In this tight labor market, finding the talent your company needs to thrive can be difficult, to say the least. If you are a small- to mid-size business, the search for skilled talent is even harder; according to Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), “smaller organizations (those with 1 to 99 employees) reported having the most difficulty in filling full-time manager and skilled trade positions.”

Traditional Hiring Practices Leave Out Potentially Great Talent

If you’re struggling to find the right talent, your hiring process may be hindering rather than helping you. Traditional hiring practices encourage employers to require a four-year degree in their job postings, even for jobs that don’t require college-level skills. This requirement narrows a company’s talent pool; 67% of the population does not have a four-year degree. CareerBuilder found more than half of employers have seen a negative impact on their business due to “extended job vacancies with a sizable proportion of these employers pointing to productivity issues, an increase in voluntary turnover and revenue loss.”

“Skills-based practices got me clear with what I want and need, and whether a candidate has what I’m looking for or not,” said Andy Seth, a Denver-based philanthropist and CEO of Flow, a Colorado-based digital agency who hired eight people using skills-based practices. “Now, my hiring is so much faster. Initially, it took me time to figure out how to use skills-based practices and then translate each job description into that. But it served as a way to get clear so that my decision-making and hiring became easy.”

You can make sure your company is not leaving behind potentially great workers by recruiting differently.

Skills-Based Hiring Practices Can Help You Find the Talent You Need

Skills-based hiring practices (SBHP), which focus on a candidate’s skills rather than their background, can help you access talent that is generally overlooked by traditional hiring methods, such as people of color, women, people with disabilities, people with criminal records, people who have paused their careers to care for family members, and people who lack a four-year degree. Using skills-based hiring practices can help you reduce recruiting costs and time-to-hire, fill open positions faster, improve diversity, increase employee retention and engagement, and find the talent your company needs in a tight labor market. Even when economic times are tough, skills-based hiring practices help you find the people you need to weather the challenges a recession brings.

Steps You Can Take to Start Using Skills-Based Hiring Practices

If you’re ready to start implementing skills-based hiring practices, below are some steps that can help your business transition from traditional hiring methods:

• Learn what SBHP can do for your organization. Check out our free employer resources, which can help facilitate your transition to skills-based hiring practices.
• Attend one of our SHRM-certified Skillful Skill Works trainings, where you’ll learn how to focus your job postings on the skills candidates need to succeed, reduce bias in your job postings, and source and recruit the talent you’re struggling to find. Find and register for upcoming trainings here.
• Quickly and easily find the skills candidates need to succeed by using the Skillful Job Posting Generator, which identifies an open job’s required skills and competencies and incorporates them into a job posting. It also eliminates the guesswork out of writing job postings and makes it much easier for employers to efficiently source and retain talent.

Don’t miss out on the talent your business needs to grow, and don’t be one of the 83% of HR professionals that have reported having difficulty recruiting suitable candidates in the last 12 months. Switch to skills-based hiring practices today! Find upcoming training and free employer resources here.