Skills Over Degrees: The Future of Hiring

Lori Cole (00:04):

All right, let’s go ahead and get started. Thank you all for being here today. My name is Lori Cole and I am a certified career coach and advisor here at iHire. And I want to offer you a warm welcome to today’s session, skills over Degrees, the Future of Hiring. So before we get started, let me point out a couple more features of the webinar platform that will really put you in the driver’s seat, those widgets that you see on your screen. You can move and resize those and explore content related to today’s presentation. Be sure you find that, ask a question widget and you can submit questions at any time during the presentation. Only our producer will see those questions and we will answer as many of those as we can after the webinar. This is always the most asked question during the webinar. Yes, you are going to get a copy of this, but it’ll be tomorrow.

(01:04):

So watch your inbox for that and then you can rewatch this on demand or share it with somebody else in your office. And just quickly, a reminder that you’re going to earn one credit today for H RM and HRCI Recertifications. We’ll tell you and show you at the end of the webinar how to download that certificate. So hang tight until the end of the webinar so that you can see that. Alright, and I’m going to move the attendee chat off my screen so that I’m not distracted by it today. Let’s see. We’ve got Chrisanne, Bowden and Mishanna Wood being our presenters, so we really appreciate them being here with us today. Let’s start by introducing Chrisanne. She is iHire’s Principal HR Business Partner and has nearly three decades of experience in human resource roles. Chrisanne currently supports small businesses who maybe don’t have their own in-house HR and then larger employers who may be working on special projects. So if you have a job for don’t hesitate to reach out. She will be more than happy to talk to you. Welcome Chrisanne.

Chrisanne Bowden (02:19):

Thanks Lori. I’m glad to be here today.

Lori Cole (02:22):

And then we have Mishanna Wood. Mishanna is a Senior Account Executive here at iHire and focuses on our mid-level customers or mid-market customers. She leverages her extensive experience in advertising and has helped companies really of all sizes secure the right talent quickly and effectively. Mishanna also has a Calendly invite widget on the screen, so if you want to talk to her at any time and schedule an appointment, you can do that. Thank you for being here again, Mishanna.

Mishanna Wood (02:56):

Thanks for having me. Hello everyone.

Lori Cole (03:01):

All right, so let’s start out with a quick poll. Does your organization currently use skills-based hiring? Yes or no? Or what’s the third one here? I can’t even see the third one on the screen. Oh, it depends on the role. Yeah. So while we’re waiting for these poll results that should have popped up on your screen, I’m going to go through our agenda and what we’ll be learning today. We’ll define skills-based hiring and how it’s different from traditional hiring approaches. We’ll discuss the benefits of taking a skills first approach. We will go over how to put some skills first hiring into practice and provide you some tips on how to overcome the challenges of skills-based hiring. So let’s go ahead and take a look at those poll results. Alright, so a lot of you are on board with this. A lot of people said yes. A lot of people said it depends on the role. So no matter where you are in this today, I think that you’re going to get something good out of this webinar. So Mishanna, let’s start with you. Tell us a little bit about what’s happening in the labor market right now and why we’re talking about this.

Mishanna Wood (04:25):

A great topic, Lori. So for the current hiring landscape of right now, there are talent shortages across various industries. And to start with a reality check, talent shortages are hitting many of those industries such as healthcare accommodation and food service, manufacturing, transportation, construction, and education. Employers are struggling to fill roles in traditional hiring methods aren’t keeping up. Have you experienced this in your organization? Drop an emoji to let us know. Just give you a moment. Global consulting firm Korn Ferry predicted that by 2030 over 85 million jobs could go unfilled due to a lack of skilled talent. And that talent shortage could result in about 8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues. And there are changing workforce expectations. So today’s workforce is different employees value, flexibility, growth opportunities, and purpose driven work. They’re also questioning the relevance of traditional credentials like degrees along with a high cost of obtaining them and jumping into the workplace and learning on the job instead is an attractive option if you’re not interested in taking on immense student debt.

(05:52):

Some of the limitations of first degree hiring models would be degree first. Hiring has the default for decades, but it’s leaving out a huge pool of talented individuals. And according to the US census bureau’s latest data, over 62% of working age adults in the US don’t have a bachelor’s degree. And that’s a lot of untapped potential. And a bachelor’s degree share has not risen significantly since 2020. In 20 20, 37 0.5% of people age 25 or older had at least a bachelor’s degree and in 20 22, 37 0.7% had a bachelor’s degree. But the differences not, excuse me, statistically significant tongue tied there.

