Ever since generative AI went mainstream, more employers have passionately advocated for skills-based hiring. The trend now tips toward a “skills revolution,” which implies a totally novel and disruptive approach to staffing and recruitment. 

The rise of gen AI pushing organizations to reconsider their hiring strategy is logical. For example, since AI is now a commodity, the ability to go from data to insights, and even from insights to action, seriously dilutes the value of human knowledge and expertise. Unless your expertise puts you in the 1% of the population, you probably won’t be hired for your expertise. 

Even after we account for errors and inaccuracies, mainstream AI, including large language models and generative AI platforms like chatGPT and Perplexity, is the intellectual equivalent of the fast-food industry. It will give you a quick, cheap, and often tasty answer to any question, but it won’t be as healthy or nutritious as a properly cooked meal.

And, just as you wouldn’t attempt to impress an important dinner guest by heating something in the microwave, you probably shouldn’t perform high-stakes assignments or tasks outsourcing it all to gen AI. Think of it as the automation of human mediocrity, which is no small feat. It elevates the bar for human performance and talent in any area of knowledge, pushing us to go beyond the wisdom of the crowds. We all have to convince others that what we know about a certain subject is more useful than what they can get through gen AI, and we all have to reconsider how we will add value even in our current roles or jobs.

Naturally, this is also a warning sign for universities that are still teaching in traditional ways, and unable to convince anyone that they nurture or harness any relevant employability skills, whether it’s learning ability, drive, or people skills. If they did, they would need to hire people with really low standardized test scores and those who are lazy and antisocial and turn them into highly employable individuals. Nobody has any data on the future, but I can promise this will not happen.

Although organizations rarely specify exactly how they define skills and what they mean by them, common sense and an average memory show that there isn’t that much novelty in skills-based hiring. Back in the 1970s, it was called competencies, and ever since, employers have talked about hard and soft skills, often using different labels.

The hope is that this isn’t the first time an employer, recruiter, or hiring manager paid attention to a candidate’s skills. Yet there are plenty of examples of highly successful candidates who climbed up the organizational ladder despite obvious skills gaps, even at the level of executive leaders.

While it’s hard to know whether this current skills-based hiring trend is more style than substance, it is possible to outline some basic parameters that need to be adopted to change from current and past hiring approaches. That includes what organizations, hiring managers, and recruiters need to stop doing, to convince us that there’s meaningful or substantive change.

Stop looking at college credentials and university titles

The gap between what universities train for, what their credentials (GPA or equivalent) signal on the one hand, and what employers are seeking, has increased with gen AI.

There are many alternative ways to evaluate what academic grades signal that don’t require people to spend many years (and a fortune) on college tuition.

• IQ tests measure learning ability better than college credentials.
• Conscientiousness/ambition/drive assessments and EQ/people-skills/social-skills assessments provide reliable and predictive measures of someone’s employability

This after accounting for their college degrees, which, incidentally, is far more conflated with social class, and more likely to decrease diversity and inclusion, and increase inequality.

Any employer serious about skills-based hiring should ignore college credentials, yet it rarely happens today (especially for knowledge workers).

Focus on soft skills rather than hard skills

Since the goal is to predict people’s future performance in a volatile and unpredictable job market, where hard skills have a much shorter life expectancy (for example, one year ago the novelty in-demand skill was prompt engineering, and now AI can prompt itself with no human intervention), you need to bet on future-proof skills.

In considering what skills to select, consider which AI is less likely to emulate or replace. These will likely have to do with IQ rather than EQ. AI has already won the IQ battle, but EQ remains up for grabs, because humans crave human validation and attention, and would rather experience human empathy than interact with an empathetic chatbot. Caveat: Data shows they prefer an empathetic chatbot to a non-empathetic human.

Also, as humans are mostly competing against humans, the focus should be on the skills that make you a better employee than your peers. For example, everybody will use the microwave, so providing a difference will come from adding the human touch. You’ll be in demand if you display more self-control, resilience, curiosity, self-awareness, humility, and adaptability than other humans.

Potential matters more than skills

The soft skills described above are also critical ingredients of your potential, even in roles you have never performed in the past. Potential is a bet employers make about your likelihood of being an exceptional performer in the future; this will depend less on what you have done in the past, and more on your ability to harness your soft skills, and apply them to succeed in whatever opportunities will come.

Nobody can predict what future jobs will be like, but if you hire more curious, self-aware, resilient, humble, empathetic, and adaptable people, not to mention smart, driven, and socially skilled—you will probably be okay.

So far the euphoria around skills-based hiring may be more talk than action. We haven’t witnessed true transformational or disruptive hiring strategies with any level of scale. The three simple steps above highlight a logical and pragmatic way forward, which should increase the number of high-performing individuals in key future roles and boost diversity and inclusion.