Since the pandemic, many companies have struggled to find qualified employees amid a worker shortage. As a result, some are tossing out old ideas about how to find candidates and pivoting toward skills-based hiring.
In some cases, that means letting go of the notion that a college degree should be required.
The Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce is creating a workshop that will run over a 12-week period to help businesses think outside the box when crafting job requirements.
“They are actually bringing in their own job postings, their own interview questions, and we are stepping through the process of moving from a traditional hiring practice to a skills-based hiring practice,” says Corrie Melton, the chamber’s Vice President of Membership and Talent Development.
As one of the leaders behind the pilot program, Melton recently led an information session for interested professionals and managers.
“What we have found is that it's a lot; it is a mind shift in moving from traditional to skills-based,” Melton says. “So, the more we can get hands on and really coach employers on how to use the process, the more likely they are to do it.”
Also coaching this first class of participants is Krista Campbell, founder of Kapstone Coaching and Consulting in Tallahassee.
“We're seeing trends from a hiring perspective that I have never experienced in my over 25 years in the corporate world, in terms of the difficulty finding candidates to fill jobs.” Campbell focuses on leadership development, training, and advising small businesses.
The chamber program is designed to help businesses find and keep employees that they previously may not have considered.
“International companies like IBM and Apple, some really big companies are moving in the direction of not requiring degrees for certain types of positions that they have reevaluated and determined that degrees aren't needed,” Campbell says.
Less than half of people in the United States over age 25 have any type of college degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Educational Attainment Data released last year.
That means requiring a degree automatically eliminates a lot of candidates who could otherwise be qualified for a position.
Campbell says it made sense to toughen the requirements when companies were fielding an overwhelming number of candidates. That’s often not the case anymore.
“We really are in a situation now where it's totally shifted, where we need workers more than ever,” Campbell says. “By disqualifying so many, it's really costing employers a lot of money that they may not even realize because it's taking so much longer to fill jobs because they're disqualifying qualified applicants.”
The goal of the chamber program is to teach companies alternative ways to find applicants, build a more diverse staff, and get those employees to stay.
Campbell says companies should start by assessing what they actually need. Someone who is dependable, who can provide customer service, and be trained for specific duties might be your best candidate, she says, and you may be able to keep them longer.
“You can easily train someone in a week to learn Excel, but it's going to take you an additional four weeks to find another candidate,” Campbell says.
“There are several studies through LinkedIn and the Harvard Business Review that say if you have a skills-based hire approach, and you start hiring candidates without degrees (because you've deemed it not necessary), the retention rates are like 30% longer than someone with a college degree, because you know, there's a lot of people that just need companies to invest in them.”
The Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce is now gathering its first small cohort for the skills-based hiring pilot program. It is tentatively slated for kickoff in November.
Organizers are looking for a few more local, private sector employers who are having a hard time filling jobs and who can send a dedicated company representative to each workshop session. They will meet once every week or two, and participants will leave with homework.
The goals is that these companies will gain the tools to address how to easily revamp a job description and a job posting.
