Skill-based hiring improves productivity

The hiring landscape is undergoing rapid transformation. No longer factors like educational qualification, referrals, and experience are ruling the roost during the recruitment process. Rather, skill is fast emerging as a critical factor of employment. In a digital world, where emerging technologies are bringing sweeping changes to the hiring process, the emergence of skill as a key criterion is enabling organisations to get the right fit for a job role.

All eyes on skill

Priority on skill over other parameters has its innate advantages. Enterprises increasingly understand that many professionals might have taken up different lines of study based on societal pressure, peer pressure, or lack of awareness of various career opportunities than based on choice. This is especially true for a country like India where the vast majority of students come from rural backgrounds.

Therefore, organisations are keen to give professionals with an aptitude for technology, an analytical mindset, and a flair for learning new skills a chance. This turns out to be a game-changer as productivity increase due to the right talent at the right job. Examples of such skill-based hiring are aplenty in the Indian IT industry. Many graduates with other than science backgrounds have turned out to be successful IT engineers with necessary skill-based training. Similarly, India has seen many coders without completion of formal education. Apart from improving productivity, cost & time savings are the other advantages of a skill-based recruitment process.

Moreover, candidates from different backgrounds and with various levels of education usually have the skills and experience that are essential to succeed in job roles, which can help create a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

Indian IT sector with a 30 per cent women participation rate is an example of embracing such diversity. Skill-based hiring also leads to a higher retention rate as a motivated employee tends to be loyal to the organisation. Such a hiring shift is also democratising the hiring process as the selection universe expands. More choices for employers mean the selection of better candidates based on merit.

Technology landscape

While the advantages of skill-based hiring are many, there is still a critical gap in terms of getting the right skillsets for job roles. Especially, the skill gap in the Indian technology industry is worrying.

That is the reason why many job roles lie vacant because of the lack of the right talent. According to a NASSCOM-Zinnov study, India is projected to face a shortage of 14-19 lakh tech professionals by 2026.

This is despite the country churning out one of the highest numbers of engineering graduates in the world. Apart from the talent crunch, the skill gap is also one of the steepest in India. Digital skills including Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and Cloud Computing face a huge shortage in India.

More than one lakh jobs remain vacant in the data analytics space alone. One of the major reasons for such shortfall is due to the absence of skillsets of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) graduates. The NASSCOM study found that out of 21 lakh, STEM graduates passed out in 2021, less than 50,000 were equipped with digital skills including data analytics.

Against this backdrop, reskilling & upskilling are the need of the hour. The World Economic Forum projects that 50 per cent of all employees will require reskilling due to new technology by 2025.

Currently, new developments in the field of data analytics, generative AI, and others are rapidly transforming the skill requirements.

Hearteningly, all stakeholders including technology firms, specialised digital skilling firms, and government agencies have been taking several steps to bridge the gap. Organisations, therefore, are better placed to partner with niche skill providers like OdinSchool to make their reskilling and upskilling initiatives effective in many ways.

(The author is Director, Odin School)