What you need to know about skills-based hiring

The shift to skills-based hiring is generally a good move for job seekers and employers. The trend avoids degree and other requirements that exclude many people. Instead, employers are allowed to focus on whether a person can do the job. There are ways you can take advantage of this trend as a job seeker, such as highlighting quantifiable accomplishments on your resume.?

You likely have heard the term skills-based hiring over the past year. While the idea has been around for quite some time, the discussion picked up steam as people changed careers during The Great Reshuffle. The term can be confusing, though. After all, isn’t the goal always to hire people with the skills to do the job? Yes, but that’s not always how it works.

The reality is that many companies have set degree requirements or asked for specific experience in job ads. One of the issues with these demands is that they automatically exclude a lot of qualified people for those roles. Ignoring those allows qualified and competent people with diverse backgrounds to access those opportunities — expanding an employer’s talent pool.

How do you take advantage of this new type of hiring as a job seeker? Well, you need to put your skills on display during the hiring process.

“You want to make sure that you are not only taking inventory of your skills but also pushing your skills front and center,” said Christopher Taylor , who is The Occupation Optimist. “And that's something that a lot of people have trouble doing, but it's something that you absolutely can do regardless of what industry that you're a part of and regardless of where you are on the organizational chart.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Taylor on my podcast — Get Hired with Andrew Seaman — by clicking here . He told me that people struggling to identify their skills can look to their resumes for guidance.

“Anytime you're having trouble, you could always take a look at your current resume and ask yourself, ‘What was the impact of this task?’

“You want to make sure that your resume is focused on results, accomplishments, achievements and quantifiable contributions — but not just from past positions,” he said. “Also from volunteer experiences, education, as well as community engagement.”

Focusing your resume on results can help showcase that you have the skills to accomplish what the prospective employer needs to be done.

Of course, you also need to make sure you have the ability to get the job done, too. You don’t need to meet every requirement, though.

“No one's got 10 out of 10,” Taylor told me. “If you come across a job you're excited about, and the job sounds like something that you can do and you believe that you're able to sell yourself, you want to go for it.”

Fortunately, there are more pathways than ever into high-paying jobs even if you lack needed skills. Companies — especially some of the biggest names in tech — have stepped up to offer training programs for people looking to get into their fields.

Google Career Certificates is one of those programs. Participants can earn certificates in digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, data analytics, project management, UX design and Android development.

“There are so so many examples of people who came from all different types of work and types of backgrounds, but now have landed in great jobs and are advancing in those jobs,” said Lisa Gevelber , who is founder and VP of Grow with Google, which oversees the certificate program.

You can listen to my full conversation with Gevelber, who is also Google’s chief marketing officer for the Americas region, on another episode of my podcast by clicking here .

“This is why we do this work,” Gevelber told me. “It's to see people's lives changed for the better and their family's lives changed for the better.”

Other companies, such as Amazon, have training programs, too. You can learn more about that program by clicking here .

What have you learned about skills-based hiring over the last year? Join the conversation .

This week on Get Hired with Andrew Seaman , I'm joined by ALOK, who is an artist, activist, writer and performer. We discussed their career, their life and their advice for young LGBTQ+ professionals and their coworkers. Listen to the whole episode below or by clicking here . You can also read the transcript by clicking here .

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