15 Skills You Need Now: Will these competencies prepare you for skill-based hiring?

Suppose you have the skills to be an accountant but lack a college degree? According to a presentation given by Terrell A. Turner, CPA on the Digital Boss from Home YouTube channel this week, you may be able to land that accounting job. That’s because Terrell and other CPA firms pursue a “skill-based” hiring approach. Some employers will consider you when you have the skills for the job although you lack the traditional degree.

Skill-based hiring is not really new. Back in 2020, I spoke with Dr. Elnora Tena Webb, a leadership coach, and Tomoko Ha, a certified career management coach, about this issue during a webinar you can watch on LinkedIn. Among other things, we touched on whether and to what extent, jobseekers should emphasize soft skills on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. The jobseekers we work with, we agreed, are correct—soft skills should be demonstrated on their resumes and profiles. Another set of skills—hard skills—should be explicitly listed because these are the competencies you must have to be employed in your industry or profession. Employers use these competencies as search terms on LinkedIn recruiting products, and in their ATS systems. Today, skill-based hiring is driven by the concept that employees will do the job well when they have the right technical and professional competencies, whether or not they have a college degree.

Core competencies define your unique value.

According to Dr. Webb, the first thing executive leaders look for when selecting staff is that the candidate has the technical skills for the job. Some of the terms I used in the core competency matrix on an IT senior business analyst’s resume, for example, included:

• Business Process Improvement,
• Functional Documentation,
• Requirements Elicitation,
• Solutions Design,
• System Implementation,
• Product Launch,
• Testing (SIT & UAT),         
• Organizational Readiness, and
• Agile & Waterfall methodologies.

It is tempting to grab a list of required competencies for your job title or industry off the Web and paste them onto your resume. There are two problems with this idea. First, the goal is to differentiate yourself from other jobseekers, so you do not want your resume to look like “everyone else’s.” Additionally, I’ve noticed that online job applications processes often include competency testing. The days when you can talk your way into a job and then figure out how to do it are gone. Only show core competencies on your resume and profile if you can pass a professional-level skill test.

Are software skills core competencies?

A career coach that works with new grads has described her Gen-Z and millennial recent grads she works with as “digital natives.” Gen-Z and some millennials have never known a time without smartphones, tablets, and laptops, so computer skills are noting special to them.

Increasingly, the managers and recruiters that are reviewing resumes will fall into this category, too. They will expect you to be fluent in MS-Office and similar productivity tools, just as they expect you to speak your native language fluently. Common software skills, then, are not core competencies that will differentiate us from other applicants.

Nonetheless, review the job description for software knowledge the hiring manager specifically requires. Make certain the software is mentioned somewhere on your resume, and that you can pass a test on that software, so you will appear in search results, and then pass initial screening.

All employees should have soft “leadership” skills.

Dr. Webb told us during her webinar that she believes everyone has leadership potential. She considers leadership skills synonymous with “people skills” or “soft skills.” Dr. Webb listed 15 soft skills that, based on her research, business leaders should demonstrate:

1. Effective communications,
2. Reliability,
3. Authenticity,
4. Integrity,
5. Honesty,
6. Flexibility,
7. Persistence,
8. Work ethic,
9. Team building,
10. Work in harmony with co-workers,
11.  Critical thinking,
12.  Creativity,
13.  Innovative approaches,
14.  Problem solving, and
15. Continuous learning ability.

Leadership and people skills are the same across many disciplines and nearly all of us can say we have all 15 leadership skills, so employers won’t search on them. They would get every resume in response to their searches.

I told Dr. Webb that this confuses jobseekers. The solution we agreed on (after the recorded portion of the webinar) was that we should demonstrate leadership skills in accomplishment statements, rather than list them in the way we list industry core competencies.

An IT project administrator I worked with wanted to say he “Led Agile Scrum teams.” Instead of asserting this, we prepared the following accomplishment statement:

• Achieved results 67% above standard when Facilitating the ONE PM program that organized all IT Value and Economics Group project managers into a cohesive team.

This bullet-point demonstrates soft leadership skills such as effective communications, flexibility, team building, and working in harmony with co-workers, critical thinking, and problem solving. The overworked resume expressions such as “great team player” do not appear in this accomplishment statement or anywhere else on the resume.

Our client received a promotion and substantial pay raise after he submitted his accomplishment and skill-based resume to his current employer. The consulting firm that employed him, he reported, was unaware of his achievements at their client company. They were also unaware of the new skills he had learned at work.

Concluding comments

The trend toward skill-based hiring is great news for jobseekers who have learned on-the-job or through industry certification programs without completing college degrees. But skill-based hiring is not a panacea. Terrell pointed out that you can work as an accountant if you demonstrate required skills, but you will still need a college accounting education, and pass the Certified Public Accountant exam to own a CPA firm.

So, look for those job leads stating that a college degree is “preferred” instead of required. This is your cue that you may get a foot in the door based on skills and achievements alone.