges and goals, designing fair and engaging assessments that deliver meaningful results. A strong believer in the power of data, she is passionate about using insights to tell compelling stories and guide evidence-based decisions.
