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When hiring a new person into your organization, it's very likely that you will review their resume, CV, or professional profile and assess how their experience might apply to what your team needs. This is a very logical approach to assessing talent, however, when you look at how quickly the skills to perform each role are changing, only looking at past experience could leave you with a big skill gap. Hiring someone for their skills is a much safer, and longer-term bet, but it's hard to change how you may have been looking at talent.
There are many news headlines that share the warnings; we have enough bodies to fill the roles, but skills development is not keeping up with the demands of today's businesses and tomorrow's innovation. Even if unemployment rates are high, it does not mean you will have more available talent that your business needs. Hiring for skills means that your workforce is better prepared for changes your business may need to take in the future and are likely more adaptable to the future organization you are starting to envision.
To make sure you are not only attracting the best candidates, but know who they are when they're right in front of you, here are five ways to approach hiring for skill:
Previous approaches may have had you looking for top commercial or consumer brands, or top international schools on a resume. Many have assumed that if they survived a period at that school, or at that employer, they would automatically be able to deliver what is needed in a particular role. Skill-based hiring has you looking for stories with keywords like: the ability to communicate, learning new systems, managing relationships, interpreting situations, forming new ideas, strategic thinking, and respecting others' input.
Many of these things are much harder to teach, change, or develop in candidates regardless of the industry they come from. These are the solid skills that can make an immediate impact and fit in with your culture, today and in the future. For consistency across all your interviews, a scoring tool to identify where the greatest added value would be, where the growth opportunity for each candidate lies, and what your recommendations are can be a helpful way to later review the talent available to you.
Having a strong understanding of what you need each role to bring to your team today--and how their role may quickly evolve--will help you find strong candidates. These will turn into fantastic employees who are adaptable and will help bring your organization into the future. It may be tough at first to be able to evaluate experience and then go beyond that to focus on skills. Know that getting a start on this will give you a competitive edge as the battle to attract, develop, and retain your talent heats up.
John Carrozza is a principal consultant with Riviera Advisors, Inc., a boutique Recruitment/Talent Acquisition Management and Optimization Consulting Firm based in southern California. His career has been dedicated to helping Talent Acquisition teams perform at their best, and has previously done this at The Walt Disney Company, and consulting for Universal Studios Hollywood and DirecTV. In his spare time, John has dabbled in producing film, video and web content. For more information on John Carrozza, please visit: www.RivieraAdvisors.com.