Theme: Skills development

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:

  • Define role-critical skills

  • Use skills-first screening and assessments

  • Match candidates based on capability and potential

  • Build inclusive, future-fit hiring practices

The result? Smarter hires. More diverse teams. And a recruitment process that’s ready for change.

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?

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:

  • Generic job descriptions and inflated requirements

  • Interviews that reward confidence, not competence

  • Bias against career switchers and self-taught talent

  • No visibility into the skills that truly drive success

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Hiring for the future means letting go of outdated models.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

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.

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.

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.

''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.

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.

HR medewerker staat in de zon in stijl van Wes Anderson

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.

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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Not just words, Action.

Future-proof HR strategy

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The Hague case

Digital strategy and growth

HeadFirst Group places more than 20,000 professionals with over 500 clients in Europe every day, achieving an annual turnover of more than 2 billion euros.
Headfirst case

Getting the data right

DJI aims to establish a data-driven recruitment and selection process to address critical challenges. This initiative seeks to create a structured and periodic measurement system that combines results, process data, and experience metrics.
DJI case

The four biggest HR challenges explained briefly.

25%
Of our profit is going to projects that support sustainable work causes. Example: Helping novices to find work.
Find out more

Innovation & productivity

Who likes boring work? Traditional HR processes are time-consuming, manual, and prone to inefficiencies. With HR tech and AI solutions, we can automate HR workflows, optimize workforce planning, and make data-driven decisions that save time and boost productivity.

Employee engagement and wellbeing

Increasing engagement and workplace wellbeing can help boost retention and productivity. Happy employees = thriving business!

Attracting and retaining talent in a competitive market

Explore data-driven solutions for increasing employee engagement, reducing employee turnover, and improving recruitment processes - all while fostering a resilient and thriving workplace culture!

Skills development

Skills are the future of work. With us, you can stay ahead and create a talent marketplace, skills-matrix, identify future skill gaps, and more!