Blog

12/08/2024

By Chris Andrews – Manager Director @ Stone Recruitment

Screening for skills is often seen as the easy part of an interview process, as averse to more nebulous areas such as identifying traits and motivation. However, there are several pitfalls in the screening process – below we look at some of the common ones and suggest approaches to mitigate risk.

Defining skills

What is a skill? One simple definition is “a learned power of doing something competently” (unlike a trait, which relates to character). A simple, tangible example would be typing speed and accuracy. Functional skills are those that are relevant to the role for which we are applying (such as welding) while others are considered more generic (such as delegation).

Skills vs experience

While there is a link between experience and skill level, it is easy to assume that the relationship is linear, and that for example, 10 years’ experience implies 5 times more skill than 2. Experience is often crucial for roles, as it implies that an applicant is habituated to a range of scenarios, however, it is important to understand how those scenarios helped them improve and develop conscious competence (skills) within the applicant, otherwise, they were not beneficial to individual growth.

Too many hiring managers, under pressure to hire and lacking time to train, fall into the trap of using experience as shorthand for assumed skills, without digging deeper into the nature and scope of those skills.

Aligning stakeholders around target skills

We often see processes fall over when one interviewer disagrees with another about the candidate’s skill level. This is frequently due less to a difference in what the respective interviewers saw in the applicant and more because they were each looking for something different in the first place. For example, the term ‘proven sales skills’ appears in job descriptions regularly. If this requirement is not defined and agreed upon in detail, before interviews taking place, then the opportunity for disagreement is very large.

Secondly, where these requirements are not defined, the temptation is to ‘fill in the gaps’ with traits that our unconscious bias associates with sales people (articulate, high-energy, confident) or experience (as per prior paragraph).

Breaking skills down

It can be very helpful, before testing a skill, to break it into components. If we use ‘sales skills’ as an example, we could ask the following questions:

• Is the role selling a concept/solution/product

• What technical product/market knowledge is essential

• How large is the territory

• Is it new or repeat business

• Who is the point of contact

• Describe the sales cycle

• Who sets up appointments and leads

• What role and seniority is the common point of contact in client

• What is the average order value

This process serves multiple purposes – it allows us to question applicants in far more detail by agreeing, in advance, an accurate weighting to each aspect of the role. Secondly it allows us to identify transferable skills which allow us to look outside industry/product applicants, greatly increasing our pool of potential applicants and consequent growth potential.

Calibrating for context

One last point to make is that skills don’t exist in a vacuum, so its important to place them in context. The companies and markets in which we work can have an impact on our success rates, putting our skills in an overly positive or negative light. For example, an applicant who can sell X thousand units with the backing of a large corporate may not be able to repeat this feat in a smaller company, and vice versa.

How we work

At Stone we look to pull the various aspects together in our hiring process, by qualifying and defining each skill requirement and breaking it down into components, giving each component a weighting and ensuring that everyone in the hiring process is in agreement before we start hiring. We also calibrate for context and provide a suite of online testing to sense check our decisions, often putting current employees through the same tests to provide a realistic benchmark.

Australia-wide recruitment and project management to ensure you outhire the competition, every time. Contact enquiry@stonerecruitment.com.au or call Chris Andrews (MD) directly on 0430 160 709 for a confidential discussion.