skills-based hiring Archives - Everpool Recruitment

The modern workforce is undergoing a profound transformation. Traditional career paths, once defined by long-term loyalty to a single employer, are giving way to a more flexible, diversified approach known as the ‘portfolio career.’ This shift is reshaping how professionals view work and how organisations attract, manage, and retain talent.

Understanding the Portfolio Career

A portfolio career is built around multiple streams of work rather than a single full-time job. Instead of committing to one employer, individuals combine various roles, projects, and income sources. This might include freelance consulting, part-time employment, creative pursuits, or entrepreneurial ventures. The result is a career that emphasises flexibility, autonomy, and personal fulfilment.

Advances in technology, the rise of remote work, and changing attitudes toward job security have accelerated this trend. Professionals are increasingly seeking variety, purpose, and control over their time values that traditional employment structures often struggle to provide.

Why Portfolio Careers Are on the Rise

Several factors are driving the popularity of portfolio careers:

Digital transformation: Online platforms make it easier to find freelance work, collaborate remotely, and manage multiple clients.
Economic uncertainty: Diversifying income streams provides financial resilience in unpredictable markets.
Changing values: Workers prioritise flexibility, creativity, and meaningful work over long-term corporate stability.
Skill diversification: Rapid technological change encourages professionals to continuously learn and apply new skills across different contexts.

This evolution reflects a broader cultural shift toward self-determination and lifelong learning.

The Benefits for Professionals

For individuals, a portfolio career offers freedom and variety. It allows professionals to pursue multiple interests, balance personal and professional goals, and adapt quickly to changing market demands. Many find that managing a portfolio of roles enhances creativity, builds resilience, and fosters a stronger sense of ownership over their career trajectory.

What It Means for Employers

The rise of portfolio careers presents both challenges and opportunities for employers. Organisations must rethink traditional employment models and adapt to a workforce that values flexibility and independence.

1. Rethinking Talent Acquisition

Employers can tap into a broader talent pool by engaging freelancers, contractors, and consultants. This approach allows access to specialised skills on demand without the long-term commitments of full-time hiring. However, it also requires new strategies for sourcing, onboarding, and integrating external contributors effectively.

2. Redefining Employee Engagement

As more professionals adopt flexible work arrangements, engagement strategies must evolve. Employers should focus on creating meaningful work experiences, offering autonomy, and fostering a sense of belonging—even for non-traditional workers. Building strong relationships with portfolio professionals can lead to long-term collaborations and mutual trust.

3. Emphasising Skills Over Roles

In a portfolio-driven world, skills become more valuable than job titles. Employers benefit from adopting a skills-based approach to workforce planning, emphasising continuous learning and development. This mindset encourages agility and innovation within teams.

4. Adapting Organisational Culture

A culture that embraces flexibility, collaboration, and inclusivity will attract top talent from diverse career paths. Employers who support hybrid work models, project-based roles, and cross-functional collaboration will be better positioned to thrive in this new landscape.

Preparing for the Future of Work

The portfolio career trend signals a fundamental shift in how work is structured and valued. Employers that adapt to this reality—by embracing flexibility, prioritising skills, and fostering meaningful connections will gain a competitive edge. Rather than resisting change, forward-thinking organisations can harness the creativity and adaptability of portfolio professionals to drive innovation and growth.

Conclusion

The rise of the portfolio career marks a new era in the world of work, one defined by flexibility, autonomy, and continuous evolution. For employers, it’s an invitation to rethink traditional models and build more dynamic, inclusive, and resilient organisations. As the boundaries between employment and entrepreneurship continue to blur, those who adapt will not only survive but thrive in the future of work.

Ask any business leader in the Legal industry, and they’ll tell you it’s becoming a lot more difficult to keep teams fully staffed, engaged, and confident in their skills. Across industries, hiring is starting to feel more like plugging leaks than building momentum.

75% of employers say finding qualified people to fill roles is their biggest challenge. As technology evolves and skill gaps grow wider every year, it’s no wonder. New demands arrive faster than many teams can respond.

It’s common to spend months recruiting only to see another critical role open when someone leaves. That’s why strategic development planning has moved far beyond optional training budgets or nice-to-have perks. A clear, thoughtful growth plan is now one of the few tools that can help keep good people engaged and ready for what comes next.

Without it, there’s little chance of staying ahead of rapid change or keeping the Legal employees who care about staying productive and competitive. A future-ready workforce depends on a strong development plan.

