Why Narrowing Down on Specific Skillsets Can Become An Issue in Recruitment

Narrowing down on specific skillsets while already a competency mapping infrastructure is in place can be challenging.

Everything in the recruitment industry, right from screening to selection is done based on skillsets. Recruiters identify the skills required for a job, they mention them on job descriptions, and they map them with candidates’ skills to hire the best talent. Candidates, on the other hand, read the required skillsets in job descriptions and apply for a job opening if they find it relevant. This matching of skill sets with job requirements is called competency mapping. Competency mapping involves various challenging evaluation tasks such as job analysis, creating analysis-based JDs, and then applying the analysis results across every recruitment process. But competency mapping becomes even more challenging when employers narrow down their requirements to specific skillsets.

An Intro to Competency Mapping

Competency mapping is a process of identifying the skills, abilities, and behavior required for a job position and then matching them with candidates’ skillsets. It requires analysis capabilities to find out the necessary skills for a job position and what is present within a candidate. Competency-based hiring is a great way to recruit naturally fit candidates for a job position. It also helps recruiters to determine the possibilities of how long a candidate would stay for the position he or she is hired for.

The Issue with Narrowing Skillsets

The problem with narrowing skillsets is that there is no room for employees to work in job positions that can make optimal use of his or her competencies. For instance, even if a candidate has additional skills other than the ones required for the job position, the other skills would not be optimally used. Let’s say candidates applying for a designing position also has social media skills. Competency mapping will limit the work possibilities of those candidates only to designing, and recruiters will never focus on their social media abilities.

Narrowing skillsets in competency mapping can also make ATS systems reject applicants with poor resume writing skills while screening. For example, narrowed skillsets would make ATS systems screen based on specific narrowed keywords. Hence, the ATS would reject all the resumes with broader but relevant skills.

The communication gap and misunderstanding between recruiters and employers is also bound to increase with narrowed skillsets. Most recruiters don’t have much knowledge and experience of the positions they are hiring for. Therefore, when skillsets are narrowed down, recruiters often find it even more challenging to understand the job positions for which they would be hiring. This increases the communication gap between hiring managers and recruiters.

A Recruitment Intelligence Solution

An AI-based recruitment solution can act as an enabler to incorporate intelligent process automation into hiring. Recruitment intelligence solutions have self-learning capabilities. Hence, they can improve over time and consider all the competencies of a candidate to evaluate future benefits. They can also improve ATS systems to go beyond keywords and screen resumes based on context. You can contact us to find out more about how recruitment intelligence can augment your hiring process.