Skill-First Hiring for Non-Technical Roles with HackerEarth

Skill-first hiring is the hottest topic in the talent world. When Aneesh Raman, head of LinkedIn's Opportunity Project, interviewed talent and learning leaders and asked them how AI would change the world of work — a topic that came up consistently was Skill-first hiring.

It's so gratifying to see this. We started our journey of democratizing access to opportunities and creating a Skill-first hiring narrative more than a decade back. We spent the past many years perfecting the craft of assessing technical skills and now we are expanding our footprint going into non-technical roles as well.

Our Advent into Non-Technical Screening

The rapid development in AI has enabled us to deepen our capabilities to assess for skills that are not software engineering related. While HackerEarth has always had support for multiple choice questions, it wasn't straight-forward to simulate real-world tasks for non-technical roles. But with LLMs, we have been able to break that barrier. We have built an automated evaluation engine on top of our 'essay-based' questions that allow you to pose role-relevant questions for even non-technical roles. For instance you can ask someone to create a project plan for roll out of an epic, testing their project management skills, or you can give a financial data set to a candidate and ask them to conduct an analysis, or you give business context to a candidate and ask them to prepare a sales plan for the year.

The platform is designed such that it allows the responses to be matched against a range of multiple correct answers with varying scores or do an open ended evaluation, subjectively evaluating it against a benchmark solution.

Some of the Non-Technical Roles being Assessed by our Customers

Companies across various industries are utilizing HackerEarth to screen candidates for a variety of non-technical roles. Below are some actual roles being evaluated by our customers that demonstrate the platform's flexibility and effectiveness in a skill-first hiring process:

• Market and Infrastructure Supervisor: Assessing candidates on their analytical skills and understanding of market dynamics.
• Assistant Director, Coins & Business Operations: Evaluating leadership qualities and operational management skills.
• Technical Writer: Screening for exceptional writing skills, technical comprehension, and the ability to convey complex information clearly.
• Financial Analyst: Assessing analytical abilities, understanding of financial modeling, and proficiency in data interpretation.
• Salesforce Analyst: Assessing ability to use Salesforce platform and derive analysis from data in it.

These are only a few examples, our customers continue to open up new roles to the platform's subjective question evaluation feature. It enables hiring managers to pose real-world scenarios or problems relevant to the role and assess candidates based on their responses, thereby identifying those who best fit the role's requirements.

Advantages of a Skill-First Approach in Non-Technical Hiring

We have always believed that Skill-First hiring is the only way how a hiring process should be built. Some posit that an over-emphasis on skills undermines the value of getting to know the human-side of a person, but that is true only if, skills are the only criteria for selection. We don't believe that we need to take out the human evaluation from hiring process, on the contrary that's going to become even more relevant in this AI-drive world. But that has to come at later stages. A skill-first hiring process in the sourcing, screening and first few rounds of interviews ensure that we are screening-in a wider pool of applicants and creating a fair and merit-drive hiring process. Here's how a Skill-First process adds tangible value:

• Comprehensive Evaluation: Beyond assessing technical skills, it enables companies to understand a candidate's problem-solving approach, creativity, and adaptability to different situations.
• Diversity and Inclusivity: By focusing on skills over credentials, companies can tap into a wider talent pool, promoting diversity and inclusivity within the workforce.
• Predictive Performance: Skill-based assessments are often better predictors of job performance, allowing companies to make more informed hiring decisions.

We are living in very exciting times. AI will disrupt every function of work and personal life. For recruiting leaders, there is an opportunity to be ahead of the adoption curve and be the early ones to responsibly leverage AI to create a more skilled and equitable workplace.