Skills-based hiring: How employers can move faster.

Most of the barriers that slow hiring down share an origin story. They were requirements someone wrote years ago for a specific context, and over time they became defaults that no one revisited. Degree requirements for roles that have never needed them. Experience thresholds that screen out candidates with strong transferable skills. Screening steps that add days to every interview journey without improving quality.

Skills-based hiring brings those barriers down. As of early 2026, 70% of employers now use skills-based hiring for entry-level roles, up from 65% the year before. The appetite is there. But adoption without procedural change produces predictable results: the same sourcing habits, the same evaluation methods, and organizations blaming the model for outcomes their own infrastructure created.

I've been in the talent space for more than 20 years, leading recruiting and sourcing teams before taking on my current role as Director of DEI Strategic Partnerships at Kelly. In that time, I’ve found that making skills-based hiring work comes down to process consistency, stakeholder training, and a willingness to interrogate how you've always done it.

What skills-based hiring means

I hear "skills-first" and "skills-based" used interchangeably all the time, but the difference between them changes how you approach hiring from the top of the organization down.

Skills-first is a strategic commitment. It means an organization has mapped the competencies it needs today, identified what it will need as roles evolve, and made deliberate decisions about whether to buy, borrow, or build those skills internally. Succession planning lives here. Workforce planning lives here. A company operating with a skills-first mindset is always asking what capabilities it needs to reach its next set of goals.

Skills-based hiring is the practice built from that strategy. It means evaluating candidates on demonstrated competencies rather than credentials, industry tenure, or years of experience. A company that is skills-first will always apply some form of skills-based hiring. But organizations can adopt skills-based practices without the broader strategic framework behind them, and many do.

Most of the organizations I work with have the intent to adopt skills-based practices. The Kelly Global Re:work Report found that 65% of global executives say their organization is moving toward skills-based hiring. Where they get stuck is building a process that every person in the hiring chain follows consistently.

How to identify which skills matter for a role

Organizations tend to overcomplicate this step. I've seen companies build competency models with 10 or 12 criteria, then hand them to hiring managers and interview teams who aren't HR professionals. They're operators trying to fill seats on their team. The model needs to be simple enough for them to apply consistently.

Start with your top performers. Look at the people who are producing results in the role right now and identify the competencies they share. You can extend that analysis across the band, from top to middle to lower performers, to see which skills separate strong hires from average ones.

From there:

• Account for where the role is heading. AI is changing how work gets done across nearly every function. The skills that matter today may not be the same ones that matter in 18 months. Build for both the current environment and the near-term future state.
• Balance soft and technical skills. Communication, problem-solving, the ability to manage difficulty: these matter as much as technical proficiency for most roles, and they're often what separates a good hire from a great one.
• Consult the people doing the work. Hiring managers and operators who interact with talent daily will tell you what competencies matter in practice. That input keeps the model grounded and gives stakeholders ownership of the criteria they'll be asked to evaluate against.

How skills-based hiring helps employers move faster

Once the right competencies are mapped, skills-based hiring creates speed in two places: at the top of the funnel, by bringing in more candidates, and in the middle of the process, by removing steps that slow everything down.

A wider talent pool gets you to qualified candidates more quickly

When you stop filtering for specific degrees, industry backgrounds, or arbitrary experience thresholds, you open the door to talent populations that most employers overlook entirely. Veterans are a strong example. An engineer in the military may have worked on large machinery, electrical systems, and computer equipment. Those skills apply directly to roles in manufacturing, facilities, and operations, but recruiters often can't see the connection because the language doesn't match. And the technical competencies are only part of it: veterans also bring discipline, attention to detail, and leadership that don't show up on a credentials checklist.

The same principle applies to removing other barriers. Through our Equity at Work initiative, we evaluate requirements that may be restricting access without improving quality of hire: background screening practices, drug screening policies where there's no safety or federal requirement, and degree requirements for roles that don't need them. Each barrier you remove is also a bottleneck you eliminate.

Fewer process delays keep candidates moving

When every stakeholder in the hiring chain evaluates candidates against the same competencies, the back-and-forth disappears. A recruiter advances a candidate based on a shared rubric. The hiring manager, working from the same criteria, can make a faster decision because the screening already reflects what the role requires. No misalignment, no restarting the search, no days lost to competing definitions of "fit."

