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It’s No Surprise That “Skills-Based” Hiring Has Not Worked

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 😄

125 comments

  • 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.

  • How do you write this article and not once reference I/O Psychology or the literature that examines how well various tests predict job performance? (e.g. Schmidt and Hunter, 1998)

    I swear this isn't witchcraft. You just analyze the job, determine the knowledge and skills that are important, required at entry, and can't be obtained in a 15 minute orientation, and then hire based on those things. It takes a few hours worth of meetings. I've done it dozens of times.

    But really what all that boils down to is get someone knowledgeable about the role and have them write any questions and design the exercises. Don't let some dingleberry MBA ask people how to move Mt. Fuji or whatever dumb trendy thing they're teaching in business school these days.

    • I can't count the number of times I've interviewed with a contractor/headhunter and a few minutes in stop them to say "I'm not what you're looking for, here, let me help you re-work those requirements so you'll get the right people to interview".

      HR provides those requirements, which just shows how bad HR usually is.

      I read about a study years ago showing that hiring via interviews was no better than pulling cards out of a hat.

      • This is an interesting observation.

        In theory, the section/department manager should be providing those requirements to HR, not allowing HR to do it for them, right? I have to agree, if companies are letting HR drive the requirements train, it's going to be a poor experience for everyone.

    • Schmidt and Hunter, 1998

      That's a 74 page article, do you care to summarize it or provide a specific area?

      Thanks for a reference. Interesting.

      • The cool thing about it is that the core of it is really just one page.

        There's a page in there with a list of types of tests and their respective r values, which is a number between zero and one that explains how well a given type of test predicts job performance based on this gigantic meta analysis the researchers ran. Zero means there's no relationship between the test and job performance and one means the test predicts job performance perfectly.

        Generally you want something better than .3 for high stakes things like jobs. Education and experience sits at ... .11 or so. It's pretty bad. By contrast, skills tests do really well. Depending on the type they can go over .4. That's a pretty big benefit if you're hiring lots of people.

        That said it can be very hard to convince people that "just having a conversation with someone" isn't all that predictive at scale. Industry calls that an "unstructured interview" and they're terrible vectors for unconscious or conscious bias. "Hey, you went to the same school as me..." and now that person is viewed favorably.

        Seriously this stuff is WELL STUDIED but for some reason the MBA lizards never care. It's maddening.

  • Code has been skills-based for as long as I’ve been working. The few places I’ve seen that really have a hard degree requirement are not places I’d work. Most CS degrees are also mostly worthless for most app jobs because the theory is not the practice. There are degree programs that focus on shipping applications. In my own hiring, I’m looking for experience over degree and potential over buzzword bingo.

    • I’m looking for experience over degree

      In most cases, it's assumed you'd hire an experienced dev over one who has never held a job, and by that, I mean they have no proof of skill, if you consider a previous employment any proof of actual skill other than convicting someone to hire them :)

      Assume you're hiring a new to workforce person. No previous employment.

      • Do you hire a degree or no degree candidate with no previous employment record?
      • What do you look for specifically if you are looking for skills?
      • If your child/family member was going to pursue a career in dev/IT/whatever, would you push them to get a degree, or just build a portfolio of code/projects/whatever shows their skills in that field?

      • For junior IT roles, you’re screening for passion more than anything else. The best candidates are usually people that play with computers and are looking for growth. There’s a mix of “I have been taking computers apart since I was a kid” and “I’m getting an associates in IT.” Totally hit or miss. Sometimes the person with nothing pans out and the degree seeker won’t. Sometimes it’s the other way around. The deciding factor here is how the candidate meshes with the team.

        For junior dev roles, someone with a college degree is usually looking for more than a junior salary but has nothing I would hire at higher levels. Someone without a degree might have been coding in their spare time or done a boot camp. A good portfolio might give you a leg up. I consider a portfolio to be evidence of growth, not a bunch of perfect code. I love seeing GitHub profiles that show really shitty code that matures into really solid code (or at least the signs someone is trying). That being said, what matters is the tech screen and a quick code test. If you can do what I validate in an interview and the team likes you, rad.

        For someone with no experience, I tell them to figure out something they want to learn and put it on GitHub. Then repeat a fuck ton. Always expand the things you challenge yourself with and move on when your learning or passion has ceased. Sometimes that means you build yet another todo list. Other times that means you try to figure out how to build that cool Discord bot and fail utterly but learn a bunch of shit along the way.

        Honestly at the end of the day it’s all fucking luck. If you get a hiring manager like me that’s slightly biased toward self-trained over degree, you have an easier chance on skills stuff. But that’s a crapshoot. I was lucky when I started and people took chances on me. In return I take chances on people I think could have great potential. That’s just dumb luck both from me and for the people I’m able to help grow.

125 comments