Organizations all across the globe continue to struggle with the same problem: a lack of genuine gender diversity in the workplace. With conventional recruiting approaches just compounding the problem, it’s driven progressive firms to explore alternate ways that benefit both the company and potential employees.
Hiring based on experience is a good solution for this problem.
Explain the concept of “skills-based hiring.”
Skills-based recruiting strategies attempt to hire individuals only based on their skills, capabilities, and appropriateness to the post as opposed to their degree, experience, and presumed suitability.
A skills-based approach looks at an applicant’s soft and hard talents and aims to locate the candidate whose skills best correspond with the responsibilities and tasks of the job.
How might skills-based assessment help close the gender gap in the workplace?
Gender biases, conscious and unconscious, explain why women face obstacles to leadership roles and advancement in the business world. However, this is greatly mitigated by using a skills-based method of hiring.
Assessments and tests based on practical knowledge may promote gender parity in the following ways…
1. AI automation reduces human bias
Quality skills-based assessments employ artificial intelligence to grade job applicants’ replies, eliminating human bias. While humans still judge which responses are excellent and which are poor, strong AI automation helps eliminate the sexism that permeates the recruiting process and often works against women.
As a result of this method, you are less likely to be affected by biases such as affinity (the tendency to choose candidates who are similar to you), confirmation (the tendency to form an opinion of a candidate before the interview), contrast (the tendency to compare two candidates and emphasize the positive attributes of one), and gender (i.e., favoring one gender over another).
2. Candidates are evaluated based on relevant criteria.
KillerCoder distinguishes itself because of its proficient skills-based assessment; this approach eliminates any needless prejudice from the recruiting process, whether it be gender, education, experience, age, etc. There is less space for prejudice or preconceptions to enter into a skills evaluation.
3. Candidates have more opportunities to demonstrate their expertise.
The interview process has always been biased toward women. Several studies reveal that male candidates are more likely to be invited to an interview than their female counterparts, even when the latter display equal or more qualifications for the position.
Hiring based on a candidate’s demonstrated talents rather than their resume is known as “skills-based hiring.”
While most hiring procedures still rely on a CV, a preliminary screening, and an interview to decide whether or not a candidate is qualified, skills-based testing gives applicants a chance to demonstrate and authenticate their level of expertise.
In conclusion
Inequality in the workplace shows that employers and recruiters can’t always rely on facts, impartiality, and the qualifications of applicants when making recruiting choices.
When making employment decisions, most companies are tainted by biases of one kind or another, whether rooted in past experiences, existing beliefs, or even external factors. And none of these factors can be used to gauge how well an applicant would do in a certain position. This regrettable truth sustains the persistent effect of gender imbalance in the workforce and presents a bleak future for equality.
While competency-based recruiting isn’t a panacea for closing the gender gap in the workplace, it is a proven method for addressing certain women’s challenges in the job search.
An employer may better recruit diverse talent and eradicate gender prejudice in the hiring process by focusing on candidates’ skills instead of their resumes.