The question is how you build one.

What Makes Development Plans Deliver

A development plan works best when everyone knows why it exists. It isn’t just a record of training courses. It’s a simple way to show how someone’s skills can grow in a direction that matters to them and the business.

Many plans fall short because they stay too general. They rely on the same list of goals for every role. Over time, people stop seeing the point. If a plan doesn’t connect to real work, it becomes a paperwork exercise. You need a cohesive strategy if you want your plan to deliver a competitive talent advantage. That starts with goals.

The SMART Goals Framework keeps things grounded. It drives companies to set specific, practical objectives that lead to measurable development outcomes. “Get better at data skills” doesn’t mean much. A stronger goal might be, “Finish a data analytics certification by October and use it to improve the next reporting cycle.”

It also helps to think about how learning happens. For most Legal employees, it doesn’t come from sitting in a classroom. The 70-20-10 model indicates that about 70% of skill development happens as a side effect of daily work. 20% comes from social interactions (coaching, mentoring, and peer conversations). Only about 10% comes from formal courses.

That balance might differ depending on your team, though. Some people want to learn with hands-on experiences; others need time to watch examples or walk through steps. Smaller, targeted lessons can also make learning feel manageable. Many Legal companies are moving toward microlearning, offering short videos or guides that employees can pull up when needed.

Whatever approach you take, make sure there’s alignment between individual aspirations and preferences, and organisational objectives.

The Strategic Development Planning Framework

A development plan is easier to build when there is a clear process behind it. Many Legal teams try to start with a list of training courses or generic goals. That approach rarely holds up over time. For measurable development outcomes, you need more clarity.

Here’s how to start:

Conduct a Skills Assessment & Gap Analysis

Any effective development plan starts with understanding the skills your teams already have. Competency mapping doesn’t have to be complicated. It can start with simple questions about the types of tasks employees handle well, and where projects slow down. You might consider what sector-specific capabilities will be more important tomorrow than yesterday.

Take a holistic view. Assessing technical Legal skills will be important, particularly as demand for certain things, like digital literacy, continues to grow. But remember to consider soft skills, leadership qualities, and transferable skills.

Think ahead and remember that some skills are becoming essential across all industries. AI proficiency, data analysis, and automation skills are becoming more relevant to all kinds of Legal employees. Will those be crucial to your team moving forward?

Explore the Four Types of Development Plans

Once you’ve mapped your skills gap, you can look at the bridges that might fit. Not every plan needs to look the same. Sometimes, you’ll be focused on improving employees’ skills in a specific Legal role. Other times, you’ll want to prepare staff to grow into new positions.

Consider a broad range of:

Skill-based plans strengthen the abilities a person uses most days.
Succession plans prepare someone to take over a crucial role for progress.
Management development plans help new leaders feel steady and clear about expectations.
Career transition plans support employees moving into a different part of the business.

Sometimes, your entire development plan will borrow elements from multiple different areas. What matters most is that your approach makes sense to you and your employees.

Define Your Resource Allocation Strategy

Strategic development planning can stall when resources feel limited. Many Legal companies set aside 2-5% of payroll for development, but there’s no ideal budget. Some organisations choose to spend a lot more. After all, certain studies have shown that learning and development has an average ROI of 353%.

If putting more into development helps you spend less on constant recruiting, high turnover, and work that keeps getting redone, it’s usually worth the investment. Learning and growth don’t just improve productivity. It also makes your company more appealing to candidates, keeps people engaged, and helps morale stay steady.

If your resources are limited, look at budget-conscious options:

Cross-training helps people build skills by learning directly from colleagues.
Mentoring connects senior and inexperienced employees for peer-to-peer learning.
Short online courses or microlearning tools can fit into busy schedules without much cost.

Technology is also changing what’s possible. Some teams use simple learning platforms to track progress. Others bring in AI-powered tools to suggest training options or measure results. These systems don’t need to be elaborated on to be helpful.

Remember Cultural Integration

The last piece is making sure development fits the way people already work. A plan that ignores culture can feel forced.

Remote and hybrid teams often need more flexibility. Different types of Legal staff members prefer varying approaches. Certain employees prefer to learn independently, while others need regular check-ins to stay engaged.

Development also means different things to different generations. Early-career employees may want to build credibility, while someone later in their career might focus on mentoring others.

Plans should reflect the fact that people learn and grow in different ways. They need to show their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. When employees see that development is set up to work for everyone, they’re more likely to take it seriously.

