Evaluating skills and abilities to meet the rise of new-collar workers

Be open to candidates who have your deal-breaker skills, but who may need to learn a thing or two to be “fully functional” in your organization.

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The first month of 2024 has come to a close, and one key theme from 2023 has carried into the new year: Hiring is still a strange thing. It remains difficult for both employers and job seekers. The rise of AI—both to write resumes and to screen them, for example — has just made things more complex and difficult for both sides. The global economy’s volatility hasn’t helped either. With so much uncertainty and so many rapid shifts in hiring plans — all combined with unprecedented types and volumes of employee turnover in many fields.

There are a few main reasons why hiring —  and applying —  in 2024 has become so difficult:  

  1. The current job market is oversaturated with talent

The first reason is one that many talent acquisition team members know well: sheer volume. With the number of applicants in the market, coupled with the relative ease of submitting an application via hiring platforms, a new job posting can easily accumulate hundreds of applicants in its first 24 hours. The avalanche of applications makes it almost impossible to screen those resumes, and certainly makes it challenging to respond to applicants in a personal, timely, and meaningful manner.

  1. The challenge of optimizing each hire due to tight budgets and headcounts

Employers are trying to get the absolute most out of constrained payroll budgets. That means we’re starting to see many employers steer away from easily-screened job requirements, including four-year degrees, a specific number of years of work experience, and so on. Instead, employers are starting to look harder at truly relevant, job-related skills and abilities. Both are a lot harder to evaluate through a traditional resume screening.

  1. A stagnant hiring strategy makes it harder to find the right people

Make no mistake, finding the right people can be hard, if not impossible, if your hiring strategy doesn’t acknowledge the realities of the current candidate market. Specifically, we have a generation of workers coming up who’ve discarded the notion that their only way forward is a high-cost, four year degree. Some 60% of the current U.S. population lacks such a degree, and that percentage is only expected to climb. There are a ton of complex reasons behind this trend, but it is real.

Anyone who’s hiring, especially for skilled jobs like those in tech, would do well to evolve their hiring strategy to meet the current market realities by following these steps:

Embrace “new-collar workers” to optimize hiring impacts

“New-collar workers” are typically younger professionals who have the skills and abilities you need, but they don’t have the standard four-year degree that’s become a boilerplate bullet on job descriptions (even if you put “degree preferred,” many candidates without a degree simply won’t apply). Your hiring process needs to move from checklists of things like degrees and evolve to consistently and reliably assess job-relevant skills.

This may be difficult to embrace. A lot of organizations and hiring managers exhibit “pedigree bias,” or an ingrained preference for candidates with degrees from specific colleges or universities. In many fields, there’s little evidence that those degrees provide a good indicator for hard skills, or even soft skills like communication and collaboration. Fostering a data-driven approach to candidate evaluation—what hiring techniques actually predict that a candidate will perform well on the job—is essentially to maximize the opportunity currently before us.

Understand the new-collar untapped potential

New-collar workers are indeed an opportunity. They can hit their desk better prepared to actually contribute meaningful skills and abilities. They’re not saddled with tons of student debt, and have more flexibility about accepting roles in which they can grow and learn. And while they may not have a degree, they likely do have more relevant education — things like vocational training, code camps, and actual field experience. The new-collar worker also represents a more diverse range of backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives — all of which create a positive business impact when they join a team.

Deliver a fair, predictable, and enjoyable candidate experience

Evolving your hiring strategy can have other benefits as well. Regardless of the job market, a qualified candidate will always have options, and they’re going to choose to work for a company that creates a positive impression. Your hiring process is your first impression on a candidate, and focusing on their experience will help you keep the best candidates in your pipeline, and ultimately bring them into your teams. That means stepping away from hiring tactics that candidates hate, “write an application as homework” assignments and similar approaches.

Re-engineer your job descriptions

It also means seriously reviewing how you construct job descriptions. A solid job description should eliminate any requirements or “preferences” that don’t apply directly to the job. These requirements include asking for unnecessary degrees, long lists of tools or technologies that aren’t all absolutely critical, and so on.

Related: Small businesses are hiring, but can they afford to keep new employees?

Be specific about “what success looks like” in the job. Be open to candidates who have your deal-breaker skills, but who may need to learn a thing or two to be “fully functional” in your organization.

Ultimately, we’re seeing a shift in how candidates approach the world of job skills. As employers, it’s advantageous for us to recognize those shifts and respond accordingly. New-collar workers have the potential to bring us the skills and abilities we actually need, even if their resume doesn’t check all of the boxes we’ve leaned on so heavily for the past couple of decades.