This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 160

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Open Kitchen: Problems of Skill Based Hiring

One of the reasons why I do Brainfood Live every week is that it is a real privilege to speak to other recruiters and learn from their perspectives. It was through debate and free exchange that several ideas emerged which I think none of us might have independently arrived at, and I wanted to use today's Open Kitchen to share these ideas in the hopes that it might continue the conversation on Skill Based Hiring.

First things first, we need to understand that SBH / SBO is an idea which first caught the collective imagination pre-Covid, primarily as a method of both increasing the available talent pool by reducing the importance of credentialism which screened out too many people, especially those from under represented groups. The concept receded during the pandemic period when Remote working dominated the dialogue, and then had to wait for its moment again when AI gazumped the conversation following the sensational release of ChatGPT in late 2022. It is only now is beginning to re-emerge as the dominating idea in our industry, perhaps given new energy by the very prospect of AI solving the data crunching problem which had previously been an impediment to the practical implementation of the concept.

In the conversation we had with our wonderful guess above - Matthias Schmei?er , Dan Logan , Christine Ng , Andrew Grier and Marija Kose - we put advocates and detractors together in civilised debate. I highly recommend you watch or listen to it , as it was a hugely educational for me, and I think it could also be for you. Also don't miss Yasamin Karimi monologue at the beginning - technology has a hugely significant role to play in the viability and utility of SBH / SBO, as we will on to discuss.

Some topic areas that we covered...

1. What is a Skill?

One of the few things the panel agreed upon on this issue, was that there was not a clear consensus on what a skill even is, and we often end up confusing related but distinct concepts which lead us to problematic conclusions, unexpected outcomes and failures in execution. A great of the reason why SBH/SBO stays as rhetoric rather than translating into reality, is because of this lack of clarity.

I asked ChatGPT what the key differences where and it came up with some decent definitions. In particular, the specificity of the skill and its proximity to a specific task, whereas a 'trait' is an inherent characteristic of the individual, portable to different circumstances, and not something which is knowledge based or learned. Finally, competence - an old favourite of TA / HR - is more nebulous, combo of skill + trait applied to a historical circumstance, an example of which is seen as evidence of the competence.

There are follow on implications for these definitions.

• SBH is not a denial of knowledge / experience, even though it is often confused for this, as reducing the weight of the CV / Resume was one of the primary drivers behind the idea. However, what we are testing for a learned skill, not an inherent trait, so the CV returns to relevance if it is written in a way which describes the skill that we are looking to test. Now if you want to do Traits Based Hiring, (i.e. 'Hiring for Potential' ) go ahead and do so, but that is a different thing from SBH and should be labelled as such.
• SBH is most applicable for when the task is also specific or the job has specific requirements. I want to hire a brick layer - the skill I need is brick laying - I should not be valuing a CV but testing for the candidates ability to lay some bricks. Hence, we need to examine the composition of the job we are hiring for and understand how significant the testable tasks are for effectively doing the job.
• SBH is least applicable for when the job is less defined and the tasks are not predictable or specific. This is when we wander into 'hiring for potential' territory, which is a form of Traits Based Hiring and not Skill Based Hiring as is commonly misconceived, or 'hiring for fit', which is an even more nebulous catch all, for a person with whom the existing team will get on well enough in order to efficiently important the relevant information when the context arises.

Hence we can already see that SBH is variably applicable to different job roles depending on how important specific tasks are within the job, and also if those skills are easily testable. No surprise then that software engineering was one of the easily cited disciplines for skill based hiring, and where the most mature assessment technologies have been.

Lesson: Understand that SBH may not be suitable for all roles in your organisation. By extension, it may be more or less suitable for particular organisations based on the composition of their workforce.

2. Accuracy of the Assessment

How accurate is our assessment of the skill?

We will not really know this until we feed performance data of the now hired candidate back to the analysis of the assessment. Hence any SBH will initially involve - quite ironically - a leap of faith on the assessment methods we might like to use. The panellists were unanimous that the way to do this was the get the assessment as close to 'real world' as possible - conduct pair programming with future team mates for example - but getting closer to reality means loss of scale. It's something you can do when hiring volume is low and the assessor to candidate ratio is high. The greater the hiring volume, the greater the need for abstraction of the assessment that can handle the scale, and the less reliable that assessment is going to be. Conversely, the higher the volume, the less you might actually care about the accuracy, because each hire might individual matter less either way. Sorry, real talk here folks!

