Building a Skills-Based Organization with the Power of Hiring Assessments

How is your company building a workforce that’s ready for whatever the future brings? The traditional methods of hiring simply aren’t as effective, as the way work is done has changed significantly (and that pace of change shows few signs of slowing). 

The answer is building a skills-based organization. In fact, 90% of executives say they’re currently actively experimenting with skills-based approaches across a wide range of their workforce practices, according to research from Deloitte. 

What is a Skills-Based Organization? 

Skills-based organizations define work and roles according to the activities and tasks that need to be done, instead of defining it according to set roles. This can take many different forms, including no longer requiring degrees or resumes for many open roles, creating pathways to help lower-wage employees progress to higher-paid jobs, and building up internal mobility according to skills. 

Hiring for skills instead of experience or education opens up much wider talent pools. It also is five times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education, and twice as predictive than hiring for work experience. 

But while many companies see the value in moving toward a skills-based organization, actually making that shift requires a lot of hard and strategic work. 

Why Hiring Assessments Help Build Skills-Based Organizations 

The answer to this challenging task is relying on skills assessments in the hiring process to find candidates who are the best fit for your organization’s needs. These kinds of employment assessments help recruiters and hiring managers match candidates with the most critical skills needed to succeed in a position, instead of relying on resumes and educational information which aren’t as accurate. 

How to Effectively Use Hiring Assessments

But how can your HR team most effectively use hiring assessments to make better hiring decisions? You must first build the right kinds of skills assessment tests, which means a test that measures both hard skills and soft skills. 

Hard skills are especially important to test for in positions where candidates must know how to perform certain tasks. But it’s also critical to know which hard skills you could train the right candidate on once they’re in the role, especially for hard-to-fill positions. Using many kinds of software, for example, is a hard skill but a trainable one, so if you’re filtering out people who haven’t used it before but could easily learn how to use it, you’re needlessly narrowing your talent pool. 

That is also why using hiring assessments for soft skills is critical. You can assess candidates to see how their problem-solving, critical thinking, and writing skills measure up, just to name a few. Soft skills are harder to train for and so more critical to hire for: a candidate who is an exceptional writer and communicator, for example, could fit into many potential roles now and in the future at your organization. 

Finding the Right Hiring Assessment Platform 

Creating all of these hiring assessments and grading them on your own is a big lift. Fortunately, platforms like Cangrade make it easy and more effective to use employment assessments in your hiring decisions and build a skills-based organization. 

With Cangrade’s Pre-Hire Assessments, candidates take a simple 14-minute test on any device and your HR team gets a fit score complete with their strengths, motivations, and development opportunities. Their hiring assessment predicts a candidate’s likelihood to stay and succeed ten times more accurately than traditional hiring methods, and can even suggest other open roles the candidate would be a great fit for. Discover how it works today and start building a future-ready skills-based organization.