Would you hire a candidate for your unskilled, hourly position if they didn’t have a resume? By the end of this article, the answer might surprise you. Unskilled workers may not have specialized knowledge, technical skills, or a robust resume, but even those without much prior experience bring potential. The reason? They often come with crucial soft skills that give them a running start.
In today’s recruitment landscape, adopting a skills based hiring approach means looking beyond traditional resumes. As of 2024, 81% of employers are using skills based hiring to reduce mis-hiring and cost-to-hire while boosting retention. 94% of employers leveraging skills based hiring find it a better indicator than resumes of on-the-job-success. A recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that unskilled, hourly workers’ low unemployment rate made filling positions harder on employers.
How can you fill those positions and reduce long-term staffing shortages? Focus your candidate pool on those who have just left high school. 56% of adults aren’t seeing college as worth the cost anymore. By 2023, roughly 72% of 16-24 year-olds who chose not to go to college had become more active in the labor market. These candidates want a noncollege alternative, which means they are much more interested in your hourly positions as an entry to the workforce. In this article, we’ll explore strategies that shift your perspective on unskilled candidates and uncover the potential that traditional hiring methods overlook.
Think Soft-Skilled, Not Unskilled
All labor requires skills. Rather than viewing candidates without prior experience or extensive resumes as unskilled, rethink them as soft-skilled. Soft skills are essential in entry-level positions because these roles are often customer-facing (like restaurant work or retail) or require teamwork (like warehousing). For skills based hiring, employers can focus on:
- Strategic thinking
- Active listening
- Problem solving
- Communication
- Teamwork
- Organizational skills
- Professionalism
- Time management
- Reading
- Conflict resolution
Even young candidates without much experience have gained soft skills from their time in school, volunteer work, and life experience. A candidate with strong enthusiasm and readiness to learn will be easily trained and keen to join your workforce.
Curate Key Skills in Your Candidates
Every role requires a candidate to have key soft skills to align with success in that position. For example:
- A server will need to be friendly and outgoing to effectively build a rapport with guests.
- A warehouse worker will need resilience and spatial awareness skills.
- A retailer worker will need teamwork and time management to balance varied tasks.
- An office assistant will need organization and communication skills.
In addition to evaluating the soft skills essential for the role, it’s important to assess the hard skills it requires. For instance:
- Basic math knowledge help cashiers quickly complete transactions.
- Conflict management skills help those in customer-facing and team-focused positions.
- Experience with certain technology can help new candidates integrate into your system quicker.
Personality Assessments give you insights about a candidate’s personality traits and whether they are a good fit for your role. Leveraging this pre-employment test as the first step of your hiring helps you quickly identify candidates with the best potential. Furthermore, by getting insights about a candidate’s traits early on, you can zero in on key questions about weaknesses, performance, experience, and motivation when you interview them.
Evaluate what knowledge is important for a candidate to perform the necessary tasks. Could you train an employee to have this knowledge? Is this knowledge a candidate must have from the start? The answer will help you create transparent job advertisements and list your must-haves. Well thought out job listings streamline your talent pipeline and accelerate its quality.
Motivation is the most important skill a candidate can have for any role. A motivated candidate is eager to learn, advance, and prove themselves, making them the easiest to train and develop despite any skill gaps.
Train to Gain the Skills You Want Them to Have
When you hire candidates with potential to learn and train them on the complex skills you want them to have, you can tailor candidates for your positions. Sectors where experienced workers are aging out quickly or where competitive new technology is increasingly being integrated especially benefit from companies committed to training new employees. Training opportunities also greatly increase buzz about your positions among younger candidates who are seeking career paths and promotion opportunities in return for their labor.
Training doesn’t have to be limited to technical skills. Teaching employees your preferred way of conflict resolution, de-escalation, leadership, and organization are all valuable skills that you can teach employees so that they fit into your workplace culture.
Hiring Tools Can Point to the Greatest Potential
Hiring tools like pre-employment assessments save time, money, and effort when it comes to hiring, especially when you are focusing on a younger candidate pool with less experience. You already know that skill assessments are a powerful tool for greater insight. Leveraging additional tools that answer questions about a candidate’s awareness of job requirements, mentality, and problem-solving. Getting these insights early makes your hiring process more efficient. It’s essential to be able to have a quick time-to-hire to snag a promising candidate.
Job previews give candidates a transparent look at a less publicly visible role’s daily tasks and the chance to self-select out of the hiring process if they see they aren’t a fit for you.
Cognitive aptitude tests let you assess a candidate’s learning potential so that you can see if they have the potential to grow into a role with the right training.
Situational judgement tests let you see how a candidate would tackle a common problem that occurs in the position, such as conflict with a client.
These tools can be utilized as part of a quick, two-step hiring process. First, conduct an assessment to get a feel for the candidate as part of their basic application. Follow up with a consistent, honed interview playbook that focuses on behavioral questions like how the candidate applies their learning or overcame past obstacles. A strong interview technique lets you flesh out a candidate’s prior experiences and attitude beyond the ideals or hypotheticals that they may have given during their application stage.
Conclusion
Hiring for hourly positions can be challenging, but rethinking the soft-skill and skill growth potential of unskilled candidates widens your candidate pool. Focusing on younger candidates who are most eager for a job widens your candidate pool, reducing the pressure on filling your open positions. Look for a candidate’s soft skills and learning potential that you can make great with the right training. Avoid waiting for an ideal candidate to land in your lap and seize the chance to have greater control over your hiring.
If you want to get started with better assessing your candidate pool’s potential, HighMatch is the teammate you need. HighMatch boasts over 15 years of experience helping diverse companies save time and money in their hiring processes. Our approach leverages a robust, automated, and mobile-friendly suite of hiring tools that help you make hiring decisions efficiently and more successfully. With personalized assessment solutions, we help you quickly identify candidates whose soft skills, aptitudes, and learning potential align with your needs. Following up with our customizable interview playbooks ensures consistency and greater insight during interviews. Additionally, our team of I/O psychologists collaborates with your hiring managers to tailor these tools to your unique needs, empowering you to make faster, data-driven decisions with confidence.
Contact HighMatch today to modernize your hiring process, identify candidates with the greatest potential, and fill your positions with people of potential–saving time, money, and frustration along the way.