Lori Cole (06:40):

So that 85 million jobs going unfilled, that’s a huge number. So we’re going to tell you about some ways that you can tap into that and access that talent pool.

Lori Cole (06:57):

Chrisanne, tell me a little bit about what is skills first hiring and how does it help us overcome these challenges?

Chrisanne Bowden (07:07):

And to really build on what Mishanna was just sharing with us, we are hearing the emerging workforce, which is we all know now as Generation Z, right? They’ve watched the millennials, they’ve watched the millennials talk about they can’t buy a house. They’ve watched the millennials talk about being buried under student loan debt and more and more of them are just absolutely saying no. Now I’m not here to say that every job that we historically required a degree for can be done without it, without a degree. Obviously if we’re hiring a nurse or if we’re hiring an engineer, I’m working on an aerospace engineer role right now for one of my clients and I do feel it’s important that they have that degree. But there’s a lot of roles that we can really rethink about and determine is a four year degree actually required for this particular job?

(08:00):

So let’s kind of start first by the definition in core principles of what skills first hiring is skills first. Hiring focuses on what candidates can do rather than where they went to school or what credentials they hold. It’s about evaluating real world abilities and potential. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about ways you can evaluate and really get to the point of feeling confident that you’re making a decision based on what this person is actually going to bring to the workforce based on their abilities and their experience, not just their degree. Think of this as hiring for capability, not pedigree. The key differences from traditional hiring practices, what we know traditional hiring often prioritizes degrees over years of experience skills. First, hiring flips the script by emphasizing competencies and hands-on experience. I can speak firsthand for the profession that I’m in. We know in the human resources field that a brand new college graduate is really limited on their ability to step into a full HR role and they’re really going to have to get into an organization in an entry level role and probably take five to 10 years before they can really be considered well-rounded enough to manage a team where I’ve had many people that I know who maybe were in an administrative role in a company and got put in the HR department and after 10 or 15 years they’re pretty well-rounded and capable of doing all aspects of the role.

(09:36):

And I think that applies to a lot of different types of jobs that we see in the workforce. So let’s talk about some examples of skills-based job criteria. So a good example would be instead of requiring a marketing degree, you might look for someone who can demonstrate expertise in SEO content creation analytics type tools. Those are things that many people have kind of started at the ground in an employer and just had the talent and ability to pick up those things. Surprisingly, software developers often don’t require a role. It’s really do they have that aptitude drive and interest in learning for a software developer role. Instead of requiring a computer science degree, you could require proficiency in Python, JavaScript or cloud platforms like AWS. And there’s numerous assessment tools that you can build into how you’re going to evaluate to show these individuals actually show their proficiency. Another good example is customer service type roles. And I’ll talk a little more about a good way to get to something like this, but you want to be prioritizing skills like conflict resolution, empathy strategy, maybe some CRM software experience. Those are the characteristics that really make somebody skilled and good in a customer service type role.

Lori Cole (11:05):

And I’m sure as you were talking Chrisanne, I’m sure we’ve all experienced somebody coming fresh out of college and applying to your company and saying applying for a management position because I think in some cases the schools will kind of pump the people up and say, well hey, you’re going to come out making the top of the range because you’re getting this degree from us. And then they come out and they’re so disappointed when they find out that that four year degree does not get them the top of the salary range.

Chrisanne Bowden (11:46):

And when it comes to an individual straight out college and I have those kinds of comments made to me, what about my degree? You’ll use it. Don’t feel like it’s wasted. I don’t think any of us are here today saying don’t go to college. We’re saying just look at some of your roles in a different way, but we don’t want to set somebody up for failure. So we don’t want to take someone fresh out of college and put them directly in a management role. In most cases, we want to have you be mentored and develop and grow into that kind of role so you can be successful.

Lori Cole (12:17):

And the other thing that I find in the career coaching is that somebody may have graduated with a degree in one thing, but 20 years later they’re not even using it. It’s nowhere near the degree that they graduated with, but your career just kind of takes you on this path and you discover what you’re good at and discover what you really like. It’s kind of unfair to ask somebody to commit to a major when they’re 18 years old and try to set that life path.

Chrisanne Bowden (12:51):

Right, right. So true.

Lori Cole (12:55):

Alright, Ms. Shauna, beyond just expanding the talent pool, what other wins are companies seeing when they move to this skills-based hiring approach?

