LIGHTCAST

Skills-Powered Hiring Toolkit

Your step-by-step action plan to becoming a mature skills-powered organization today.

Among widespread talent scarcity, organizations are being called to shift their hiring strategies toward a skills-based approach across the talent management lifecycle. Through actionable steps, this toolkit demystifies the process and empowers you to hire workers with the right skills for the job. Get the tools you need to get started today.

Maturing the Model

To help guide organizations in their skills-powered hiring journey, Lightcast developed a skills-powere maturity model that describes the key factors that determine skills-based hiring success. The model is informed by our work with numerous organizations on skills-based hiring initiatives, as well as our research and discussions with hundreds of talent leaders, hiring managers, skills vendors, and other subject matter experts.

It outlines four key dimensions that organizations should consider for their skills-based hiring initiatives:

Business Value Delivered
Skills Strategy and Direction
Skills Data Management
Stakeholder Engagement

Organizations may use this model to baseline where they are today in terms of their skills initiatives and determine their desired future state for each dimension of skills-based maturity.

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Skills-Powered Hiring Journey: Step-by-Step Breakdowns

While the Skills-Powered Organization Maturity Model presents a high-level framework for organizations to assess the overall posture of their skills-based initiatives, organizations also need actionable guidance on where to begin their skills journey.

To outline the actions that organizations can take to adopt skills-based hiring and talent management practices, we detail a 12-step journey to becoming a skills-based organization, in three phases (PLAN, ARCHITECT, OPTIMIZE). These steps are informed by Lightcast’s work with organizations implementing skills, reviews of existing skills literature, and discussions with subject matter experts.

Plan

1. Connect skills to business strategy

Assess the anticipated bottom-line impact of strategic priorities or key talent challenges that a skills-based approach will support. This will make it easier to establish KPIs and demonstrate the ROI of skills-based hiring initiatives.

2. Evaluate organizational readiness for skills-based hiring

Determine which internal teams and leaders are most receptive, and may stand to benefit the most, from skills-based hiring (the two may not be the same). Then prioritize those teams and leaders for initial skills-based hiring initiatives to maximize the likelihood of establishing early skills-based hiring wins.

3. Assess existing and desired skills infrastructure

Many HR tech and IT vendors already leverage skills in their solutions, but they may not always be explicitly mentioned. Ask your vendors whether they are already leveraging skills taxonomies and whether they interoperate and integrate with other tools or skill taxonomies.

4. Plan skills-based hiring implementation and change management strategy

If certain teams or leaders within your organization are hesitant

to embrace skills-based hiring, or if you want to evaluate your skills investments before scaling them, starting with a smaller pilot program can be an effective way to generate quick skill-based wins, build on lessons learned, and demonstrate value to reluctant stakeholders.

Architect

1. Develop Internal Skills Library

Save time by identifying existing skill libraries or taxonomies that you can adopt from third parties, many of which are available for free (full disclosure: Lightcast offers a free skills taxonomy).

2. Connect Skills Data to Other Internal Skills-Enabled Infrastructure

It can be a large undertaking to integrate skills with your existing infrastructure, so start with the easiest connections to find quick wins and generate momentum. Don’t worry if you can’t integrate skills into all of your workflows all at once.

3. Connect Internal Skills Data to External Talent Intelligence

Common metrics and KPIs used to inform and assess skills-based hiring include:

Time to fill
Turnover rates
Tenure
Promotion rates
Average hiring costs

Optimize

1. Identify Future Skill Needs and Pinpoint Key Skill Gaps

Reviewing market data on emerging skills across your industry is a good way to pinpoint skills you may want to build to keep pace with your peers. However, it is also important to not simply imitate others in your industry, but also develop skills that differentiate your workforce. This can help you build competitive advantage through unique skillsets on your team.

2. Optimize Talent Development Strategy

Prioritize your most critical roles first when first building out a skills- based talent development strategy. You can determine these roles by identifying the largest, hardest to fill, or most strategically important roles in your organization. This can help you demonstrate quick wins and reduce the time to value of your skills-based initiatives.

3. Optimize Talent Sourcing Strategy and Diversify Talent Pipelines

Some KPIs you can track to assess and communicate the ROI of expanding your candidate pool include: average hiring costs, average time to fill, retention rates of new hires, and various DEI metrics.

4. Develop Targeted Onboarding and Training Strategy

Training for skills that are the highest-growth and highest-cost in the market can help you maximize the ROI of your training initiatives. It can also help you differentiate your workforce your competitors.

5. Build Career Pathways and Enhance Internal Mobility

Use career pathways to expand the diversity of your talent pipeline for critical roles by identifying skill-adjacent fields with a more diverse talent pool that can be redeployed into fields with less diversity.

