How to hire using skills?
It’s time to hire for what really matters: skills.
By shifting focus from credentials to capabilities.
Traditional hiring filters out great talent based on degrees or job titles. Skills-based hiring does the opposite—it looks at what people can do, not just what they’ve done.
At ImpactWork, we help you:
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Define role-critical skills
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Use skills-first screening and assessments
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Match candidates based on capability and potential
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Build inclusive, future-fit hiring practices
The result? Smarter hires. More diverse teams. And a recruitment process that’s ready for change.
The Challenge
What’s going wrong with traditional hiring?
Traditional hiring still prioritises degrees, job titles, and gut feeling over real skills. And it’s failing—on speed, fit, and fairness.
What’s broken:
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Generic job descriptions and inflated requirements
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Interviews that reward confidence, not competence
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Bias against career switchers and self-taught talent
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No visibility into the skills that truly drive success
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Overreliance on the same shrinking talent pools
The result? Slower hiring, missed potential, and teams that aren’t future-ready.
Learn more about skills? Download our free whitepaper!
Our approach.
Hiring for the future means letting go of outdated models.
At ImpactWork, we don’t believe in one-off assessments or cosmetic diversity tweaks. We help you build a fully integrated, skills-based hiring ecosystem—designed to attract, assess, and select talent based on what truly drives performance: skills, potential, and learning agility.
Here’s how we help you build a hiring process that reflects the realities of modern work:
We start by breaking down each role to its essence: what must someone actually be able to do to succeed in the role.
Replace generic, exclusionary criteria like “5-7 years experience” or “bachelor’s degree required” with clear, measurable skills. This opens access to broader talent pools—career changers, self-taught professionals, neurodiverse talent, and more.
CVs and interviews are poor predictors of success. We embed structured assessments and scoring frameworks to ensure consistency, fairness, and insight.
— ImpactWork.
The impact.
Shifting to a skills-based hiring model is not just a recruitment innovation—it’s a transformation of how your organisation thinks about talent, growth, and potential.
Here’s what you unlock with a skills-first hiring strategy:
1. Higher quality of hire
By aligning selection with real-world capabilities and outcomes, you significantly increase the match between candidate potential and role success. Employees onboard faster, adapt quicker, and deliver results sooner—because they were hired for the right reasons.
2. A more inclusive and diverse workforce
Skills-based hiring removes artificial barriers that filter out high-potential candidates. No more unnecessary degree requirements, no more overemphasis on linear career paths. This approach welcomes talent from non-traditional backgrounds, creating a broader, richer talent pool—and a stronger, more resilient organisation.
3. Reduced time-to-hire and recruitment costs
With clear, skill-based criteria and structured assessment flows, hiring becomes faster, more focused, and less reactive. Teams spend less time screening, more time selecting the right candidates, and less budget on repeated hires or agency reliance.
4. Stronger internal mobility and workforce agility
Skills visibility doesn’t just help you hire better—it helps you grow better. When you know what skills exist inside your organisation, you can redeploy talent, close capability gaps, and make smarter build-buy-borrow decisions. Hiring becomes a strategic engine, not a stopgap.
5. An employer brand that stands for fairness and future-readiness
Candidates—and employees—notice when you do things differently. Skills-based hiring signals innovation, inclusion, and long-term thinking. It shows you care about what people bring, not where they’ve been. And that positions your organisation as an employer of choice in a competitive market.

Want to get started with skills?
Discover how our services can help you with the transition to becoming a skills-based organisation—one that thrives on adaptability, inclusion, and performance.
Shifting to a skills-based model is more than a structural change—it’s a cultural transformation. It requires new ways of thinking about talent, capability, and potential. It means moving beyond static job titles and hierarchies, toward a dynamic system where work is designed around skills, not roles. Where people aren’t boxed in, but built up.
Ready for the first step? Let's talk!

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