A plan that accommodates different needs and backgrounds feels more genuine. It shows that learning isn’t just an extra thing to do when there’s time; it’s part of how the team works.

Implementation Best Practices: From Plan to Performance

A Legal development plan can look amazing in a document, with clear goals, good intentions, and a timeline everyone can follow. But sometimes those plans fall apart because they don’t account for a careful launch, regular monitoring, and future growth.

Here’s how you can plan for success.

Develop a Clear Launch Strategy

How you introduce a plan is important. Without your team’s input, it shouldn’t feel like it was developed behind closed doors. When employees get to share what they need and what feels realistic, it’s easier to get real commitment.

It’s worth talking early about what success should look like, too. Be specific about who will be responsible for what, and what should happen month after month. Make sure everyone knows what resources are available to help.

Don’t overlook basic preparations, too. Setting up logins, ensuring reading materials are easily accessible, and even figuring out how to record milestones early can make a plan feel more structured.

Master Monitoring & Evaluation

It’s common to see plans lose momentum when nobody checks in. Without regular conversations, goals lose their meaning. Some Legal teams meet monthly to see how things are going. Others chat every couple of weeks, even just for ten minutes. What matters is that it happens.

Measuring progress doesn’t need a big system. A few questions work fine. Are new skills showing up in daily tasks? Are people more confident? Is turnover steady? These are the signals worth watching.

You can usually spot the impact if you look for it:

People stay longer because they feel their role has a future.
Projects finish faster with fewer mistakes.
More employees are ready to step into bigger jobs.
Teams can handle more complex work without needing outside help.
Surveys or informal chats show people feel supported.

Don’t wait for a formal review or exit interview to spot issues. A quick conversation can uncover small problems before they turn into big ones.

Commit to Continuous Improvement

The Legal industry, and your business will continue to change. Your development plans shouldn’t stay frozen in place. It helps to define moments when you’ll review what’s happening and decide whether it’s working for your team.

Be ready to adjust when a new project, a shift in priorities, or a change in employee aspirations arises. Keep communication fluid, too, focusing on regular feedback. Gathering insights from team members about what they would like to improve can help you optimise your training resources. Recognizing staff for their efforts keeps motivation high.

The last step is constantly documenting the lessons you’re learning as a business. When a team finishes a development cycle, pause and look back. What worked? What slowed things down? Collect those insights so the next plan feels easier to start and simpler to follow.

Turning Plans into Real Progress

There’s no perfect recipe for strategic development planning. What works for one Legal team might hold another back. Every organisation has its own mix of challenges, priorities, and learning preferences.

But one thing shows everywhere: people want to know their skills matter. They want to see that there’s a path forward, especially when everything around them feels uncertain.

A good development plan helps meet that need in a real way. It tells employees that growth isn’t something they have to figure out on their own.

Getting started doesn’t take a huge step; it just requires a clear goal, a conversation with your team members, and a small investment in the right resources.

If you’re unsure where to begin, don’t wait for the perfect moment or plan. The most important thing is to start somewhere. Even a simple, honest approach can go a long way if it stays connected to people’s daily work.

If your Healthcare job search starts to feel like a marathon with no end, you’re not alone. In 2025, hiring timelines are stretching, with some estimates suggesting it takes up to 6 months to find a role. There are various reasons for this.

Companies are reluctant to hire when they’re not sure what the future of work will look like. AI is reshaping roles and responsibilities, new challenges are emerging constantly, and even the workplace is changing, with new versions of hybrid work.

In addition, the World Economic Forum highlights that skill necessities are shifting, with around 40% of the skills companies screen for today set to be obsolete by 2030. When companies do decide what they need, the competition for roles is fierce, meaning business leaders often have more applications to sort through and interviews to schedule than ever before.

While AI and automation can help streamline hiring cycles to some extent, many companies face major delays, directly impacting you as a candidate.

The challenge? Staying proactive and motivated during long periods of silence and uncertainty.

Understanding Current Hiring Timelines

On average, healthcare candidates can expect to spend between 3 and 6 months just finding a relevant role, but that timeline can vary drastically. Depending on the role a company wants to fill, candidates could spend weeks sorting through applications, months arranging pre-screening interviews, and even longer analysing skill tests.

