Why Skills-Based Hiring Success Hinges On AI

Working together in a world where talent equals skills, AI can uncover an untouched sea

It’s become trite to say that we live in an age of upheaval, but we do — especially as it pertains to work. Paradigms surrounding employer-employee relationships, work-life balance, and organizational resilience have shifted and continue to shift. HR leaders have adapted their practices accordingly.
 

Skills-based hiring is one increasingly significant adaptation. Traditional hiring strategies target college degrees and work experience as indicators of desired skills and qualifications. However, this practice overlooks a wealth of skilled workers in nontraditional career paths. Skills-based hiring evaluates candidates based on their demonstrated technical proficiencies and interpersonal, or “soft,” skills — e.g., collaboration, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking.

With labor shortages and rapidly changing market demands, it’s all hands on deck. Companies looking to close skill gaps, scale growth, and improve diversity, equity, and inclusion are increasingly implementing skills-focused hiring methodologies.

While many companies have publicly dropped degree requirements and adopted more inclusive hiring practices, these same companies still maintain questionable degree requirements in many key positions. Change is easier said than done.

Institutional habits and biases can stall an initiative before it even begins, no matter the good intentions or evidence behind it. This isn’t a condemnation — it’s just human nature. It’s also where technology can help.

AI-powered hiring platforms assist hiring teams to more effectively and equitably sort, identify, and engage top talent, positioning organizations to meet their current and future needs.

By partnering with AI, HR leaders can augment the human element to create a more robust and inclusive hiring process. Hiring teams can leverage technology to empower their process — and improve the world of work — in several key areas.

A More Equitable Landscape

Recent critiques of hiring culture reveal that traditional methodologies can create barriers to candidacy. Relying on college credentials, for example, excludes 76% of Black Americans and 83% of Latinx workers without four-year degrees. Unable to access these positions, educational barriers can have a cascading effect, further disenfranchising already underrepresented populations for lack of professional experience.

Skills-based hiring pushes back on this trend by highlighting candidates based on their actual skills and competencies. This process can — and should — go beyond reframing how a hiring manager parses a resume. Even with DEI mission statements and frameworks in place, it’s incredibly difficult to disentangle narrow associations of formal education with skill.

AI-powered hiring platforms can directly address reader bias. Pre-made filters can identify and surface candidates with critical skills regardless of education or employment background. “Blind” search technology can also address implicit biases by removing profile information, including age, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ethnic identity, or religious affiliation, that are unrelated to skill or merit.

AI can help cultivate a more equitable workforce by enfranchising underrepresented professionals. Personal qualities like race or gender, or circumstances such as gaps in employment, are not proxies for skills. While HR leaders are making great strides toward more inclusive hiring practices, technology can help close the distance faster.  

A More Plentiful Sea

The current talent market can feel like fishing in an empty sea. Competitive pay, diverse benefits packages, and flexible work modalities cannot fully compensate for a lack of viable or interested candidates. It’s a fish market, and employers need to be proactive if they want to land the best talent.

Hiring around traditional credentials like education and past employment has become like trawling an overfished territory. Pairing an outbound, skills-based approach to sourcing, recruiting, and hiring with the right technology opens up whole new waters.

AI-powered sourcing engines can assess scores of applicant profiles to locate candidates with critical skills who would have been sidelined by more traditional vetting parameters. These platforms can be customized to an organization’s unique specifications and needs — for example, returning only candidates with a 100% skills match.

HR professionals can leverage their own expert knowledge to collaborate with AI platforms. For some platforms, recruiters can customize searches with boolean logic to add layers of keywords related to important skills. For example, a search for quantitative research can be supplemented with terms like “statistics” or “mixed-method research,” empowering professionals to simultaneously harness the efficiency of machine learning while handling human fuzziness.

Working together in a world where talent equals skills, AI can uncover an untouched sea.

A More Resilient Tomorrow

Today’s hiring challenges are vexing enough. But what about tomorrow? The past several years have underscored the need for hiring managers and recruiters to constantly evolve their strategies to stay competitive.

AI is here again to help. For one, AI can be leveraged in career development, identifying current and prospective employee proficiencies and offering insight into upskilling. Fostering a culture of continuous learning directly improves employee satisfaction and reduces turnover. For another, AI-powered platforms can create strategic talent maps, identifying organizational skill gaps and giving hiring teams insight into where and how to grow talent.

Working alongside AI, leaders are better situated to respond proactively and strategically to current projects and future opportunities.

A Human and AI Partnership

Though technology can help eliminate bias and locate more skilled candidates, AI is only part of the equation. For skills-based hiring to be successful, humans are more important than ever.

AI-powered skills-based hiring’s true impact lies in its ability to enhance and support the insight of human professionals. Machine learning relies on programming frameworks and logic that are ultimately envisioned and taught by people leveraging their holistic understanding of social and organizational cultures.

AI needs human critical thinking, HR expertise, and empathy to craft competent, inclusive, and impactful algorithms. A partnership is not only advantageous, it’s essential.

Good enough is no longer good enough. HR leaders and their organizations cannot change the world of work with half measures. But they also can’t do it alone. And they shouldn’t be expected to do so.

AI is a powerful resource for finding, engaging, and cultivating talent. It has the potential to create a more inclusive and equitable world of work, shifting not only the method but the mindset. But AI also can’t do it alone. HR leaders need to seize the opportunity to realize the change they want to see.

Author Bio

Shannon Pritchett is Head of Community at both hireEZ and Evry1 (which she co-founded in 2021). Prior to joining hireEZ, she served in a variety of recruiting roles and later leveraged her industry experience and expertise to hold leadership positions at Moxy, SourceCon, CareerXroads, and beyond. As a talent acquisition leader, she remains passionate about connecting companies with their most valuable asset — people. Connect https://www.linkedin.com/in/sourcingshannon/