The COVID-19 outbreak has triggered a significant downturn in the global economy, and the U.S. unemployment rate has surged to 26.1%Opens a new window . This might lead many to believe we’re in an employer’s market and that hiring for all roles is easy in the current climate. Yet top talent is more difficult to recruit than before. Individuals are reluctant to give up their current role’s relative security to take the leap to something new, writes Jonathan Finkelstein, CEO of Credly.
Organizations see an opportunity to revisit their talent sourcing and recruitment strategies during the pandemic. Many recognize the need to build back better than before, giving fresh eyes to things like how to foster a more diverse and inclusive workforce, a new embrace of remote work, and a focus on skills over pedigree in making human capital decisions.
How You Can Hire Quality Talent Now
These imperatives speak to the need to source talent from an expanded view of what constitutes the available talent pool. Here are four tips to help companies recruit and hire amid a pandemic while moving the needle on strategic talent initiatives that center on skills.
1. Start with your internal talent pool
The most qualified, interested, and ready talent pool may be right in front of you. Recruiters can uncover opportunities to fill critical positions by looking at the talent resident within the organization before they cast the net wider and start a search for outside talent. Not only do current employees already have a headstart in understanding the company’s goals and operations, but their skills and mindsets are already vetted and verified before the hiring process even begins.
It is easy to forget that your current employees are not the same people they were on the day you hired them. They have developed and grown on the job and may have even pursued their own external professional development opportunities that you may not be aware of.
Analyzing your team’s current competencies and latest certifications enables you to not only place candidates for new roles with pinpoint precision, it also allows you to identify opportunities for upskilling and reskilling employees to fill internal gaps. This will ultimately save time, money, and resources.
2. Streamline the top of the hiring funnel with a focus on specific skills versus poor proxies
Even before the labor market disruption brought on by the pandemic, hiring managers for corporate jobs were overwhelmed by the number of resumes they received – on average over 250 applicationsOpens a new window for every single job posting.
The process of trimming the pile of resumes to a more manageable stack often leans on the use of proxies and biases – like whether or where someone went to college, the number of years at a particular prior job, or whether one can pronounce their name. This summarily discards qualified candidates and decreases the diversity of the finalist candidate pool.
Instead, organizations can apply a filter at the top of the funnel that begins with a search for verified skills and competencies. Rather than assuming that years of experience are a good stand-in for skills or knowledge, ask yourself what it is you’d expect someone to be able to do if they had that much experience.
There will be candidates who have the proven skills – and the credentials and qualifications to prove it – who took a shorter or different path. And your organization will have a competitive advantage for having found them.
3. Focus on skills and mindsets that are adaptive for the future
The skills your organization needs now might not be the skills it needs around the next bend in the road. Staying on top of shifting trends across both industry and technology can help you better prepare your workforce for what’s next.
Current employees need to upskill to meet these new demands. They will also have to compete with the generation that will soon enter the workforceOpens a new window with advanced technical skills and verified digital badges. What are some signs that a candidate has the mindset to be a continuous learner and is prepared for a rapidly changing world of work that not only prizes tech skills but agility, adaptability, and curiosity?
One signal is to look for people who recently earned skill or role-based credentials, including product certifications. Not only is a recent certification a trusted signal that a candidate has the requisite skills, it’s also tangible proof they are self-directed and eager to learn. 76%Opens a new window of people who earn a tech certification are motivated to actively seek out certification independently, which makes them a good fit for a company where ongoing upskilling may be required. And earning such a credential rarely has prerequisites like a college degree, which means you are opening up the aperture on the potential talent pool to a more diverse set of candidates without compromising on the skills you need.
4. Validate those skills
In a struggling economy, companies can’t afford to hire candidates who don’t have the skills to back up what they claim on their resume. Verifiable, skill-based digital badges are much more reliable than simply taking someone’s word that they can do what you need them to do in your organization.
Since hiring is resource-intensive, employers need to trust that a new employee can begin performing on day one. And leveraging what a candidate already knows can bypass an extensive onboarding process and speed the time to a new team member delivering results. A verified approach isn’t exclusive to technical skills, either. Companies should consider verified soft skills such as leadership, management, and curiosity when hiring talent. There are trusted credentials for those skills, too.
Finding top talent who are equipped with the skills needed to succeed in a position may seem difficult in a time when traditional hiring practices have been challenged or disrupted, but implementing new recruitment strategies that incorporate verifiable skills can remove much of the uncertainty.
Which best practices have you followed to recruit top talent during the pandemic? Tell us on LinkedinOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window .