Skills Based Hiring is a Lie
I drafted a piece in 2023 for a recruiting newsletter on how impractical skills based hiring was and the limited exceptions for how you could implement it. Unfortunately, after getting feedback my tone was too snarky for their editors to publish without being watered all the way down, it was abandoned. I refused to tone down…my tone.
I went digging for it in my drafts folder this week after I read a pair of articles covering AI, hiring, and the future of building companies in the New York Times (both links are gifted). The summaries and opinions that follow are strictly my own.
A.I. is Prompting an Evolution, Not Extinction, for Coders
Coders are enhanced, more productive, and enabled to build AI using AI. Sure, we’re losing out on internship or junior opportunities - but you can take courses to re-skill. Engineers are getting better like fine wine. How will this affect the labor market ::shakes Magic 8 Ball:: REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN.
A.I. is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups
Startups (except the LLMs producers that more than half are built on) are now going to be small, nimble, and everyone is enhanced by AI which allows for a fraction of the headcount and operating expenses. No more icky scaling operations. But VCs optimistic these founders will take more money soon and get nice and big!
Ok, no surprises or anything shocking. We’ve been seeing versions of this for a while now alongside unmitigated panic over millions of people being out of work when AGI shows up to do…everything?
Although, if you’ve been paying attention for the last decade you realize this is going to slowly (and then suddenly) eliminate the pipeline problem of not having enough engineers to hire. We’ll have too many, with entry level or junior opportunities drying up, and the mid-senior engineering ranks will literally all be 10x-ers. Finally. (Laugh cries in tired recruiter.)
The people left out in the cold or suddenly without a job will be given the standard re-skilling pitch: social media threads, online courses, graduate programs. Coders won’t go extinct but they’ll certainly go back to being endangered (this time intentionally).
The rosier prediction for work evolving vs being decimated, really, is in large part reserved for engineers. The AI customer support chatbot or automated interviewer doesn’t mean every customer support hire and junior recruiter evolve into AI conductors - for the most part it means those people just don’t have jobs anymore.
And this sums up the frustrating nature of debates around the future of work or future of tech - is AI reducing the number of jobs or changing the type of jobs we’ll need? Or both? Why is our knee jerk reaction to make this a re-skilling issue vs addressing the reality of less opportunities? Wouldn’t a more practical path be to encourage more innovation, more nimble companies to be created? Why aren’t we talking about this? We need more founders and opportunities, less weak professional development pitches.
The next wave of re-skilling influencers is already here. A couple cycles ago everyone was advised to go figure out how to be a prompt writer, prompt engineer, oh look out of work journalists are being hired by [fill in the blank LLM] - see we’ll just re-apply your skill set to something else! Except if your lifeline to staying afloat in this new reality can be summed up by the infinite number of X content bros pumping out thread after thread of these MadLibs, maybe take a step back and re-evaluate.
”It’s {2025, Golden Age of, Future is here} and you can’t afford to be {dumb, unskilled, AI ignorant, without a side hustle earning thousands}.
AI can {teach, do, earn you} anything - but only if you know what prompts to use. {arbitrary number between 3 and 25} {powerful, next level, unheard of, best} prompts you can use today.
#6 will blow your mind.”
(Bonus points if you are supposed to comment “DM Me” for a link to their free prompt guide.)
Companies are getting smaller and you need to do the work of multiple people assisted by a suite of AI tools (that are being built right this moment). So the tech market is contracting even further. But this is just the very beginning of this next tightening - because the “bigger is better” public companies are still shedding talent consistently via layoffs. Midsized pre-IPO organizations are still reconfiguring for profitability, turning to M&A, or pivoting to an AI strategy. And the early ones are all gunning to be less than 100 employees (rightfully so).
