HRevolution

It's overdone. This is the practice of selecting people based on their skills and abilities to do the job. In truth, all selection systems do this, but skill-based hiring is a little more detailed, and has been sold to corporations by ATS vendors.

Skill based hiring (SBH) inherently biases to skills at the expense of attitudes. With some good reason perhaps; it is cheaper to hire people who can get up to speed quickly, and minimize training costs. But this savings decreases in importance as the employment relationship lengthens. Further, SBH is likely to bias toward mediocrity since the focus is biased to the short term. The best people move on while the mediocre ones hang around forever. By biasing your selection on skills, you ensure a mediocre workforce in the long run. Remember, interview processes are finite. They are designed to declare a winner at some predetermined point. There is a zero sum component in that time dedicated to measuring one factor reduces time spent measuring others.

The counter argument, of course, is that skill-based selection merely sets a threshold, leaving the remaining interview time to test other factors. In practice, however, skills are assessed, then the manager picks the one s/he likes best. The bottom line here is that, for long term positions, skills should be downplayed. SBH makes them the primary focus of the selection process.

Here's one way it plays out. At the core, the best candidate is someone whose skills are a 100% match the job description. Usually such a person is experienced at the job. SBH assumes they will want to repeat that same job. Why would they? Whether they lack ambition, like the role, or want to slack off for a while isn't covered in SBH. Only that they're the best candidate. The problem is that the candidate's capacity to engage in the job is given short shrift. In my experience, this is the best predictor of success.

If we have the conceit that we're recruiting people for careers, skills based hiring doesn't work for me. There are exceptions, but not as many as the market would have us believe.