Mishanna Wood (13:06):

I do have a real world example from my conversation with an employer fairly recently. So initially, historically, they were using the default hiring approach with the exact skills and degree and that worked for a while, but it’s a very niche role. It’s a very tough work environment and some of the locations were very rural, so they were finding over time that it was more and more difficult to hire, but their current staff was getting overloaded with work or they’re having to spread people out. It just wasn’t a great work environment. So their strategy was to have a training program that they incorporated and reach out to people with that correct skillset that they’re looking for, not necessarily that degree and it really alleviated a lot of parts of their business and made a better work environment. So that’s one example that comes to mind, but it gives you that broader, more diverse talent pool of course.

(14:06):

But by removing those degree requirements, you open the door to candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, including veterans, career changers, and like I said, those who gain skills through those micro-credentials, courses or self-learning. This approach also helps reduce systemic barriers and promotes diversity, equity and inclusion and it improves candidate quality, retention and performance. So skills first, hiring often leads to better job matches. Employees are employees are more likely to excel in roles that align with their abilities, which boosts retention and performance and self-taught individuals are often highly motivated and lifelong learners. These traits are beneficial to any organization.

(14:55):

Have you noticed that some of your best employees don’t necessarily have the most traditional resumes? This also leads to faster, more agile hiring cycles. So focusing on skills can streamline the hiring process. You dive straight into what really matters, how well can they do the job? You can quickly identify qualified candidates without getting bogged down in credential checks. This agility is especially valuable in industries where skills evolved rapidly like tech or healthcare and there is a cost savings. So hiring based on skills can reduce turnover costs and training expenses. You’re less likely to make the wrong hire when you focus on skills and abilities. Plus you’re not paying a premium for candidates with degrees that may not directly impact job performance.

Lori Cole (15:52):

Chrisanne, now that we kind of understand why we should implement this skills-based hiring strategy, exactly how should we do it? How do we go about this?

Chrisanne Bowden (16:05):

Yeah, I’m glad you asked that, Lori, because what I know is somebody who often is face-to-face with a hiring manager or someone in an organizational leadership type role that is pretty set in the fact that they need a degree for this role. The number one thing I hear when that’s the case is that the degree shows discipline and I would really be prepared to challenge your hiring manager or your leadership that’s using this strategy. A degree does show discipline. Even earning a bachelor’s degree in most cases takes some effort and time and ability to take on learn new things that maybe you hadn’t been exposed to. So it does show discipline, but Mishanna mentioned military and that’s of a particular, I think something I always like to bring up to hiring managers. Military resumes can be challenging to read because they’re just, the whole structure of military is so different, but military receives exceptional training.

(17:13):

I would argue that a lot of depending on the role that a person serves in the military, a lot of it relates very closely to what you’re learning in college. Plus they are picking up that discipline that the military doesn’t just instill in them, but it requires of them. So somebody who goes into the military right out of school and spends four or eight years should receive some consideration for that. And I also would say I want to challenge leadership about discipline because doesn’t it show discipline if somebody perhaps entered the workforce at 18 versus getting that four year degree because they wanted to help support their family through a difficult time or they wanted to be out on their own or they were making a hard decision to put in a 40 hour work week rather than living a social life at college. They just wanted to get started with their adult life sooner.

(18:02):

So there’s a lot of different ways that you can look at why a person may have decided not to pursue a degree immediately after high school or even later on down the line. So what this is going to entail is working to get that buy-in within your organization that at least some of our roles should be reconsidered, whether a degree is required and once that buy-in happens, you’re going to spend time auditing and rewriting your job descriptions to take out any of the language that’s necessarily requiring a certain number of years experience over top of a specific degree, et cetera. So review your job descriptions. Are you listing degrees, years experience requirements that aren’t truly necessary and replace those with specific skill and competencies instead of bachelor’s degree required. You might say proficiency in Excel and data visualization tools are required. So also update screening and assessment tools.

(19:06):

There are so many resources out there for skills assessments to evaluate candidates and it’s not just hard skills. There’s a lot of assessments that will evaluate soft skills. We mentioned earlier like a customer service type role. It’s assessment will put people in different scenarios and ask them to map out how they would handle a situation like that. And that’s a really good way of knowing do they have the natural aptitude but perhaps also have had that real world experience of dealing with difficult customer situations. And mentioned too tools like coding challenges. Writing samples are a good way to see if somebody who perhaps doesn’t have that four year degree but is a good natural writer, is there a skillset up to the level you’re looking for? Situational judgment test can give you a clear picture of a candidate’s abilities. So I want you to think about training your hiring managers and your HR team.

