💡 The logic behind skills-based hiring is solid, but execution remains a challenge. In a compelling new article in the Harvard Business Review, BGI President Matt Sigelman, BGI Economist Alex Martin, and our esteemed partner Joseph Fuller outline the critical steps needed to make skills-based hiring a reality. Discover six actionable strategies that companies and organizations can use to guide their managers in implementing this essential approach. 🔗 Read the full article here. https://lnkd.in/g5xQSVxn Join us in transforming hiring practices to unlock a broader, more diverse talent pool. Together, we can build a future where skills truly matter. #Management #HumanResources #Hiring #Skills #TheBurningGlassInstitute #skillbasedhiring #careers
Even as employers struggle to change their hiring patterns, skills-based hiring isn’t doomed to fail. In our article in Harvard Business Review, Joseph Fuller and I lay out six strategies to support hiring managers in making skills-based hiring a reality. The logic for skills-based hiring is unimpeachable and CEO’s have the best of intentions. Yet too few have backed up pledges with nuts-and-bolts support for hiring managers. Skills-based hiring has been framed more as what managers shouldn’t do—i.e. reflexively demand a college degree —rather than on what they should do instead. It’s an old story. Education reforms stumble on the realities of classroom teachers. Police reforms fall short when they don’t consider cops on the beat. So too with skills-based hiring. Executives can revamp hiring policies. But without changing the habits and preferences of thousands of hiring managers, little progress is likely. Here’s what you can do: 1. Celebrate successful skills-based hires to show hiring managers what is possible. Dell Technologies and Grainger bring attention to leaders who rose from the ranks without a degree - key to giving managers license to consider a wider swath of talent. 2. Reverse engineer success by identifying and replicating patterns across high-performing skills-based hires. Are there commonalities in prior work histories, training, or credentials or in the roles to which they were hired? Comcast analyzed its entire workforce to map the skills most critical to success in each role. 3. Define requirements and identify acceptable evidence beforehand. Walmart started by drawing up new job descriptions that define required specifically. Which skills are needed initially vs. which can be developed later? 4. Recognize that your work isn’t done at hire and redesign how you onboard and support new skills-based hires. Even though workers without degrees may have the right hard skills, they haven't necessarily developed the social capital that graduates have. Accenture has introduced supports to help new hires realize their potential. 5. Build experience with skills-based advancement before trying skills-based hiring. It's natural for managers to consider non-degreed hires too risky. But promoting from within changes the risk calculus as managers can assess an incumbent worker’s demonstrated capabilities directly. Through its skills-based hiring journey, Cisco helps workers continue progressing. 6. Acknowledge that many jobs do require a degree and recalibrate as needed. Consider how skills-based hiring leader IBM actually increased slightly the share of jobs requiring a BA after a massive cut. That’s not backsliding, it's being evidence-based. You can find our article on https://lnkd.in/e3TbcGtb. Thanks to my colleague Alex Martin at The Burning Glass Institute who co-authored with Joe and me our recent research on this topic. #management #humanresources #hiring #skills
Analytics and Modeling
2moYou're never going to replace formal training and education with experience and "skills" but you can find ways to make this training and education far less expensive, relevant, and adaptable. I'm currently taking online classes with the same content as an Ivy League University for <$300 a class with not much learning value lost compared to in person. Meanwhile, people are going thousands of dollars into debt per class to go to a lecture hall and get material they could get from YouTube and have assignments graded by a TA.