It’s No Surprise That “Skills-Based” Hiring Has Not Worked
It’s No Surprise That “Skills-Based” Hiring Has Not Worked
A new report shows that, even after businesses announce dropping college degree requirements for jobs, most hire college graduates anyway.
This article outlines an opinion that organizations either tried skills based hiring and reverted to degree required hiring because it was warranted, or they didn't adapt their process in spite of executive vision.
Since this article is non industry specific, what are your observations or opinions of the technology sector? What about the general business sector?
Should first world employees of businesses be required to obtain degrees if they reasonably expect a business related job?
Do college experiences and academic rigor reveal higher achieving employees?
Is undergraduate education a minimum standard for a more enlightened society? Or a way to hold separation between classes of people and status?
Is a masters degree the new way to differentiate yourself where the undergrad degree was before?
Edit: multiple typos, I guess that's proof that I should have done more college 😄
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To believe otherwise, you must believe that business leaders and hiring managers don’t know what they’re doing – that they are blindly following tradition or just lazy. [...]you’d need to believe that businesses have simply overlooked a better way to hire. That seems naïve.
IDK, Has the author ever worked anywhere? Talked to anyone who worked somewhere? READ SOME POSTS ON REDDIT ABOUT WORKING SOMEWHERE? The amount of times no one could understand why a business does what it does, seemingly to its own detriment, is staggering.
They are right that it's wrong to believe that people with college degrees don't have skills - some do. The issue is that it appears to practically be non correlated to each other. I've seen people with college degrees who clearly learned very little during that experience. I've seen people with no degree be very knowledgeable and skilled.
The other obvious question in regard to hiring is - if going to college was necessary to do a job, then surely the degree would matter. However, outside of limited situations, the thing they're looking for is a degree, not one related to the job they're hiring for. Also, degrees are stupidly expensive which at least has to drive up wages a little anytime there's some competition in the labor market.
I'd argue the biggest obvious mark against a degree really doing much is that it's relevant at most for the first job. After that, no one asks to see the degree, or cares what your GPA was, or whatever - because the much better skill assessment is actually doing a job in the field. At that point, while it's tradition to require a degree, it's literally a check box. If these companies thought about it better, they'd realize the hiring mostly ignores degrees for any position outside of literally the first one out of college. An obvious solution to this problem IMHO would be the probationary period. Set it for 6 months renewing for some period. You need some time having someone do the actual task to really know if they're going to be a good fit anyway.
Has the author ever worked anywhere?
I wonder if having a degree is a hard requirement for journalism and writing/communication and that's what the author's world perspective is based on?
When coworkers sit around the lunch table and complain/vent about the state of the world, do you imagine that journalist complain about a lack of higher education, so when they see any evidence that threatens the model of college degrees (which = debt), they jump on it as proof of their own path?
while it’s tradition to require a degree, it’s literally a check box
This is a very good challenge to the requirement. If it's just a check box (that you have A degree) and not a very specific one, does it diminish the credibility of the requirement?
Do people like the probationary period idea? It sounds functional and practical to me.
I currently work at a business that uses a similar method to the probationary period, and I hate it. It’s definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper, but in practice I would love to move away from.
We use a proprietary system in my field, and train a couple of members of each department to be able to submit stuff into it (think Concur / NetSuite). It takes about three months to become proficient enough that I don’t have some form of issue with everything you submit. This means I can spend months training someone, just for them to be let go and the next person roll in.
Training people is expensive in both cash for the business and the time of those around them. Hiring correctly once would make my life a lot easier.
Training people is expensive in both cash for the business and the time of those around them
You're definitely supported by an enormous amount of evidence in this.
In my current job, we have a small group of employees with specialties in sciences, medical, hazardous materials, IT, threat/plume modeling, and running daily activities. They go to so much training in their first two years, they're gone all the time, and then they are still almost worthless for another year due to lack of real-world knowledge they couldn't get from these special schools.
When we hire the wrong people, it's a huge problem in costs, lost time, and then it makes finding replacements that much harder and shorts the organization longer as well.
Finding the right people who are a good fit is hard.
Training people is expensive in both cash for the business and the time of those around them. Hiring correctly once would make my life a lot easier.
I agree that training people is expensive - I'm just not convinced that any other system than the probationary one works. That is to say, there's sufficient cases of people getting past whatever screening plan the companies have and yet cannot do the job. Depending on the company, once you're permanent, it can be very hard and every expensive to fire you - especially in some countries.
I'm not suggesting that you should take anyone off the street and give them a probationary period. I'm saying if your position needs a skills assessment, I don't think there's a functional one other than a few months of actually doing the job. Too many other systems are easily gamed, or are easily set up to fail people inappropriately too.
I've never seen a hiring manager that knew shit about anything besides trying to haggle wages down. Are they living in some kind of parallel universe?
They also know how to sack people and talk people into not reporting something like health and safety violations.
One place I worked at used ozone in an enclosed space for cleaning. No masks or ventilation. Some new guy was like "in the last place I worked we had a shit load of procedures for that because it was so dangerous"
They stopped using ozone then and no one got anything out of it.