(20:03):

Your hiring managers need to understand the value of skills first hiring and how it evaluates candidates more effectively. I think there’s a real argument once you get their ear about this is the amount of time they may be spending with somebody who has a degree but not much real world experience that’s going to impact the amount of time they spend on a person versus somebody who’s actually done the job and has those proven skill search. It might involve you doing some training, some workshops, new interview frameworks, behavioral and structural interviews. Situational type interviews are so important for any of you who aren’t currently using behavioral interviews. Just to give you a quick overview of what that means, I always kind of display a behavioral interview as sort of like a tell me a story. What we want to do with a behavioral interview, and I had a great opportunity many, many years ago to go to was no affiliation, was a company outside of Pittsburgh called DDI Development Dimensions International, and I was trained on finding the top performers in each job that we currently had in our workforce, establishing and documenting what were they bringing to the table that was making them so successful in their roles and then developing behavior-based interviews to see if we can bring out those characteristics in other people.

(21:29):

When I say it’s a tell me a story type interview, we’re asking a candidate to describe a situation and what the situation was, how they approached it, what pitfalls or situations, things they had to work through and what was the end result. We sometimes even want to ask them to give us a situation where they weren’t successful to show what their learning was out of it. So for example, we might say, if I would say in an interview for a customer service person, how do you feel about customer service? Obviously they’re going to answer. I think it’s very important. I always give my customers great service. In a behavioral interview we might say, tell me about a time you had a really difficult customer. What was going on? What was the situation? How did you work through and resolve it and what was the end result?

(22:19):

So we’re asking them to be really specific or we might say something like, tell me about a time you solved a complex problem under pressure or imagine you’re leading a team that’s behind on schedule on an important project, what would you do? So we’re asking them to give those real world examples. Another avenue you can explore is consider starting an internship program or hiring interns if you don’t already. And don’t make your internship application requirements too stripped either instead of requiring a degree or only considering students you’re actively pursuing a specific degree, use one of these skills assessments. What are they bringing to the table? This could be a good way to build your future workforce because you’re identifying what skills they have and you’re building on them and growing that person maybe into a new employee for your organization. Internships are a great way to provide on the job training and build your talent pipeline for the future. So I definitely encourage people to consider that. And I also would say it’s not new any longer, but what technology like skills assessments or AI tools can you bring into play AI tools can help you identify transferable skills in resumes or magic candidate to roles based on their actual abilities. I think you had some, we know you’re big into AI. Laurie had some input on that.

Lori Cole (23:47):

I do. I would really like to do a little emoji poll to see how many of you are using AI in your day to day right now, because I use it all day every day. It makes my job so much easier. I feel like I can get things done faster than I’ve ever been able to do things before. But we have a couple of AI tools on the employer side that I wanted to show you here. So yeah, I see the emoji play and that’s really exciting. Yeah, I just love them and could talk about these tools all day. So let’s just focus on what AI tools right now. This is our I score tool. So we’re going to show you what this is. So these are the candidates who have applied to one of my jobs and you can see that they have an I score and that’s an AI generated score and I can sort these from low to high or from high to low. Then I can click into those resumes and I’ll get an AI summary of the resume. I’ll be able to see their matching skills, their missing skills and their I score details. So that really makes it fast for you to decide who to talk to and we even give you the ability to customize your ranking and what that looks like and how it’s going through in ranking. So that is kind of cool. Let me go to this next one here and push it live. This is our pre-screening questions demo.

(25:35):

So this is where we start in the job posting flow and you can even create your job posting with ai, but these are the prescreening questions you can use previously added questions or you can push a button and ask AI to generate those questions based on your job description. So after it creates those questions, you can start to add to it. You can use some of our sample questions, you can create your own questions, but just remember, don’t make that screening process too long. The fewer questions the better because the longer you make that screening process, the more likely it is that your candidates are going to fall out of that process and maybe not even finish. I just saw an employer today that had a four page application jot form on their website and somebody was going to have to fill out four pages and I said, you know what? I would really rethink that. Get your deal killers in there maybe on one page of what do you absolutely have to have and then let them submit the form with a resume or a brief note or something and then follow up with those people immediately because we would much rather have you get that lead then for very few people to complete that four page application process.

(27:14):

I think that you have some real world examples here. IBM, I think Christina and you were going to talk about them a little bit, is that correct?

Chrisanne Bowden (27:26):

I do want to reiterate, Laura, I’m so glad you brought up the length of the application because that’s another thing that the frontline hiring team really needs to approach with leadership and maybe legal if they’re insisting that this be like a 45 minute one hour process for people to apply. We just have to be doing things smarter than that in this day and age. But yeah, with regards to case studies and why, I think this is something that individuals who are looking to hire and looking at this approach want to understand. We know that leadership a lot of times likes to hear the statistics. IBM huge company implemented a skills first approach and saw a 63% increase in hires from underrepresented groups. So if you are looking at some DEI initiatives or something along those lines, this can be really impactful. We speak from experience that this is IBM by the way. We speak from experience rewriting job descriptions and removing the four year degree requirement in more than half of IBM job openings in the US resulted in more diverse applicants. It was a 63% increase in underrepresented applicants and almost 20% of US hires joining joined without a degree. So that’s IBM. You kind of can’t argue a company that size. How about you michan? Any examples on your end?