Lesson: Be critical of any assessment used, and ensure your confidence in the assessment is moderated by feed back from performance data. Where ytyou are early in process and no performance data is available to feedback, your confidence in the assessments should be correspondingly low.

3. Skills Fade / Skills Currency

A common criticism of any kind of testing is that it does not capture the dynamism of skills - at best, it is a snapshot of a single moment in time. A candidate's capability in a skill can and will improve based on usage, familiarity, practice and new insight. Likewise, a candidates capability can also degrade, through lack of use, a loss of motivation, some external factor not directly related to the work or simple physical and mental decrepitude over time. In most SBH approaches a candidate is tested only once - pre-hire - and then not tested again once they are in the organisation. How do we track the development of this skill over time - with constant testing?

Translating even successful Skills Based Hiring to Skills Based Organisation falls down at this stage - tracking of the skills development over time is difficult. We either interrupt the workers with constant testing or intrude on their privacy with employee surveillance. Both seem suboptimal

Additionally, we do not or are not able to track 'learning speed'. A highly experienced candidate may have very well developed skills (at a specific task) but is that a better candidate than a far less experienced candidate with a very close skill level but who took far less time to achieve that capability? In VUCA world where 'never normal' is the condition we all must get used to, the ability to learn new skills is perhaps the only skill we really need to care about. Yet is SBH centred testing for this Metaskill? It probably should be.

Lesson: We have challenges on how maintain the currency of our assessment of the skills. In order to translate SBH to SBO, we need to have a strategy on this.

4. Performance is Contextual

Skills might be captured in an abstraction (i.e a coding challenge) but real performance in most forms of modern work takes within a context - a team, a company, an active market with competitors, customers and clients who each do unexpected things which influence our task. Just as the best test score does not mean the best driver, a test - however accurate or 'real world' it may appear to be, will never replicate the situations in which that skill needs to be deployed. The exception to the rule is if the job takes place in a controlled environment where the workers are insulated from the external market and the work consists of repeated actions which never deviate from a predetermined protocol.

Of course these jobs exists - arguably they were the most common form of job as envisaged by Henry Ford - divide the work into repeated components and have specialists just do that one thing over and over before passing it on to the next person in an assembly line. Yet this type of work which is increasingly vulnerable to automation as machines and AI can and are being trained on the required process and can and are simply taking it over.

Skill Based Hiring would actually be highly appropriate approach for this type work, but interestingly it is usually not formally deployed for hiring on the factory floor assembly line but instead for entry into the knowledge economy. We do SBH for software developers, not for meat packers or brick layers or assembly line workers. This is a problem because job performance in knowledge work is usually high context, whereas job performance in manual work is usually low context. In other words, your job performance is contingent on other people and their actions and inputs are not easily measured yet feed into your work and influence the quality of your output. You likewise, do the same for and to them. Perhaps the most illustrative example of job performance being high context is in the field of elite team sports - how many times have we seen a superstar player in Team A, suddenly become a benchwarmer after transferring to Team B? The quality (traits) of the player has not necessarily changed, but the context has. Does SBH capture context? It could, but I suspect it usually doesn't

This is incongruity is a significant component to why SBH has not translated readily from idea to practice. We may be using a very good approach for the wrong kind of work and under estimating the importance of context when making the skills assessment.

Lesson: Ask how important is context to the performance of the task. If the task or job is high context then Skill Based Hiring may not be the most suitable for the assessment approach. If you still insist on using it, then some way of putting context into the assessment is essential. Btw 'Paired Programming' is exactly SBH + Context.

5. SBH -> SBO. Maybe it should be SBO->SBH

So here's some heresy for you: maybe recruitment itself is the wrong context for Skill Based Hiring?

Recruitment - talent acquisition - is finding / attracting, assessing and then hiring new colleagues into the business. This is an episodic, necessarily decontextualised, procedurally linear activity. The less we make it so, the less it appears to be 'recruiting' and more it becomes something like community management - interacting with the potential future candidates in such a way that we become more familiar with who would 'fit' into our organisation. This is a form of community based hiring which is familiar to those who work in SaaS, especially when the software itself is used by the community you want to recruit from. We see few - if any - examples elsewhere (if you know of any, please do let me know in comments below!)

Performance feed back loop is also broken. We know this because the data is housed in different places, managed by different teams. Talent Acquisition and Talent Development are occur under different departments, and making the two join together has been a painful and fruitless task. Perhaps in future we will see those two functions come together more, so TA does less rowing away from HR but in fact reverses course and merges more fully with it.