I had great seats for ZIRP tech scaling - myself and the teams I built were responsible for thousands of signed offers and dizzying headcount plans. And I LOVE that we aren’t doing that anymore because it wasn’t sustainable. The valuations didn’t make sense, the teams were bloated, people weren’t getting the actual resources they needed. We’d break everything downstream from that signed offer because no one wanted to invest in the hundreds of people the business demanded and we had delivered. I have a love hate relationship with scaling. I love the motion of scale and the constant re-imagining of systems to accomplish impossible heights, but the human cost is really rough.
I’m nervous. For the tens of thousands of people that came to tech and built a career as…for example, a Customer Success Manager (CSM). Generally - candidates were smart and a little techy, maybe did customer support beforehand, could communicate well, and wanted to learn a product inside and out. Maybe they came from the industry we were selling into and already knew a few things about the product. They were there to onboard customers, train them, help them out with strategy and make sure they were successful with the product making for a smooth renewal and upsell at the end of the contract.
Let’s say AI does 50% of that now. So you need half as many CSMs. What are the displaced folks going to do now? Learn better prompt writing?
This isn’t to pick on CSMs - because every function across any and every tech company is going to feel this. Maybe not immediately, maybe it takes another 5 years to really be a measurable and obvious problem. But I’m not sure the solution is as easy as - just take some online courses and now you’re “re-skilled” - congrats! For what job though?
If the economists can’t figure out what the impact will be, founders want ultra lean teams, and the VCs are impressed by efficiency gains but hope companies keep doing what they’ve been doing for the last 10 years - take more money, get big, land higher valuations, and the VCs get to cash out…where does that leave everyone else?
I was frustrated enough 2 years ago to write the piece below about how much of a sham skills based hiring was, and it feels even more relevant now. Don’t fall for the consulting jargon bait - but do critically think about what you can do, build, and learn. (I put a few 2025 themed ideas for “what now” at the end.)
Skills Based Hiring is a Lie [2023 Version]
The Lie
Skills based hiring is a lie. Magically, if we just removed years of required experience and degrees off of our job posts we could hire folks from “different” backgrounds with transferable skills and experiences. Ring the inclusion bell we’ve done it! Did you also add a paragraph about asking people to apply even if they don’t match all the requirements? Gold star!
In the echo chamber of hiring practices, we distilled the ideas behind skills hiring down to a checklist of what you’ve omitted on a job post.
Did your hiring managers get more interested in your “skills aligned” candidates that you were pitching? Or did they zero in on the resumes of people who had done the jobs leading up to the role they were hiring for? (More realistically, they wanted someone with the same title who will take the same pay - no stretching or growth required on either end.) Tell me how skills based hiring worked when you needed to find a Senior DevOps Engineer.
In the corporate fever dream of a Talent Connect conference years ago - Skills (those little tiles somewhere at the bottom of your profile) were going to be the MOST critical aspect of any candidate’s page. The algorithm was going to “help” you by weighting those skills in Recruiter searches.
In reality, they’re just unverifiable phrases that you could get “endorsements” on from other users who may or may not even know you. When it was first introduced, my friends and I looked for the funniest ones we could add: cat herding, falconry, making coffee, sharks. Worse yet - these skills don’t carry the context of the experience behind them - when I have “project management” as a skill on my profile, that means something very different vs. when a Product Manager who’s been working in cybersecurity for the last decade says it.
But what about once you get past job posts and LinkedIn flair? Because leveling guides - those pesky spreadsheets that tell you if this role is a Senior Engineer or just Engineer are still using years of experience. Compensation survey data? Ties back into years of experience and education. Your skills based hire goes on to be considered for a promotion one year into their job and suddenly HR wants to know why someone with only 3 years of experience was hired as a “Lead.”
In Talent and People Operations - there is no infrastructure to support true skills based hiring. No real demand for it. And outside of the one off wunderkind that every startup has lurking in Business Operations, no one has really seen it work well.