Mishanna Wood (28:47):

That’s ADP. So according to ADP, most companies, which is 90% using a skills-based hiring method report, reducing their mishires and 94% agree that skills-based hiring is more predictive of on the job success than resumes.

Lori Cole (29:11):

Yeah, I understand that. The 63% increase. Chrisanne, that’s huge for your IBM. Yeah. Alright, we’re going to wrap up the presentation. The last two slides we’re going to go over and then we’ll do our q and a. If you have not gotten your questions in for q and a, this is the time to do it because we’ll answer as many as we can after the fact. So if you haven’t already used that q and a widget, so what are some of the pitfalls we should be looking out for if we do implement the skills-based hiring? Mishanna?

Mishanna Wood (29:56):

There’s a lot of common challenges. So of course there’s organizational resistance to change and change is always hard, especially though when it challenges those longstanding practices like the employer that I had mentioned. But again, they did find the value in making that change. Start by sharing data and success stories to build buy-in from leadership. And you may want to pilot skills first hiring in one department to demonstrate its effectiveness before scaling it across the organization. And you want to address bias and standard standardization. Bias can creep into any hiring process, but skills first hiring can help mitigate it by focusing on objective criteria and standardized assessments and structured interviews are key and ensure every candidate is evaluated in the same way. And you want to ensure the accuracy of skills assessments. So not all skills assessments are created equal. Make sure you’re using validated tools that accurately measure the skills you’re looking for and make sure that your tests are reliable and can’t be cheated. So to avoid this particular concern, you could have the assessment done in person or via conference call where you can supervise the candidates yourself. And additionally you could outsource your assessments to a certified third party provider and you do want to consider balancing skills and credentialing when needed. So in some cases credentials are still important and non-negotiable, like in healthcare or law. The key is to balance these requirements with a focus on skills where possible

Chrisanne Bowden (31:48):

I could too. Michela, you addressed something that I think is also really important with regards to skills first hiring, you mentioned bias. Well, we all know the term bias, we know what that means. None of us are immune to it by the way. We shouldn’t presume that we’re the ones who’ve risen above it. Bias can take place in a lot of cases and one of the things I think that we have to keep in mind is there’s something called like me bias. Like me bias is when a hiring manager, interviewer, HR person team kind of looks at somebody and tries to find the characteristics that I had that made me successful in this job. And maybe I do hold a four year degree in marketing. So therefore I feel like a four year degree in marketing is essential for this role. When you really start to focus on the skills, it can help you really overcome that bias that there’s a specific kind of person kind of contradicts what I said earlier about behavioral interviews. I do think that’s different because a behavioral interview is just going to help us predict how a person’s actually going to perform in the job, but that bias of this is the bit for this job or even sometimes employers who stress so much that they need a cultural fit, but what they really mean is the cultural fit needs that everybody on the team needs to be like them.

(33:10):

Your strength is always going to be and the variety of people you have on their teams and what they’re bringing to the table. So that’s I think an important consideration when we look at why we might want to go the route of skills first hiring as well.

Lori Cole (33:26):

Chrisanne, is it wrong in an interview to maybe ask someone why they chose not to go the college route?

Chrisanne Bowden (33:37):

I think carefully depending on if it’s coming up naturally and it’s something that would make sense in a scenario, but I don’t think I’d lead with it as a gee, I see you didn’t go to college. Why we don’t want to appear that we’re judging somebody for that. I would really maybe like to ask them how did you enter into the marketing field? What led you to it? And then you learn that at 18 they chose for whatever reason and they may disclose it to you or not, that college wasn’t their path and they were working in a coffee shop and the owner asked them to go ahead and pick up the social media coverage because the owner didn’t want to do it. So they did and they found that they really liked it and over time they took that little bit of experience and got higher level and higher level roles within other organizations to the point where after six, seven years they were a pretty competent marketing person. It’s perfectly fine to listen to somebody tell a story like that too, but not ask them directly. I wouldn’t make it seem judgmental for sure. Why didn’t you go to college? We don’t want to

Lori Cole (34:44):

Do that. Yes, right.

Chrisanne Bowden (34:45):

Yeah.

