How Skills Technology Drives Talent Acquisition Excellence

The topic of skills is taking the HR world by storm. But are skills as relevant for talent acquisition as they are for talent management?

Yes, 100%.

With skills technology in place, TA teams can capture more relevant candidates, find best-fit talent faster, and ensure the right people are joining their company who are in it for the long haul — and have upskilling opportunities to grow and develop over the years.

During Skills Day, we discussed just where skills exist within talent acquisition and how TA teams can use skills intelligence technology to boost their hiring efforts. Continue reading for the key takeaways.

Where Skills Already Exist In Your Organization

Skills are everywhere, but their potential often remains untapped due to a pervasive lack of utility and consistency in their application. The key to unlocking the full spectrum of skills lies in a well-thought-out strategy and cutting-edge technology to support TA teams. Let's dig deeper and explore how a refined approach can amplify the impact of skills across talent acquisition.

Skills in requisition creation

Let’s say a hiring manager finally gets approval to hire an underwriter for their team. This is a critical addition to the team, but they’ve never hired for this role before. The hiring manager must create a job requisition from scratch, including the skills this person will need to do the job well.

They may turn to GenAI like ChatGPT to help them write this requisition, but what’s missing? Assistance to avoid gaps. How can the manager be sure they’ve covered everything, especially if they’ve never hired an underwriter before?

To ensure they’re covering all the bases and creating a requisition that will target the best person for the role, the manager needs technology that understands the company, the team, and implicitly knows what skills are required. This tech gives the manager confidence that their requisition is the best it can be and nothing important will be missed.

Skills in the requisition meeting

In discussions between the manager and the recruiter, the role, expectations, required skills, and the ideal profile for the prospective hire are laid out. Armed with the manager's wish list, the recruiter begins to identify and secure the best talent for the position.

However, there’s a missed opportunity to uncover candidates who might not align precisely with the initial criteria — but who possess valuable attributes. For instance, a silver medalist from a prior interview may emerge as a fitting candidate, meeting most, if not all, of the required criteria, presenting an untapped resource that could have been expediently shortlisted.

Without skills intelligence technology to aid the recruiter, this person and other valuable prospects will be overlooked.

Skills in candidate applications

When a candidate applies for the job, they look for roles that meet their interests, location preference, salary expectation, current skills, and more. If they find a job that fits all of these, they apply.

But what’s missing?

If the organization doesn’t have the right technology in place, they’re failing to keep track of skills trends for this position. They don’t know the top skills that applicants are listing when applying for jobs, and therefore missed the opportunity to include this information in an updated job description. This could also be a missed opportunity to ask the recruiter to look out for people who possess these skills in addition to others they’ve found who could be a potential match.

Skills in interviews and hiring decisions

Once an interview has taken place, it’s time for the hiring manager and recruiters to discuss the candidates. If they don’t have technology that can automatically record the entire interview and analyze the candidate for company-specific metrics, they may miss out on details that could help them make a more informed decision.

And if they miss that info, they can’t take what they’ve learned from the interview and skills trends and streamline that for future open roles. They’re choosing who they think is best for the role, but if they’re not seeing the whole picture, who have they missed?

With workforce intelligence technology that can capture all the skills that exist within your organization and within potential hires, hiring managers and recruiters can feel comfortable knowing they’ve found the right person for the role.

TA Use Cases For Skills

It’s time to set aside the type of degree, reputation of a university, or cache of a company as drivers for candidate evaluation and get down to the granular skills level.

Let’s look at a few use cases for skills.

• Fit Score is a great tool that gives recruiters guidance on which candidates match their requirements best, but it also gives them the ability to fine tune those requirements based on additional input and what they learn as they’re moving through the process. If it’s a role they’ve filled before, they can also identify an ideal candidate that can be used to drive better matches and shorten the hiring process.

• Skills are not only needed when searching for external candidates to fill roles. They are extremely useful when looking internally. TA teams can use skills to create drip campaigns. They can send automated and personalized messages to current employees about open roles within the company, including the skills and requirements needed to fill these roles.

• When it comes to futuristic hiring, there is a huge need for updated, critical skills within organizations, and TA teams can help with this as well. Before a position opens, they can create talent pools that focus on certain skills or sets of skills, immediately adding existing candidates from their CRM using skill filtering technology, and making the pool dynamic so new candidates automatically go into the pool as they enter the company’s ecosystem. Once a role opens, they have an immediate pool of talent they can work with, but again, they shouldn’t bypass internal talent.

• With workforce intelligence technology that integrates seamlessly with your CRM, recruiters can log in and see a list of best fit candidates that has been updated automatically — based on information provided by hiring managers and profile information given by both internal and external candidates.

With these tools, recruiters can take exactly what the hiring manager needs and create an accurate, holistic job description based on historical information, market trends, skills requirements, and more. With the most up-to-date job description possible and a list of candidates at their fingertips, sourcing becomes a breeze.

Getting Started With Skills Technology

Once you’re ready to take a skills-first approach, it’s time to adopt technology that can help you identify skills and skills gaps within your organization — and use this information to improve your hiring processes. To get started, you should:

• Appraise your tech stack. Are your data and systems integrated and able to serve up best-fit candidates?

• Adopt AI-powered technology where systems are lacking

• Create a structured recruitment strategy

• Analyze your skills data for gaps and areas of improvement

Once you’ve assessed these areas, you can become a skills-first organization, capturing best-fit talent better than your competitors.

Take the next step by requesting your complimentary Skills Snapshot right here. You’ll receive a targeted sample of the skills, roles, and progressions within your organization, and a Phenom expert will discuss how to use this data to start your skills journey.