9 reasons skills-based hiring boosts employee productivity

More and more talent acquisition and other human resource professionals are advocating for hiring students, recent graduates, and other early career candidates based more on their skills and less on what school they attended or even what their major was when they attended that school. But is skills-based hiring just something that sounds good, or does it actually lead to the employer generating more revenues, reducing expenses, or some combination of the two? In other words, is it true that shifting to a skills-based hiring approach leads to increased workplace productivity?

To answer the question, we’ve gathered insights from top professionals, including Chief People Officers and CEOs. From maximizing performance to aligning specific skills with job requirements, dive into these nine expert perspectives on how a focus on skills leads to a more dynamic and effective team.

Maximize Performance with Skills-Based Hiring

We build job titles around particular sets of skills. Still, with the adaptability required of modern teams and vast differences between individuals, you’re better off looking at the skills needed for your team to maximize performance and fill those gaps with the appropriate people. 

With skills-based hiring, you ensure you have all your bases covered straight from onboarding, saving your team time and energy trying to upskill someone who might have a great-looking resume but lacks the skills needed to do the job well. It also allows you to build flexible teams that can move quickly enough to adapt and maintain a speedy competitive advantage.

Robert Kaskel, Chief People Officer, Checkr

Cut Onboarding Time, Enhance Client Relations

Skills-based hiring leads to more productivity because it cuts the onboarding time by at least half. Granted, every company has its own culture and customized working tools that recruits need to be trained on, but if they already have the basic and some advanced skills required to do the job they are hired for, there is less need for hand-holding. 

In my company, interaction with clients is 90% of the job, so I looked for people who understood the tone and philosophy of the company for such engagement, and I find this leads to more positive feedback and longer client relationships.

Manasvini Krishna, Founder, Boss as a Service

Optimize Talent with Unconventional Hiring

Recognizing abilities in their many forms optimizes talent and culture. Rather than fixating on elite school names, our engineering team targets programmers who demonstrate grit, unconventional thinking, and hands-on coding mastery, whatever their background. 

Judging by achievement rather than appearance avoids overlooking hidden gems while building a culture that welcomes effort and unconventional genius. Seeking the underestimated for what they can do, not for the credentials they lack, manifests game-changing productivity.

Lou Reverchuk, Co-Founder and CEO, EchoGlobal

Balance Hard and Soft Skills for Productivity

When we first started recruiting candidates for our team, I was only interested in their technical abilities. Did they have the right experience? What was the standard of their work? I wanted hard facts, definite data, and clear qualifications. In short, hard skills were the heroes. 

However, this approach wasn’t as effective as I’d expected. We had some new recruits who should have been ideal based on their applications, but the truth was, they just didn’t fit. This really impacted the team dynamic, and productivity decreased as a result. It took some time, and training, to correct the situation, and a lot of this revolved around soft skills. 

Now, we have a strong focus on all skills when we hire, as we don’t want to encounter this problem in the future. Seeking soft skills as well as hard skills has increased our productivity, as this supports teamwork and facilitates a positive working environment. When assessing skills, look at the full picture and not get caught up in the specifics. Balance is key to productivity.

Bobby Lawson, Technology Editor/Publisher, Earth Web

Boost Client Satisfaction with Skills Mastery

Client satisfaction comes first in any company. When you hire employees based on their skills—because they have mastery over what they do—it will take them less time to do the work. The chances of mistakes also decrease, as they are well aware of how to apply their skills to make the project better. 

Whereas, when you hire an employee because of their educational background or experience, sometimes they take longer to understand the project. Since the time we started hiring employees based on skills, we have seen our client satisfaction rate increase. Every client gets proper attention, which leads to retention and a loyal client base. 

And the main reason I’m saying this is because of my skilled team; it’s because even my clients give feedback on how the team managed and produced the results. This appreciation clearly defines how a happy client can lead to a productive workspace, and this is because of their skills.

Jean Christophe Gabler, Founder, Yogi Times

Find Productivity with Skills Assessments Lead 

As the Executive VP & COO at Wainbee, I take part in skills-based hiring of salespeople using pre-made assessment questionnaires based on real-life work scenarios. We are a distributor of engineered systems with excellent partnerships with top brands in the market. 

