Skills First Hiring

Why Skills-First Hiring Is Key for Sourcing Marketing and Communications Expertise in the Future

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Why Skills-First Hiring Is Key for Sourcing Marketing and Communications Expertise in the Future

​Many employers will recognise this scenario; they have identified a candidate, recruited them and invested time onboarding them into the business. They seem like the perfect fit, but suddenly it becomes clear that they aren’t working out, for one reason or another. This is an issue facing organisations across all sectors, and often comes down to the use of traditional hiring methods that don’t properly ascertain whether someone has the right skills – both soft and technical - to excel in their role and gel with the business.

What’s required is a skills-first hiring approach; but what does this entail, and how can companies work in this way?

Skills-first hiring

Skills-first hiring is Ronseal. It does what it says on the tin, and involves prioritising an individual’s core ability to carry out a role, rather than their prior experience, qualifications and track record. While experience and formal education can still be relevant, they are secondary to the tangible skills a candidate brings to the table. The focus is on what an individual can do, rather than simply what they have done in the past, or where they’ve worked.

With so many businesses facing major shortages– one McKinsey backed study found that 87% of executives report skills gaps within their workforces, or expect them in the coming years – a skills-first approach to hiring can reduce the cost of recruitment, and the time spent sourcing new talent. This is perhaps more important when all markets are evolving rapidly. Marketing and communications, in particular, are not static. What worked last year may be obsolete today, and tomorrow’s best practices could be entirely unknown right now, particularly with the pace of change within technology, consumer behaviours, and industry trends. As a result, traditional recruitment methods, th