Removing credential requirements that aren't tied to role performance speeds things up further. The Kelly Re:work report found that 42% of global workers say their current role doesn't require a college degree. When that’s the case, and employers acknowledge it at the hiring stage, there are no transcripts to chase down, no education records to verify, no added days in the onboarding pipeline for documentation that won't predict success. That’s a major reason why over half of employers have already eliminated degree requirements from their hiring practices. In our experience, adjustments to screening processes can reduce time-to-start by four to six days depending on the role. For high-volume hiring, that time adds up.

Why most skills-based hiring programs stall

The most common failure point I see is companies treating skills-based hiring as a job description project. They remove the degree requirement, adjust some copy, and consider the initiative launched. But the job description only affects who applies. It doesn't change how your recruiters source, how your hiring managers evaluate, or how your interview teams make decisions.

Breakdown happens when there’s inconsistency across the hiring chain. Every stakeholder in the process needs to be evaluating candidates against the same set of competencies, from the sourcer to the recruiter to the three-person interview panel to the person extending the offer. When the recruiter screens for skills but the hiring manager is still looking for industry experience and a degree, the candidate gets sent back. The search restarts, and the organization loses the time it was trying to save.

Part of the challenge is behavioral. Recruiters under pressure default to the talent sources that have always delivered. Hiring managers who've interviewed a certain way for 15 years aren't going to adopt a new rubric because someone in HR asked them to. Standardized scorecards help, but only if the organization has invested in training every person in the chain on what skills-based evaluation looks like in practice.

How to build buy-in and measure what's working

Most hiring managers aren't opposed to the concept, but they're often skeptical that changing how they source and evaluate will produce better results than what they've been doing for years. The way to move them is with proof.

If a specific business unit or function has applied skills-based sourcing and seen results, whether that's a wider candidate slate, faster fills, or stronger retention, put that data in front of the skeptics. Internal success stories carry more weight than external research because they remove the objection that "our situation is different."

Frame skills-based hiring around the outcomes managers already care about. Show them that skills-based hiring is also a strong retention strategy. When you can demonstrate that opening up non-traditional talent channels solved a staffing problem in a comparable function, resistance tends to soften. People don't argue with results from their own organization.

What to track once the program is running

Two metrics matter most, and both require patience.

Time-to-fill or time-to-start is the most immediate indicator. After deploying skills-based screening, track whether the time from posting to first day decreases, particularly in the screening and interview phases. If you've widened your talent pool and removed credential verification steps that weren't tied to job performance, you should see that number move.

Retention takes longer to read, but it tells you more. When you hire for demonstrated competencies rather than rigid credential requirements, the people coming through those channels tend to stay. If you see a lift in retention post-implementation, especially among talent from non-traditional sources, that's a strong signal the approach is working.

Both metrics only tell you something useful if the process is being applied consistently, which is why the infrastructure described above has to come first.

Where to start with skills-based hiring

The natural temptation is to roll out a new approach across the organization all at once. Resist that impulse. Start small, prove the model, and expand from a position of evidence.

1. Pick a few key roles to pilot. Choose roles where success is easy to measure, whether by revenue, production output, or another clear metric. Avoid your hardest-to-fill positions early on. If the pilot struggles, you don't want that difficulty attributed to the approach rather than the role.
2. Identify top performers and map their competencies. Look at what your best people in those roles actually do well, then build your evaluation criteria from that foundation.
3. Build a standardized rubric. Every person in the hiring chain, from recruiter to final interviewer, should evaluate candidates against the same scorecard.
4. Train recruiters and hiring managers on non-traditional sourcing. Skills-based hiring only works if the people doing the sourcing know where to look beyond their usual channels.
5. Update job descriptions last. The job description reflects the process. If the process hasn't changed, a new job description is just new copy on the same old approach.

The process is the strategy

Every successful implementation I've seen shares the same foundation: trained stakeholders, a shared rubric, and a commitment to sourcing talent from places the organization hadn't looked before. None of that requires a massive overhaul. It requires the discipline to start small, measure what happens, and let the results make the case for doing more.