Lori Cole (34:47):

Alright, Mishanna, I think this is your slide two. Why don’t you go ahead and take us home.

Mishanna Wood (34:55):

So I know we’re diving into our q and a, so don’t forget to hang tight until the webinar concludes to click the view certificate button in the certification widget and download a certificate of completion with SHR M an HRCI activity IDs for recertification credit.

Lori Cole (35:19):

And then Mishanna, did you want to talk about Nope, we’re onto the recap. Sorry about that. That was my fault. I missed that. I missed that. So sorry. So let’s do our recap. Christine, you can go ahead and do this if you’d will. Happy

Chrisanne Bowden (35:36):

Me too. Problem with today’s talent shortages and other challenges. Traditional degree first hiring limits your access to qualified candidates in a lot of roles. Now again, I think we always have to say the caveat that there are some specific roles where the degree is actually going to be required, necessary important, but in a lot of cases we can be open-minded about that and keeping those IBM statistics in mind is a good place to start. Skills first hiring, which focuses on experience competencies and potential over credentials. Broadens your talent pool significantly and helps you hire faster, saves costs and improves retention. That’s another thing we didn’t really talk about, but sometimes people without a degree are just a little more appreciative that you gave them that opportunity and less likely to be wanting to shop themselves around a great deal, be more engaged in your organization.

(36:33):

So to implement skills-based hiring, you’re going to rework your job descriptions, you’re going to use assessments and prescreening questions, you’re going to train your teams on the process and use AI and other tech to identify what the actual skills and strengths are for the role skills first. Hiring builds stronger and more inclusive teams. Remember we talked about why do we want to do away with that bias? Well, we want our teams to bring to the table a broad array of life experiences and skills so that we can be better at what we do and drive our business results. Your business is going to thrive well into the future when you really evaluate what roles we can be open-minded about skills on.

Lori Cole (37:21):

Alright, so as Mishanna said, we are going to give you that certificate of completion right after the webinar here. We’re into our q and a time and we’ve got so many questions, so I am excited to dig in here on for a second. Let me get to that area. All right. How can you determine which skills are most important for each position?

Chrisanne Bowden (37:57):

I’ll take that. So as I mentioned earlier, I think the best place to start with that I would start by sitting down with the job description because that’s going to tell you a lot. Just sit down and read through it and say what is actually required here? And then evaluate that to your top performer or potentially even maybe somebody who didn’t succeed in the role, what were they missing? What weren’t they bringing to the table that was needed? And how can we get around the predetermination that a certain degree is what makes somebody successful in the versus what we’re seeing in actually performance or lack of performance.

Lori Cole (38:43):

Are perks like tuition reimbursement still attractive to candidates with this shift towards skills-based hiring?

Chrisanne Bowden (39:01):

Do you want to answer?

Mishanna Wood (39:03):

I think it depends. I think it depends on the candidate and what’s of interest to them and what they’re looking for. I definitely think putting that in as a benefit as I’m talking to employers, anything to encourage candidates to view and apply and anything you can talk about to help that candidate is a good thing.

Chrisanne Bowden (39:25):

And I would add if you are going to offer tuition reimbursement, be open-minded about what that looks like. Some of my clients have had tuition reimbursement programs that really only highlighted individuals that were getting master’s degrees and there are so many opportunities out there for improvement in education that it could just be getting a certificate in something or going back for one course. I had a tremendous success at one point with a young woman who was really great at her job, but writing wasn’t her strength and it showed. And so we just paid for a couple college courses in business writing for her and it really turned her life around because she had so much confidence and she knew how she was supposed to be communicating in those areas. We saw her start to thrive pretty quickly, but we weren’t paying. Sometimes I see these policies, employers do that, they’re directed towards a degree and I encourage you to consider being really open on what that looks like.

Lori Cole (40:27):

Those micro certifications are becoming so popular now

Chrisanne Bowden (40:32):

For sure.

Lori Cole (40:33):

How many assessments should you use per role?

Chrisanne Bowden (40:42):

You want to use assessments, but to your point earlier, Laura, you want to use as few as possible and that means that means being really selective in that you’re using the best ones for the role that they’re actually going to show you the outcome. It is very fatiguing to a candidate to be asked to do four hours worth of assessments and some of that might even include some redundancy or things that aren’t really applicable to the role, put the work in ahead of time. Assessments are important, but they need to be relevant, if that makes sense.

Lori Cole (41:17):

Are there companies out there that specialize in assessments for different types of roles?