Certain industries experience even longer timelines. For instance, the energy and defence sectors have some of the most extended hiring periods, often exceeding 60 days, due to rigorous security clearances and specialized skill requirements. That means you could wait two months or more for a job offer even after an interview.

The truth is that the modern recruitment funnel has changed a lot. There are various stages involved that weren’t common in the past. After you apply, it might be screened by AI tools and then passed to human experts for review.

From there, there’s a first round of screening interviews, followed by skill assessments, second-round interviews, and even final interviews with panels. Every stage takes time, and as companies struggle with limited administrative support, hiring cycles naturally extend.

Maintaining Momentum: Strategies for Each Stage of the Process

When days stretch into weeks and months, it’s easy to lose motivation, feel disheartened, or feel your confidence dip. The key to success is learning how to maintain energy and momentum through each stage of the process—from application to negotiation and offer.

Application Phase: Quality Over Quantity

It often takes 10-20 applications for one job interview, regardless of your Healthcare role. In certain sectors, like Professional Services, you could send dozens of applications and hear nothing back. The answer isn’t just to send out more applications.

Upgrade the quality of your submissions first. Use keywords from the job description to ensure your resume passes Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Customise each application based on the role and company you’re applying for. Look for ways to differentiate yourself from competitors by focusing on your agility, resilience, or commitment to constant development.

Interview Stage: Staying Engaged

Many Healthcare companies today take a multi-stage approach to interviewing. Even if you excel in the “pre-screening” phase, you must maintain enthusiasm through each subsequent stage.

To keep your energy up, reframe each interview as a two-way conversation. This isn’t just about proving yourself – it’s also your chance to evaluate the company. Come prepared with thoughtful questions that show your curiosity and give you insights into the team culture and expectations.

Prepare yourself for different interview formats with mock practice sessions with friends. Explore the differences between virtual interviews, panel-based interviews, and so on. Know how to follow up politely if you don’t hear back for a week or two after each phase. Remember, don’t pester—just check in once in a while to find out if they need help making a decision.

Assessment Phase: Showcasing Skills

Your credentials and resume can’t guarantee you a job offer anymore. Companies are switching to skills-based hiring – an approach considered up to five times more predictive of future job performance. Be prepared to show your skills in action.

Create portfolios you can share online, showcasing your accomplishments or the projects you worked on in different roles, and share them with employers. Review the core skills listed in job descriptions and seek out practice tools or platforms. If the role requires Excel modelling build a few practice models.

Don’t forget soft skills – many employers will look at your ability to collaborate, adapt and lead, so prepare stories you can tell in interviews that showcase those skills.

Negotiation and Offer Stage: Patience and Preparation

The final stage of the Healthcare job search can be frustrating. Delayed offers are increasingly common as companies finalize budgets, compare finalists, or navigate internal approvals. That doesn’t mean you’re out of the running – it just means it’s time to play the long game with clarity and confidence.

Start by doing your homework. Research market compensation for your role, factoring in location, seniority, and industry. Tools like Glassdoor, Levels, fyi, and recruiter insights can help. Prepare not just for salary, but for the total package.

When an offer is delayed, stay in contact, without being pushy. If and when an offer does arrive, don’t feel pressured to accept on the spot; be ready to negotiate if necessary.

Staying Resilient and Ready: Smart Moves

Beyond carefully preparing for every stage of the new hiring process, it also helps to have a “toolkit” in place to help maintain momentum. Here are some quick tips for success.

Stay Organised with Applications

An organised approach is crucial during an extended Healthcare job search. Applying here and there without a clear system quickly leads to confusion and missed opportunities.

Use tools like Trello, Notion, or Airtable to build a visual pipeline of where you’ve applied, who you’ve heard back from, and what’s next. Create reusable templates you can use for each application, but remember to personalise them for each role.

Watch out for application fatigue. Don’t try to push out 50 applications in one day. Take breaks, and give your brain time to reset.

Managing Uncertainty and Anxiety

Patience might be a virtue, but it isn’t easy to maintain. The silence you experience after submitting an application or completing an interview can easily lead to nerves. Establish a daily routine and implement ways to keep your mind occupied when you’re anxious.

Look after your mental well-being, and touch base with friends and family members when you start to feel overwhelmed. Invest in your confidence. If you’re rejected for a role, don’t beat yourself up—tell yourself you’re learning from each experience.

You could even create a “win” journal to log positive progress, like callbacks, good interviews, and positive feedback from Healthcare leaders.

