Skills based working

Skills-based hiring process

medewerker met oorbel linksIt’s time to hire for what really matters: skills.

Traditional hiring filters out great talent based on outdated signals — degrees, titles, years of experience. But in today’s fast-moving world of work, what you can do matters more than what’s on paper.

Skills-based hiring flips the script.
It focuses on potential, adaptability, and real-world capabilities — opening doors for diverse talent and future-fit teams.

At ImpactWork, we help organisations move from credential-driven to capability-led recruitment.
The result? A smarter, more inclusive hiring engine that’s built for change — and built to last.

 

94%
of Dutch employees consider a healthy work-life balance a top priority. 61% would reject a job offer if it disrupted that balance.
Why?

The Challenge: What’s going wrong with traditional hiring?

Hiring based on pedigree or past roles might feel safe—but it’s a poor predictor of performance in today’s dynamic work environment. Here’s what’s not working:

  • Overreliance on degree-based filters

  • Job descriptions filled with vague or inflated requirements

  • Interview processes that assess confidence, not competence

  • Biases that disadvantage career switchers, self-taught talent, and underrepresented groups

  • A lack of visibility into which skills actually drive success in the role

  • Fishing in the same talent pool leads to less and less results in a tight labor market

The result? Slower hiring, missed potential, lack of diversity, and employees who don’t match the needs of the role—or the future of your business.

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Hiring for the future means letting go of outdated models.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:

 

Rebuild roles around business-critical skills

We start by breaking down each role to its essence: what must someone actually be able to do to succeed in the role.

We partner with hiring teams and business leads to:

  • Define outcome-based role profiles focused on impact, not input

  • Identify technical and human skills that matter most for performance

  • Align job requirements with strategic workforce planning

Create clarity of skills

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.

We help you:

  • Reframe job descriptions using inclusive, skills-forward language

  • Build competency models that translate business needs into observable behaviours

  • Implement skills taxonomies aligned with your broader HR and learning architecture

Design evidence-based, bias-resistant selection processes

CVs and interviews are poor predictors of success. We embed structured assessments and scoring frameworks to ensure consistency, fairness, and insight. Our selection redesign includes:

  • Skills simulations and job-relevant case challenges

  • Asynchronous and live assessments that reduce interviewer bias

  • Role-specific evaluation rubrics linked to skill criteria

  • Interview training to build objectivity and reduce affinity bias

Train your organisation to hire differently

A successful skills-based hiring process isn’t just a new toolkit—it’s a cultural shift. We equip your teams with the knowledge, behaviours, and systems to embed this way of working. Our enablement programs include:

  • Hiring manager capability building focused on skills-first mindset

  • Cross-functional calibration sessions to align evaluation standards

  • Templates, playbooks and digital tools that drive consistency and adoption

''You don’t build future-ready teams by looking backwards. Skills-based hiring is how you recruit for what’s next''
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.

When you prioritise skills over background, you open doors to untapped capability. You accelerate hiring without compromising on quality. You build teams based on what people can contribute, not what’s printed on their CV. And that changes everything.

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.

medewerker staat in de zon

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.

Learn more about skills? Download our free whitepaper!

40%
more skills development in organisations that became a skills-based organisation (source: Udemy)

Ready for the first step? Let's talk!

 avatar
Rogier van Hamburg
|
Co-founder ImpactWork
There's many challenges in the world of work, but together we can tackle them. We're here to help you improve your HR strategically and create thriving workplaces. Check our services pages for more information on how we can help, and feel free to reach out!
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