Chrisanne Bowden (41:25):

Oh, absolutely. Everything from personality assessments to specific skill assessments to predictive testing. And I think it’s very important whether you’re HR or you’re an owner of an organization and you want to go this route, you do have to invest the time to the applicability of the specific assessment. Have some of your interior, some of your successful employees take it, let them give you feedback, look at the results and see is this really predictive? I know at one point I took an assessment and it absolutely said I should not be doing the job that I was very successful at. And we had a couple other individuals have who had that same experience with that particular assessment. So we moved along from it, but put your work in and use it. They’re not cheap either, some of them. So you want to make sure you’re getting the best ones for what your true intentions are when your hiring process,

Lori Cole (42:23):

That’s probably a really good idea to have your superstars take it so that you know how close those results are to being true for your organization. So should you still contact an applicant’s references when using a skills-based hiring approach?

Chrisanne Bowden (42:51):

Contacting references? Absolutely. I think particularly if you are moving to a skills-based hiring approach, it’s important to talk to people who can tell you what they actually witnessed the person doing on the job. Now I know as well as anyone that many employers will not actually talk to you and provide details. They’ll give you dates of employment eligibility for rehire, things like that, but try to get at least a couple of people. Sometimes you kind of have to go in the side door a little bit and talk to a former manager directly who can just answer some questions about how they actually performed in a similar role or their readiness to step into the role you’re hiring for, et cetera.

Lori Cole (43:39):

Should you pay a candidate for their time? If you require assessments that are going to take a few hours or four hours or half the day,

Chrisanne Bowden (43:51):

Yes, you should compensate them in some way. And particularly if your assessments are really kind of job performance specifics. I hear candidates sometimes say that they had an employer, for example, had them write some kind of social media copy. Here’s the situation, write us something for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. And they later found out the employer used it. That’s just not right. That’s not good practice or really ethical. And so if you are requiring a good amount of time, tie some compensation to it, people’s time is valuable and otherwise do the best you can to keep the assessments reasonably. Again, you talked about it earlier, it can be very off-putting if we’re requiring a whole lot of time. The other thing I don’t think we have talked about, but where do the assessments go in the interview process? They should go later in the interview process.

(44:52):

If you’re going to be likely to be weeding somebody out, they maybe just aren’t the best fit from the candidates that you have. There’s no reason to tie them up with an assessment. So we don’t do, if we have a three-phase interview process, I usually do the assessment between an example of how we do things that iHire a lot of times is we will have an initial interview with the hiring manager and then we may have another round of interview and then the final interview might be a panel. Well, a panel, I can definitely justify this because that’s usually four or five people’s time being tied up for the interview. So if somebody does really poorly on an assessment, we maybe just don’t want to move them on and burden them with more time and burden all the panelists with their time, but don’t also start with the assessment or do it really early in the process. We want to make sure that we’re really considering this personal viable candidate before we go that route.

Lori Cole (45:48):

When you were talking about paying for the people’s time, I know that I’ve had candidates who have said, well, I was asked to create this presentation and I spent multiple hours on this presentation and went in and gave it to their senior leadership team or the panel interview people and then they didn’t get the job and they felt very used. They felt very like, oh, you were just picking my brain for ideas. You really weren’t very serious about this. So I think you’d also have to be careful about asking people to do something like that too.

Chrisanne Bowden (46:29):

I think you do, but also a lot of that has to do with communication and respect throughout the process for certain roles, right? Mishanna sales, we are going to expect a person to show us how they’re going to perform in front of our potential customers. So that is a normal expectation. But if we’re being transparent and respectful and very much communicative through the process, hopefully if that candidate ultimately isn’t the person chosen to be hired and we can give them some good feedback and encouragement and help them maybe do a little bit better job in the next interview that they have, they won’t have that feeling. I mean, it’s just realistic. There are some jobs where we’re going to be expected to kind of perform. Yeah, I dunno if you have anything to add to that, Mishanna, having been on the other side of the table.

Mishanna Wood (47:22):

No, no, I completely agree. And keeping that candidate communication open perhaps would be the right fit for something else. And it also affects your reputation in the marketplace if you’re communicating with them and keeping a positive tone.

Lori Cole (47:40):

Absolutely. Do you have recommendations on how to attract candidates with the military background?

Chrisanne Bowden (47:50):

Sure I do. Again, I’m considered in the DC metro area, so it’s just by nature of where we are. We have a pretty strong presence of veterans in my community. And again, I think it starts with the pre-work because people are going to respond to a job post in most cases, feeling they have a good chance of pursuing that, pursuing the role. So if you haven’t done the work to really evaluate your job descriptions and see what those skill sets are, then what they really should be and is it not degree but something else, you’re not going to attract ‘em to begin with. One of the things I do know is there are many, many organizations out there that support veterans through the hiring process. They’re not always going to find you. You may want to reach out and find them. These could be veteran centric nonprofits, veteran centric hiring platforms, et cetera, where they go.