Plan

1. Connect skills to business strategy

Assess the anticipated bottom-line impact of strategic priorities or key talent challenges that a skills-based approach will support. This will make it easier to establish KPIs and demonstrate the ROI of skills-based hiring initiatives.

2. Evaluate organizational readiness for skills-based hiring

Determine which internal teams and leaders are most receptive, and may stand to benefit the most, from skills-based hiring (the two may not be the same). Then prioritize those teams and leaders for initial skills-based hiring initiatives to maximize the likelihood of establishing early skills-based hiring wins.

3. Assess existing and desired skills infrastructure

Many HR tech and IT vendors already leverage skills in their solutions, but they may not always be explicitly mentioned. Ask your vendors whether they are already leveraging skills taxonomies and whether they interoperate and integrate with other tools or skill taxonomies.

4. Plan skills-based hiring implementation and change management strategy

If certain teams or leaders within your organization are hesitant

to embrace skills-based hiring, or if you want to evaluate your skills investments before scaling them, starting with a smaller pilot program can be an effective way to generate quick skill-based wins, build on lessons learned, and demonstrate value to reluctant stakeholders.

Architect

1. Develop Internal Skills Library

Save time by identifying existing skill libraries or taxonomies that you can adopt from third parties, many of which are available for free (full disclosure: Lightcast offers a free skills taxonomy).

2. Connect Skills Data to Other Internal Skills-Enabled Infrastructure

It can be a large undertaking to integrate skills with your existing infrastructure, so start with the easiest connections to find quick wins and generate momentum. Don’t worry if you can’t integrate skills into all of your workflows all at once.

3. Connect Internal Skills Data to External Talent Intelligence

Common metrics and KPIs used to inform and assess skills-based hiring include:

Time to fill
Turnover rates
Tenure
Promotion rates
Average hiring costs

Optimize

1. Identify Future Skill Needs and Pinpoint Key Skill Gaps

Reviewing market data on emerging skills across your industry is a good way to pinpoint skills you may want to build to keep pace with your peers. However, it is also important to not simply imitate others in your industry, but also develop skills that differentiate your workforce. This can help you build competitive advantage through unique skillsets on your team.

2. Optimize Talent Development Strategy

Prioritize your most critical roles first when first building out a skills- based talent development strategy. You can determine these roles by identifying the largest, hardest to fill, or most strategically important roles in your organization. This can help you demonstrate quick wins and reduce the time to value of your skills-based initiatives.

3. Optimize Talent Sourcing Strategy and Diversify Talent Pipelines

Some KPIs you can track to assess and communicate the ROI of expanding your candidate pool include: average hiring costs, average time to fill, retention rates of new hires, and various DEI metrics.

4. Develop Targeted Onboarding and Training Strategy

Training for skills that are the highest-growth and highest-cost in the market can help you maximize the ROI of your training initiatives. It can also help you differentiate your workforce your competitors.

5. Build Career Pathways and Enhance Internal Mobility

Use career pathways to expand the diversity of your talent pipeline for critical roles by identifying skill-adjacent fields with a more diverse talent pool that can be redeployed into fields with less diversity.

“As companies build new programs to source, identify, and grow skills in this competitive labor market, Lightcast can serve as the "universal source of truth" for analysis, planning, recruiting, and benchmarking.”

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Putting Skills Into Practice: Guide to Getting Started Today

Identify Critical Roles

The best way to get started is to identify key roles free to access - to help identify the priority skills that are a business priority for your organization in the next 12 months. This may include roles with high turnover rates, hard to find candidates in the market, or strategic importance to the organization. Generate a list of 5 to 10 priority roles to start.

Identify Meaningful Skills

For each of these roles, not all skills are created equal. Skills and their importance for different roles are constantly changing alongside your organizational priorities and technological advances. Correctly identifying and prioritizing skills needed in these roles can be the key factor in driving impact for your organization. Informed by thousands of hours of data analysis and our skills taxonomy, we've created a tool - free to access - to help identify the priority skills for each role. Start here to help shed some light on the critical and disruptive skills with Lightcast's Disruptive Skills Matrix.

Upgrade Your Job Postings Accordingly

Most hiring managers have no way of knowing what kind of talent exists in the market or how the skills or other requirements they’re asking for impact the pool of potential candidates. This is where data-informed skills analysis can offer insights and help to optimize job postings. Take a deep dive into understanding the skills needed for these roles and which skills you are missing by using our free online Job Posting Optimizer Tool. Copy the text of your posting into our Job Posting Optimizer and watch it instantly extract all the skills you’re listing (including ones you didn’t realize you were asking for). Now you can refine the posting by taking note of which skills are common, which are priorities, which you can exclude, and new ones to include.

Download the Complete Toolkit

This is only some of the information we offer in the complete toolkit. Download it now to get a realistic starting place to build your business case, achieve quick wins, and build momentum.

A simple approach to take action today, whether you’re in a startup or Fortune 50 organization.