Skills-based hiring

Close the Skills Gap with These 4 Tips from Top Talent Leaders

Photos of Forward panelists Sean Hudson, Daisy-Auger-Dominguez, and Placid Jover

The future of work will require an evolving set of skills, skills, and more skills. 

That was a key takeaway from Forward, the annual LinkedIn Talent Solutions live event that brought together talent leaders from around the globe to discuss what lies ahead for work. 

Skills is one of the buzziest terms in HR today,” said best-selling author Angela Duckworth, who moderated a panel on skills and internal mobility. “Companies constantly need new skills, but it’s clear they can’t solve that problem through hiring alone. LinkedIn expects member skills to change by about 40% by 2025.” 

Let’s pause and think about that for a moment: In just a few years, your workforce may need a whopping 40% more skills than they have now. Why? In part, because the pandemic has sped up digital transformation and rapidly accelerated the trend towards analytics and AI. Workers urgently need to upskill and reskill to stay current. 

The good news, Angela pointed out, is that employees want to develop and use their skills. According to the 2022 LinkedIn Workplace Report, employees who feel their skills are not being put to good use in their current jobs are 10 times more likely to be looking for a new job.

Forward panelists Sean Hudson, head of learning and development at Pfizer; Daisy Auger-Dominguez, chief people officer of Vice Media Group; and Placid Jover, vice president of HR, Latin America, at Unilever, shared their thoughts on what employers can do to address the skills gap, both through internal mobility and external hiring. Here are their thoughts: 

1. Connect the dots between skill development, internal mobility, and retention

“There’s a renewed awareness,” Angela said, “of just how essential it is for companies to think of learning and development as a constant as they try to navigate the future.”

There are simple reasons for this: In addition to keeping a workforce up-to-date, skills development also boosts internal mobility and that, in turn, boosts retention. According to Glint data, employees say that having opportunities to learn and grow is the No. 1 driver of great work culture. That could come through formal learning or on-the-job opportunities, such as mentorship, gigs, shadowing, and internal mobility. 

When employees are given chances to learn and to move within the company, the benefits are many. They are more engaged, more agile, and more likely to stay. Companies that excel at internal mobility are able to retain employees nearly twice as long as those that struggle with it. 

Yet, even though skills development is so crucial, LinkedIn research shows that only 52% of employees feel their manager encourages the use of work time to learn new skills

2. Provide plenty of opportunities for employees to develop new skills 

At Unilever, Placid said, skills development is a top priority. “Learning, skilling, upskilling, reskilling,” he said, “the development of our people is central to who we are and what we do and how we do business.” 

Learning and development are so essential to Unilever that its Future of Work agenda lists “reskill or upskill our employees with future-fit skills by 2025” as one of its three main goals for the company’s 148,000 employees. 

The company is asking employees to create their own “future-fit” plan, in which they outline their career goals and the skills they’d like to obtain. To illustrate Unilever’s progress, Placid noted that employees visited the company’s learning management system more than 4 million times last year. The company also offers an AI-powered internal mobility platform, called Flex.

3. Encourage employees to pursue ‘zigzag’ careers 

Skills development and growth can take many paths, including sideways. “We have this concept at Pfizer,” Sean shared with the panel, “called zigzag growth.” Employees are encouraged to make nonlinear moves that might previously have been considered untraditional to learn new skills and expand their knowledge. The idea, Pfizer’s website says, is that “different experiences in a role, function, or across multiple functions produce professionals with unique expertise and broader perspectives.” 

Sean pointed to his own career as an example of zigzag growth. “I’ve literally been lots of different things,” he said, “a banker, a marketer, a strategist, and now I’m leading learning at Pfizer.” In each of those cases, he was driven by his curiosity and desire to learn, and every experience allowed him to acquire new skills or apply the skills he had in a different way. 

This type of growth also helps prepare employees to be future leaders. Research by The Conference Board in 2019 found that the top strategic purpose for talent mobility was to develop high-potential performers-and cross-functional rotations was one of the best ways to do that. 

“People who move around the company,” wrote industry analyst Josh Bersin in 2020, “gain perspective, cultural insights, and can perform in unique and productive ways because of their relationships and knowledge of all parts of the company.”  

4. Put skills in the spotlight with programs like ‘No Friends and Family’ 

Of course, skills-first hiring is another way to bring fresh and updated skills into a company. The concept is being so widely embraced that President Joe Biden even mentioned it in his recent State of the Union address, promising that U.S. workers would be given a “fair shot” and companies would “hire them based on their skills not degrees.” 

“Skills-first hiring,” Daisy shared with the panel, “is really just effective hiring. That is how we should be hiring.” The main reason: It leads to more inclusive and equitable hiring practices. 

Daisy shared an example of something that she’s put in place at several companies, a No Friends and Family program for summer interns. When she or her teams are hiring interns, she said, “I do not want to have a list of intern candidates that come from individuals in the organization that have asked my team to recruit them only because they know them or because they’re tied to someone important to the organization.” 

Instead, her team hires interns based on skill sets outlined in the job descriptions. The result is a truly rich mix of candidates. 

Other companies are also realizing that skills-first hiring works. LinkedIn research shows that when companies leverage skills data to find the right match, they’re 60% more likely to find a successful hire than those not relying on skills. 

Final thoughts

According to a McKinsey & Company report, 87% of companies say they have a skills gap or expect to have one within a few years. That means they’ll probably need to address the gap both externally and internally. But when you go outside the company for skills, you’re at the mercy of a very competitive talent market. With robust internal mobility and L&D, you have a lot more control. You’ll also “future-proof” your employees, as LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky wrote in a 2021 Harvard Business Review article.  

“From a talent strategy perspective,” Placid said, “those companies that are probably focusing too much on the buy side may not be hitting the sweet spot. At this point in time, it is equally important to be on the market, acquiring talent, but also investing in your employees and growing talent from within.”

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