And - this is actually where many people landed when imagining how AI would impact hiring: people will have identifiable skills that can be certified or cataloged in a way that will ensure the best candidate is selected. Blockchain verified resumes were floated. A whole ATS was built on this premise in 2018: ingest a resume and AI magic will tell you if they’re a good “match” for your open job. Cut out that pesky Recruiter in the middle. Reduce candidates to keywords.
How did we get here?
“Skills based” hiring itself is an iteration of some of the principles we’ve been using in talent acquisition for decades, namely behavioral interview practices and performance based hiring - a focus on a role’s outcomes, deliverables, and skills in order to evaluate candidates’ past accomplishments and predicted future performance.
Behavioral interviewing will allow us to uncover patterns of past performance which will indicate future performance. We focus on what the candidate has achieved previously and ask the same questions of each candidate in a structured interview process.
Performance based hiring highlights the outcomes and deliverables for the role allowing us to focus on people who have delivered or have the capability to deliver similar results. Find high performing people ready to take the next step “into” this job and no longer just offer lateral moves (e.g. trading logos on your hoodie vs. moving forward in a career path).
Skills based hiring builds on these ideas with the goal to drive inclusivity by becoming industry, education, seniority, and logo agnostic in our consideration of talent. It doesn’t matter where you worked, if you got a degree, or how many years you’ve been working - if you can demonstrate you’ve mastered these skills then we want to consider you for this role. (This is in my mind ultimately a fantasy, but I’ll outline some ways you could in theory apply this.)
So to implement all 3, we must put skills within the context of experiences or outcomes and communicate that effectively to hiring managers and candidates. Keep the years of experience and degrees off of the job post, but align internally with your hiring manager and HR counterparts to ensure the employee experience (which is subjected to those compensation ranges and leveling guides) won’t be disrupted with your approach. And double down on the best practices (1 and 2) of structured behavioral interviewing with an eye on outcomes and performance.
However, within the constraints of time, and with a hiring manager desperate for another Senior Engineer - behavioral interviewing and performance based hiring may be accepted as best practice, but it’s an entirely different story when you try to pitch a candidate with 18 mos of experience as being “skills based” and worthy of a call. So while the majority of searches can thread the needle on the first two hiring practices above - how do we implement skills hiring in a way that would yield the desired results?
If we want to attract talent that are some combination of industry, education, seniority, and logo agnostic, where can we do that in the organization?
Here’s the “how to” Part
Narrow your focus. Almost everyone is inching up a functional ladder in their career - most functions are designed this way - but there are two distinct areas within startups that are actually primed for a skills based approach:
Entry level positions into a function (think Customer Support, Sales Development, Coordinators, Analyst, Marketing Associates, Interns)
Mid-Senior positions that would benefit from specific industry or “non-traditional” backgrounds, usually roles from your customer base or the industry you sell to (Business Development, Product Management or Marketing, Strategy)
Tip: Entry level roles benefit the most by removing required years of experience (which are generally arbitrary for entry points to an organization) and using language that outlines what the candidate should know vs what you’ll teach will yield great results.
Once you’ve identified roles that would benefit from this approach, use your sourcing and kick off meeting questions to outline personas or potential talent pools you want to attract or source from:
What will we teach this person? How will we onboard them and train them?
If I found someone with great skill X, can we compromise on experience Y?
What other industry experience or non-traditional titles would be helpful in this role?
Once you have your personas defined, then craft multiple job posts (one for each profile) aiming for titles similar to that candidate’s next career step or translates within their current industry or function. The goal is to get your job post in front of someone who hasn’t considered a career or transition into your company or industry - you’re aiming for visibility and a hook to sell to this talent.
In your job post, start by describing the persona - what’s their background, what titles they have held, industries worked in - and why that experience is valuable to your company. Then GIVE THEM A REAL LIFE SUCCESS STORY. Finish out with the well-written-outcomes-driven-sparkly job post template.