Using the Extended Timeline to Your Advantage

It might be hard to see, but there is an upside to longer hiring cycles – you have more time to level up. While waiting for an opportunity to arise, you can actively work on filling skill gaps. Find out what matters to the Healthcare companies you’re targeting, like digital literacy or resilience, and invest in workshops and programs to boost your skills.

Experiment with new projects, even if that means volunteering or taking on different tasks in an existing role. Develop your personal brand on channels like LinkedIn with thought leadership content and build out your network.

Join industry groups on Slack or LinkedIn, attend webinars, and connect with like-minded individuals who can help you throughout your job search. Consider partnering with a recruitment expert who understands the current landscape for personalised guidance and a competitive edge. They might even be able to introduce you to new opportunities you wouldn’t find elsewhere.

Know When to Move On

Sometimes, the hardest part of a long hiring process isn’t waiting – knowing when to walk away. In a slow-moving market, stepping back from any opportunity can feel risky. But sometimes, you must identify when an opportunity isn’t right for you.

Pay attention to red flags in the hiring process, such as vague answers to questions, limited feedback, or inconsistent communication. If you lose confidence in the employer and their ability to deliver a great employee experience, it’s okay to step back.

Watch out for signs that the company culture or experience isn’t suitable for you either. How a company communicates during hiring often mirrors how it operates day-to-day. Do they respect your time? Keep you informed? Offer transparency around the role and expectations?

These are strong indicators of how they treat employees, too. If something feels off now, chances are it won’t feel better once you’re on the inside.

Thriving in the New Job Market

Unfortunately, extended hiring cycles are the new normal for many Healthcare professionals. They can feel exhausting, but they don’t have to drain your confidence or derail your career path.

By protecting your energy and confidence, staying organised and focused, and being ready to adapt at all times, you can consistently evolve and grow, even while you’re waiting for feedback from a potential employer.

Need some extra help? Work with a recruitment professional for unique insights into the hiring market, how you can prepare for new recruitment stages, and even access to roles you wouldn’t find anywhere else. A little help can go a long way.

How much can you learn about someone from a CV? These documents might offer a brief insight into a Retail candidate’s previous roles or credentials, but they don’t show you how competent a candidate will be, or how well they’ll mesh with your company’s culture.

These days, they may not even tell you if your candidate has the skills they’ll need to thrive in a specific role. After all, with innovations in AI and technology happening constantly, a degree in a particular topic doesn’t necessarily guarantee a candidate’s future success.

That’s why 72% of hiring managers prefer skill-based hiring over CV assessments.

Ultimately, hiring the right talent has become much harder. Economic pressures, rising operational costs, and what’s now called a “bifurcated labour market” are making it even more difficult. Some sectors struggle to fill roles, while others face an oversupply of candidates. It’s a confusing, frustrating landscape for both employers and job seekers.

That’s why a skills-based approach is so valuable. In 2025, organisations that shift their focus to examining real capabilities rather than credentials will be better positioned to adapt, innovate, and grow.

The Limitations of Traditional CV-Based Hiring

It’s estimated that around 60% of companies use CV screening in the hiring process. That’s nothing new – Retail employers have relied on these documents for decades, typically using software to immediately “narrow” candidate pools based on specific credentials.

Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work. Often, your hiring team or automated system will automatically ignore candidates who could be ideal for a role just because they haven’t listed a particular skill or credential.

One Harvard Business Review report found that around 61% of employers reject qualified candidates because they don’t meet “degree” requirements. However, someone without a degree could still be incredibly valuable for a role if they have the right skills.

Plus, it’s worth remembering that roles change faster than educational paths evolve. Today’s candidates don’t always have degrees in things like “data science” or machine learning, but they could have transferrable skills that align with those roles.

Beyond that, traditional hiring methods have inherent biases. Hiring teams have a habit of inadvertently favouring candidates from specific backgrounds or people with a certain amount of experience.

An obvious example is how immigrants in Canada are regularly rejected for roles because they have “no Canadian experience.” Unfortunately, AI can sometimes make this bias problem worse. Although AI screening tools save hiring teams time, they can also prioritise candidates based on the existing CVs and employee data they’re trained on.

What is Skills-Based Hiring?

Many experts believe skills-based hiring is the future of recruitment. This strategy focuses on a candidate’s competencies—both technical and interpersonal—over traditional things like previous job titles or degrees.

The idea is that instead of trying to estimate whether a person will be effective in a role based on what they’ve accomplished in the past, you look at what they can do now and what kind of potential they’ll have in the future.