With my 27 years of work experience at the company, I have noticed a 95 percent average productivity boost and higher employee retention when applying a skills-based, hiring approach. Our skills-based sales account questions focus on gauging a candidate’s negotiation skills, objection handling, unconscious bias awareness, and critical thinking skills. We include a scenario primer, and the related questions are open-ended to allow for answer exploration.

Campbell Tourgis, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Wainbee

Improve Organizational Levels via Quality Hires

The primary advantage of a skills-based hiring process is the improved quality of hire. 

Experience-based hiring, in effect, sacrifices the quality of hire in exchange for convenience. Instead of measuring candidates’ skills using a battery of pre-employment tests, it assumes that experience is synonymous with skills and hires based on resume content. 

However, a skills-based hiring process leaves no stone unturned and seeks to identify the best and most skilled candidates. This tends to have a snowball effect, whereby those top candidates become top employees, and then top managers, and then overall business leaders, improving the organization at every level. 

Moreover, skills tend to diffuse throughout the organization via distributed learning, making skilled employees more valuable than just their immediate contributions.

Ben Schwencke, Business Psychologist, Test Partnership

Filter Productive Candidates for Results-Based Environment

A skills-based hiring approach leads to a more productive workforce, as the potential candidate already knows that the company places the largest emphasis on results, rather than being a place that is going to pay for one’s time regardless of their output. Those individuals who are not interested in having this kind of pressure will likely panic during the interview or potential pre-interview homework that will test their skills. 

The great thing about this is that these individuals will get filtered out, and only those who can handle the pressure of a results-based environment will stand the challenge of a skills-based hiring approach. Furthermore, those who get hired will understand that the company is hiring them based on what they can do, rather than who they are and the education that they have, as per the old model of hiring.

Knowing that the company places the largest emphasis on the value that one can bring through their skills, candidates will know that in this results-based environment, they must be productive, or else the company will hire someone else with better skills and productivity. 

In my experience, I saw this in action when I hired a cold caller from the Philippines who had a good education but didn’t necessarily have the skills going into the job. I thought that I’d be able to save money on employment costs and have them perform; however, I soon saw that the quality of work was not as high as I had hoped because the largest emphasis was not placed on skills but rather education.

I then focused on hiring cold callers based on their skills and put them through rigorous homework before they were able to be hired, and I saw that I attracted results-focused cold callers instead, which resulted in a more productive workforce.

Sebastian Jania, CEO, Ontario Property Buyers

Motivate Employees Through Skills-Based Hiring

At my company, we used to hire only people with a degree and a good GPA. However, after trying to hire a software developer with this method and failing miserably, we took a gamble and went for a self-taught developer with real-life experience.

He immediately fit into our team, and we haven’t had any problems with him yet.

I believe skills-based hiring leads to a more productive workforce because it exposes you to motivated employees.

Using a software developer as an example, someone with no degree and the technical skills I’m looking for had to teach themselves. This shows work ethic and motivation. If you hire based on degrees, these candidates would have had a curriculum laid out for them. There was no motivation to teach themselves.

Scott Lieberman, Owner, Touchdown Money

Align with Job Requirements with Specific Skills 

If you’ve recruited for different profiles in recent years, you might have observed that skill-based hiring is pivotal for boosting productivity and overall efficiency in the workplace. The essence lies in aligning specific skills with job requirements. When employees are hired for their distinct skills, they hit the ground running, needing less training and contributing more quickly.

This approach creates a domino effect. Skilled employees set high work standards, inspiring their peers to elevate their performance. They often become in-house experts, and a newbie working at maximum potential will obviously force the old-timers to sharpen their work too, resulting in healthy competition among employees.

For instance, hiring a tax law specialist proficient in federal tax regulations allowed us to handle complex cases more efficiently. This specialist not only increased our case capacity but also enhanced the team’s overall understanding of tax law, making us collectively more efficient.

Martin Gasparian, Attorney and Owner, Maison Law