Skills-based hiring sounds great until you try to write the brief. Here's what to actually ask for.

The "skills not degrees" movement is right in principle. It's been undersold in practice. Most of the companies I've worked with who say they want to do skills-based hiring lose the thread the moment they try to write the actual brief.

Here's what usually happens. The hiring manager says "we don't care about the degree, we care about whether they can do the work." Great. The HR partner asks "so what specific skills should the brief list?" The hiring manager says "you know — strong analytical skills, good communication, finance background." That's not a skills-based brief. That's a degree-based brief with the degree removed. The vague descriptors hide the actual capability requirements behind soft adjectives that any CV can claim.

What an actual skills-based brief looks like

Let me walk through a real example. We're hiring a financial analyst for a manufacturing business. Here's the lazy version of the brief: "Strong Excel skills, financial modelling experience, attention to detail, ability to work under pressure."

That brief tells me nothing. Every CV I send through will claim all four. The hiring manager will read fifteen CVs, fail to differentiate, and default back to "what university did they go to."

Here's the skills-based version of the same brief.

Can the candidate build a three-statement model from scratch — P&L, balance sheet, cash flow — that balances and ties through, given a one-page brief on the business? Can they explain to a non-finance person, in plain language, what the model is telling them about working capital? Can they spot the variance in a monthly management pack and write three lines for the exec summary about what to do about it? Can they push back, productively, on a number from operations that doesn't look right?

Those are four real skills. Each one can be tested. The first can be a take-home modelling exercise. The second can be a five-minute conversation in the second interview. The third can be a sample variance analysis with a real management pack from a similar business. The fourth shows up in the reference call: "Tell me about a time the candidate disagreed with operations on a number. What happened?"

That's what skills-based hiring looks like when it's actually done. It's not "we removed the degree requirement." It's "we specified what the work actually requires, broke it into testable capabilities, and built an assessment for each one."

A small admission. We don't write the skills-based brief unilaterally. We can't — we don't know the hiring manager's role well enough to define the four capabilities that matter most. What we do is ask the questions that pull the brief out of them. Ninety minutes with us early in the process saves a quarter of bad shortlists.

If you're telling people you do skills-based hiring and your job descriptions still read like a list of adjectives, you're not actually doing it yet. That's fine. Start with one role. Pick the four capabilities. Test for them. The rest follows.

— Kern