All of these ideas point the idea that recruitment itself is the wrong context for SBH. We need to start with the data on our own employees, before extracting the trends which indicate consistently strong performance and applying assessment for those traits into the hiring process. We then reexamine the performance of the newly hired and loop this back again to the hiring process. Hence, SBO - Skill Based Organisation - is a precursor to Skill Based Hiring, not the outcome of it.

Lesson: Tech can help. Being able to finally understand what skills are important for performance can now be tracked using Organisational Network Analysis. Tooling is also maturing to get us there - see TechWolf.ai

Love to know what you think of all this - let me know in the comments how wrong you think I am!

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

Whats In The News?

LinkedIn Roll Out 'Verified Recruiter'

ID fraud is a huge problem in social media and every platform has made moves toward real ID. LinkedIn has a unique approach - a verification badge for recruiters with the LinkedIn Recruiter badge. Is it crazy to imagine a future scenario where only those with this badge (and the paid LIR account...) will get messages sent or read? We might be beginning to see the end of LinkedIn as a free service, at least for the recruiter tools side of it. Keep an eye on this - more here

Checkr Cut 32% of Workforce

Tough news last week for background screening service, Checkr. Challenging to guess the direction of the market but with interest rates remaining high, market growth simply has not happened in the key areas of planned expansion. Service is needed, by the hiring has slowed. Techcrunch with the report .

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiter Events to Attend in 2024

There are 100+ events in the Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 - make sure you bookmark this spreadsheet, share it with your event organiser and event going friends and get yourself to one of these this year. If you see any that are missing and should be there, please do add to the bottom of the spreadsheet - I will merge them in weekly.

Canadian Staffing Summit 2024 , Weds 17th April, One King West Hotel, Toronto

Honoured to be keynote in the Canadian Staffing Summit 2024. It is going to be welcome opportunity to learn from the Canadian community on what the local challenges have been in operating a recruiting business. My task is set those challenges into a global context, and offer some strategies that recruitment agencies in other parts of the world have pursued. It's going to be a great event - tickets here .

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep244 - Data or Ads? Future of Job Board Advertising in Era of Gen-AI , Friday 19th 2pm BST

What is the future of job board advertising? Might there be another revenue opportunity here? We're going to bring all the big heads together on this show to figure out what the future of job boards really looks like. We're with Bill Fischer , CTO (VONQ), Louise Triance , Founder (UK Recruiter), Alexander Chukowski , Senior AI Advisor (Job Boards), Steven Rothberg , Founder (College Recruiter) & Yazal Dalal , Chief Growth Officer (Joveo). Register here

Tribepad Gro Webinar -Unlocking Growth: Scaling Your Team with AI Driven Recruitment , Thursday 25th April, 2pm BST

Re-arranged to next week folks. Reminder that we're going to talk automation in recruitment and super excited to chat with one of the few who have done it, Neil Ray , MD, Livero Group and others. Register here

Simplifying Skills Based Hiring: Are Most Companies Overcomplicating it? 30th April, 12-1pm BST

Skill Based Hiring with a different angle - how do we get out of our own way trying to implement Skills Based Hiring? We're with Dominic Joyce , Head of Talent Acquisition (Travelex) and Robert Newry, CEO (Arctic Shores). Register here

HR Tech Europe , 2nd-3rd May, RAI Amsterdam

HR Tech Europe in Amsterdam promises to be a top class event. I'm humbled to be sharing the stage with luminaries of the industry like Josh Bersin and Madeline Laurano . 2 day event, let me know if you're in Amsterdam in May! Register here

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter,?comment below?with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

Who's Hiring?

Aggregated demand for recruiters, worldwide. Check out Brainfood jobs on TrueUp - if you're looking, check it out here

What Are You Doing?

Martin Dangerfield , MD of Immersive is rebuilding his business in public, via this Notion page . Transparency is difficult, especially when times are not great - (easy to talk about building in public when you're killing it!) - and I'm super impressed by Martin's approach here. If you want to know how others are adapting to 2024 & beyond, follow Martin and check out his Notion.

If you have any personal news or initiative that you want to share, make sure you comment on the this newsletter with your news.

End Note

In Toronto today and will be out and about in town for the rest of the week, so message me if you want to meet up. I will be at the Canadian Staffing Summit on the 17th, so do come up and say hello if you're around. On Saturday, I will out in Montreal before going onto Denver the following week - hope to catch as many of you around as I can.

Have a great week everybody

Cheers

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood , and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.