Skills-based hiring encourages a careful evaluation of all types of skills:

Hard Skills: These are measurable, Retail job-specific abilities acquired through education or training, such as proficiency in a programming language or expertise in data analysis.
Soft Skills: These encompass interpersonal attributes like communication, teamwork, and adaptability, which are crucial for effective collaboration and leadership.
Transferable Skills: Skills applicable across various roles and industries, such as problem-solving or critical thinking, allow individuals to adapt to different job functions.

So, why is this approach so valuable? Skills-based hiring opens doors for a broader range of candidates by focusing on actual abilities rather than formal qualifications. It allows you to overcome the biases in traditional hiring practices and offer opportunities to individuals from diverse backgrounds.

This doesn’t just improve DEI metrics – it means you gain access to more valuable talent, at a time when 87% of global companies are experiencing skill gaps.

Benefits of Skills-Based Hiring for Employers

Studies from McKinsey show that skills-based hiring is incredibly valuable. It expands your talent pool, creates a more resilient workforce (through diversity), and accelerates the hiring cycle. When you focus on skills first, you get:

Access to a Broader Talent Pool

Companies can tap into a more extensive and diverse candidate base by prioritising competencies over traditional credentials. Some studies suggest skills-based hiring can expand the talent pool by up to ten times. In the Retail landscape where access to talent is limited, this greatly impacts your ability to fill skill gaps fast.

Enhanced Diversity and Inclusion

Focusing on skills, rather than arbitrary things like degrees and prior experience, helps reduce biases in hiring, creating a more inclusive recruitment process. That means you end up with a more diverse team, more capable of innovating and sharing unique perspectives. Research shows diverse teams lead to more profitable companies—diverse companies are 70% more likely to capture new markets and 87% better at making decisions.

Better Retention and Reduced Turnover

A skills-focused approach can streamline hiring, resulting in significant cost and time savings. Organisations have reported up to a 91% faster hiring process and nearly a 90% reduction in hiring costs.

Moreover, candidates selected based on their competencies are more likely to excel in their roles, leading to higher job satisfaction and reduced turnover.

Practical Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide

So, how can companies embrace the era of skills-based hiring?

Ultimately, it’s all about rethinking how you review candidates.

Step 1: Conduct a Skills Audit of Current Roles

Begin by analysing existing positions to identify the specific skills and competencies required for success. The important thing to remember here is to take a forward-thinking approach. Don’t just consider the skills team members need now.

Think about the skills relevant to your Retail roles in the future. According to the World Economic Forum, around 40% of the skills that today’s employers screen for might be obsolete by 2030.

Step 2: Update Your Job Descriptions

Stop listing things like “degree in [x]” or “[x] years of experience in [role]” on your job descriptions. Instead, focus on the skills you need. Clearly outline the essential competencies you’re looking for and why they matter, such as “knowledge of data analysis” or “excellent team collaboration skills”. This will help you attract a broader pool of candidates.

Step 3: Design Skill Assessments

Instead of validating whether Retail candidates have the right skills based on their credentials, put their competencies to the test. Create assessments that accurately evaluate each candidate’s reasoning skills, data knowledge, or cognitive abilities. This will show you whether your employees can leverage the abilities they have in the workplace.

Step 4: Implement Structured Interviewing Techniques

Structured interviewing is a great way to remove bias from the hiring process and gain a deeper insight into the potential of the people you meet. Create a list of specific questions that probe your candidate’s abilities, experiences, and behaviours. Consider using a scoring mechanism to evaluate everyone’s responses fairly.

Step 5: Leverage Technology Effectively

AI and automation can create problems in the Retail recruitment process, but they can also be helpful. Train your models to identify the key competencies linked to a role in candidate applications and assessments. Use predictive analysis tools for deeper insights into which candidates might have the most potential based on their abilities.

Step 6: Address the Need for Upskilling

As Retail roles continue to change, there’s a good chance you won’t find a candidate with the complete set of skills you’re looking for. With that in mind, ensure you have a plan for upskilling. Look for ways to build on impressive candidates by giving them access to new training resources, mentorship programs, and online courses.

Overcoming Common Challenges and Resistance

Although many companies are discovering the benefits of skills-based hiring, certain team members and employees might still resist a shift to a new strategy. Most hiring managers are used to focusing heavily on CVs and resumes.