(48:50):

And the other thing, use ChatGPT, plop that military resume when you do get one in ChatGPT and ask it to help you understand what this means in civilian terms, right? So a good example of this is, if you don’t mind if I tell a little story. I many years ago was asked to help out a friend of a friend who was transitioning out of being a sergeant in the infantry 12 years in the service infantry sergeant. He’s like, I don’t know what I’m going to do and what do I do with this experience? I’m an infantry sergeant. And so we spent probably about 45 minutes just talking about what that meant in the military for him to be a sergeant and how much time do you actually spend marching around a field with a gun on your shoulder that much. So much else that he had learned through the military with regards to management type training, skill sets that he had picked up, leadership development that he was given a high level of, and also just his ability to communicate with people. And interestingly enough, he really started to see himself, small world as a recruiter. He went into government contracting, recruiting people out of the military into government contracting roles. And he never saw himself that way. But a lot of the skill sets he had learned as someone who could lead a hundred people in the military transitioned very well into that civilian role. So yeah, they’re out there. Find the organizations that are communicating with them, have them help you get your jobs out in front of them and wish you luck.

Lori Cole (50:38):

All right? How do we change leadership’s minds that refuse to change and won’t consider anyone without a degree?

Chrisanne Bowden (50:50):

It’s going to take work. And I would say my best advice to somebody fighting that battle, and it’s not exclusive, but I do find this to still be more prominent in large organizations, IBM being an exception to the role, but to the rule, start small. So find a role that you do struggle to fill that you’re struggling to find candidates with, and you can justify that a specific degree or background is not necessarily required for that role. And do your homework. Keep your statistics, show the volume of candidates and chances are good if your organization’s really deeply ingrained into this after a few hires and they see those success stories come in, they’ll be more open-minded to taking a look at the whole picture. Which ones of our job titles actually do require a specific four year degree and which can we be much more open-minded about?

Lori Cole (51:52):

And to just understand that managers, where they’re coming from, a little bit of that like me, bias could be creeping in. If that manager has a degree, they may be feeling like anyone worth their salt will have their degree and maybe I’ll just stop there. Anyone worth their salt would have a degree. So yeah, you just have to look at that.

Chrisanne Bowden (52:19):

Yeah, we all have that local college that has that great alumni network that the leadership of the organization wants to hire all the people they can from usually where they’re an alumnus, right?

Lori Cole (52:33):

Yes.

Chrisanne Bowden (52:34):

Right. That’s significant bias. I mean, I do understand and wanting to help young people up into the workforce, but that is very deep like me bias and something I think organizations should take a hard look at because that’s not working towards you having that well-rounded workforce if everybody even went to the same school.

Lori Cole (52:56):

Alright, we’re going to do one more question. How many screening questions do you recommend?

Chrisanne Bowden (53:03):

That’s going to be for you, Lori.

Lori Cole (53:05):

Well, you know what? I would do no more than maybe six for that application process that I displayed with those pre-screening questions. I wouldn’t ask them to do any more than six. The fewer the better in my opinion. Get your deal breakers out of the way. If they’re going to be a brain surgeon, they certainly need that degree and we need to see that degree. But other than that, get the deal breakers out of the way and then call them and talk to them and find out what their background is. Alright, so that’s all the time we have left for today. Thank you all so much for being here. You should be able to click on that view certificate button on your certification widget so that you can download that certificate of completion for your SHRM and HRCI activity, IDs and recertification credits. Thank you again, Chrisanne and Mishanna for being here.

(54:10):

We really appreciate your time. For those of you attending today that maybe have less than 500 employees, check out that iHire360 widget on your screen so you can learn more about that exclusive program. It has job ads, career site, AI powered resume matching, automated recruitment marketing, and a lot more. But if you have over 500 employees, Mishanna would love to talk to you and we’ve included a widget, her Calendly widget on this screen also, so that you can set up a time with her. And then also Chrisanne, you can schedule a time with her for a free consultation so that she can talk to you about personalized guidance for HR tasks, any projects you might be struggling with or your HR strategy. So you can click that outsource to HR services link and book time with her. And if you have any other questions that come to mind, you can reach out to our customer success team at [email protected] and we will get you with the right person. Remember to click that view certificate button here and keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow for an on-demand recording of today’s webinar. We’ll invite you to our next webinar in a couple of weeks here. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you all for attending.