What success story? If your talent brand hat wasn’t on yet, go find that pink fluffy bucket hat and put it on. Recruiting is all about telling compelling stories and the best stories for this situation are the ones that your current employees can tell. Odds are that niche candidate you’re looking to attract has a twin already at the company. Find that person and get their story - where did they used to work, why did they consider this company, what were their biggest fears, how do they feel now that they’ve made that leap into a new career? Include a picture (with permission). Now, your future candidates can really envision what this life change might look and feel like. (Please also spot bonus anyone you wrangle into your talent branding efforts.)
And this is where I’d love to see AI actually give people that visibility at the beginning of a search (or slow Wednesday browsing job postings). Many of my close friends have wondered out loud if this is the end for their recruiting careers and what they might do next. Many junior developers are finding a lack of opportunities where there used to be a frothy clamoring for any warm body that could code. For all the data LinkedIn has at its fingertips - a virtual career coach who could tell you where people “go next” from where you are today would be a brilliant way to deploy their resources. (And of course offer you examples of folks to connect with and hear their stories.)*
Good Luck**
While what is considered a skills based hiring approach today has become more of an exercise in writing inclusive job descriptions, there is a way to implement this method with specific searches: focus on entry or cross-industry roles. For the rest of your searches, candidates looking for a lateral or (tiny) stretch role may be the best method. Happy sourcing!
2025 Post Script***
Alright - so what I skipped over when I originally wrote this was acknowledging the ENDLESS consulting firm slop (and the piles of cash they made and continue to make) promoting skills based hiring, inventorying the skills of every employee you have (to help with learning and development, layoffs, re-skilling, internal hiring), and re-doing job descriptions until they had little to no meaning anymore. It’s still going. Kind of like how every 3rd post on LinkedIn is about remote work vs return to office.
And at the time I drafted this in 2023 we were still in the early stages of recruiting teams starting to notice resumes looking a little funky, application numbers spiking, and then a deluge of AI generated (and automated) applicants coming into every job post. We’re now solving this problem by filtering and ranking candidates with new AI systems where we can search for…wait for it…skills and experience we listed in the job description. Except this AI is smart enough to put those skills into context (most of the time). My predictions here are still holding up pretty well.
So - while the work of understanding your own core skills and experience (within and without your current context or career) will become more critical as the talent market continues to re-organize and contract around new AI driven technologies - avoid the trap of flashy re-skilling programs. Ask yourself - is that class, that MBA, that program, that online content - really preparing me or is it lining someone else’s pockets who is taking advantage of the moment? Will this be relevant in 6 months? A year?
Beware of skill based training or hiring rebranded for the age of AI. It wasn’t great to begin with.
Are you working at a newly formed lean startup? A petite unicorn in the making? I’d love to hear about your experience!
*LinkedIn won’t do this because it would be good, practical, and maybe get them somewhat closer to justifying their premium prices.
**Here’s 3 things you should be doing now:
Demo, attend webinars, talk to industry friends - be constantly watching, consuming, and testing out AI tools. Start with the X content bro prompt suggestions if you need some inspiration to get going - but narrow in on tools that impact or will impact your current job.
Have a real honest conversation with yourself on what AI tools are being developed in your function, what they’re replacing well, not so well, or haven’t touched yet - i.e. find the things AI cannot replace and figure out how to double down on that skillset.
If what’s “left over” in your job or function isn’t much at all, start looking for new roles that could take advantage of your existing experience - opportunities close to critical systems or work that can’t be trusted to automation, roles that blend multiple skill sets (think Chief of Staff, or Talent Partner who can also do HR, etc.). Always be interviewing.
Brainstorm what other industries, roles, or types of companies could leverage your skill set in one of those mid to senior level non traditional roles - can you sell talent tech? Help develop it?
***After you finish a letter and sign it, then write “P.S.” along with some additional thoughts, the P.S. stands for Post Script. Its Latin origin is post scriptum, an expression meaning "written after.” Write letters to your friends. Send post cards. Mail thank you notes.