The best way to address this issue is with education. Show your hiring managers clear evidence of the benefits of a skills-based approach, such as improved performance and diversity outcomes. Engage stakeholders through workshops and discussions that address their concerns.

During the transition period, gather as much data and feedback as possible. Highlight how skills-based strategies are reducing hiring costs or improving productivity.

Remember to focus on a comprehensive approach to assessing skills, too. While it’s important to find candidates with the right technical skills, it’s much easier to “teach” hard skills than to reshape a candidate to fit your company culture.

Skills-based hiring should incorporate evaluations of interpersonal skills and adaptability to maintain and enhance a cohesive workplace culture.

Rethinking Hiring for a More Resilient Workforce

Ultimately, for Retail companies, the case for skills-based hiring has never been stronger. In the years ahead, demand for these strategies will only grow. Thanks to the impact of AI and automation, the types of skills companies need in their employees are changing at an incredible pace.

Human skills, such as resilience and adaptability, are becoming increasingly important, and these competencies cannot be measured in degrees and certifications.

Switching your attention to skills over CVs will ensure you can more rapidly adapt to a changing market and access a wider range of talented professionals. It’s the key to faster, more effective, and more strategic hiring in a dynamic world.

Hiring the best Legal Costs talent isn’t easy, particularly when skill shortages are increasing. The cost of making the wrong decision can be huge. Not only do you waste time and resources onboarding and training the wrong employee, but your team’s productivity can suffer, too.

So, how do you ensure you’re making the right hiring choices? Focusing on skills is common, particularly for companies trying to avoid unconscious bias. Prioritising skills over attributes ensures you can hire team members with the right abilities to thrive in a specific role.

However, while more than 80% of employers say they take a skills-based approach to hiring, focusing on skills alone may not be a good idea. After all, the skills Legal Costs team members need are constantly changing, and while you can teach employees how to leverage new skills, it’s much harder to shape a team member’s attitude or potential.

Here’s what you need to know about hiring for skills, vs attitude, vs potential.

The Current Job Market Landscape: Hiring Challenges

The Legal Costs job market has changed significantly in recent years. The competition for top talent is increasing in an environment where every company faces significant skill shortages. Worldwide, more than 75% of companies struggle to find skilled workers.

Additionally, employee priorities are changing. Following the “Great Resignation”, candidates focus more on finding roles that offer the perfect blend of work balance, development opportunities, and a strong focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

To attract and retain top talent, companies can’t afford to rely exclusively on scanning resumes for evidence of the right education or experience. CVs offer a stunted insight into a candidate’s potential, focusing solely on their achievements.

A more comprehensive approach to analysing a candidate’s “potential matrix”, based on their hard and soft skills, personality traits, and ability to adapt to changing situations, ensures you can hire more resilient, successful employees.

The Case for Skills-Based Hiring

Skills-based hiring, which involves prioritising candidates based on their abilities, does have value. Deloitte research found that companies that take a skills-based approach to hiring are 63% more likely to achieve the results they need from their teams.

Evaluating the skills of your potential employees ensures you can look beyond how many years of experience a candidate has in the Legal Costs sector or which certifications they’ve earned to focus on how well they’ll be able to carry out specific responsibilities at work.

This can reduce the risk of unconscious bias in hiring and lead to benefits like:

Quicker hiring decisions: Skills are often relatively easy to verify through portfolios, certifications, and practical tests, accelerating your hiring decisions.
Immediate productivity: Employees with the right skills can instantly contribute to your workforce without additional training.
Reduced costs: Because your candidates will already have the skills they need to thrive in their role, you can spend less money on training, mentoring, and development.
Improved retention: Some studies show that skills-based hires have a 9% longer tenure at their companies than traditional hires.
Competitive advantage: Focusing on emerging skills, such as digital literacy, can help you give your organisation a competitive advantage in the Legal Costs industry.

Focusing at least partially on skills is often crucial for virtually all roles and positions. Ensuring your team members have the right competencies to complete the tasks essential to their roles means you can hire more efficient, productive team members.

However, there’s a risk to focusing on skills alone, particularly in a world where experts predict employers will need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030, thanks to changes in the workplace. That’s where a focus on attitude and potential becomes a priority.

The Benefits of Prioritising Attitude and Potential

Skills are undoubtedly important in any role, but they can’t accurately predict a person’s chances of success in your organisation alone.

They’re either missing motivation, don’t have the resiliency to adapt to changes, or can’t thrive in the culture your company offers. Technical skills can be easily taught in the Legal Costs industry with coaching, training, and mentorship. Adjusting someone’s attitude is much harder.

Focusing on attitude and potential by examining a candidate’s personality, soft skills like communication and adaptability, and work ethic drives incredible results, such as:

Greater resilience: In the fast-moving Legal Costs industry, companies need adaptable employees who can adjust quickly to changing challenges. Hiring employees focusing on continuous learning, improvement, and a growth mindset improves resilience.
Improved retention: Studies show that 90% of new hires lose their job due to their attitude or personality. Hiring for attitude improves your chances of retaining critical team members who mesh well with your team.
Enhanced performance: Candidates with the right attitude and soft skills are more effective at collaborating with team members, serving customers, and solving problems. This can significantly improve the performance of your teams.
Diversity: By hiring for attitude and potential over technical skills, you can improve your chances of building a more diverse workforce, boosting your employer brand.

Of course, hiring for attitude alone also has its setbacks. If you focus on personality over skills entirely, you’ll need to invest more in training and development programs and spend more time evaluating candidates for personality traits.

Balancing Skills and Attitude: The Hybrid Hiring Approach

Ultimately, the best option for improved Legal Costs hiring strategies isn’t focusing on skills, attitude and potential independently – it’s taking a holistic approach.

When hiring a new team member, focusing on certain essential skills, such as proficiency with certain software or exceptional communication and customer service skills, will help streamline the recruitment process and reduce the cost of future training.

Skills-based hiring will also ensure you can hire team members who are immediately productive in their role, improving the ROI of your hiring strategy. Plus, it can reduce the risk of unconscious bias in your hiring decisions, ensuring you can assess each candidate objectively.

However, focusing on attitude and potential by evaluating a Legal Costs candidate’s soft skills, personality traits, and work ethic ensures you can choose diverse candidates who can contribute to your company culture and remain resilient in a shifting landscape.

Here are our top tips for hiring for skills, attitude and potential.

1. Identify Essential Skills Carefully

Assess the roles you need to fill carefully and determine which skills are crucial to your candidates’ responsibilities. Focus on prioritising skills that would be difficult or time-consuming for staff to learn on the job.

For instance, while it’s easy to show a candidate how to use a new piece of Legal Costs software, delivering comprehensive skills training for things like accounting, analytics, or customer service would be much harder.

Once you’ve identified the most crucial skills your employees need, search for those capabilities consistently across all applicants. Take additional steps to minimise unconscious bias in your hiring decisions, such as using structured and standardised interview questions and blind resume screening.

2. Determine Valuable Attitude Traits

After assessing the most essential “technical” skills your candidates will need, consider the attitude and personality traits that will make them a good fit for your business. Focus on things like:

Soft skills: Great time management or communication skills.
Mindset: A growth mindset and commitment to continuous learning.
Personality traits: Such as proactivity, intrinsic motivation, and flexibility.

Identify how you’ll examine these indicators of “potential” in your candidates. For instance, competency-based interviews with situational questions, behavioural interview questions, and personality tests can offer valuable insights.

Peer interviews can also be extremely useful, as they allow different team members to understand how well a new Legal Costs employee will fit into or contribute to your workplace dynamic. You could even consider hiring employees on a “trial” period for insights into how well they integrate with your team and their effectiveness in their roles.

3. Commit to Continuous Development

Finally, ensure you have a strategy for continuously developing your new Legal Costs team members. While you might not be able to change their attitudes, you can improve their potential and enhance their integration into your workforce with group training and coaching sessions.

You can also look into options for improving your staff member’s soft skills, such as offering communication and collaboration training resources.

Regardless of the technical skills your team members already have, make sure you’re constantly offering access to new development opportunities. Think carefully about the future needs of your business, and offer access to a range of solutions to boost skills in digital literacy, technology, and niche-specific capabilities.

Take a Balanced Approach to Legal Costs Hiring

Ultimately, neither skills-based hiring nor focusing entirely on attitude and potential will ensure you can hire the right employees for your Legal Costs team. The right results require a holistic approach, focusing on skills, attitude, and potential in equal measure.

With a holistic strategy, you can ensure you’re hiring employees who contribute to your company culture, respond well to changing circumstances, and perform well in their roles.

Contact Everpool Recruitment today to learn how we can help you make the right hiring decisions based on skills, attitude, and potential.

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