The BHI's principles on skills for a more secure labour pipeline.
The Better Hiring Institute’s mission is to create a Faster, Fairer and Safer labour market in the UK.
Organisations repeatedly report skills shortages that limit their ability to hire staff. The Better Hiring Institute is calling for all employers to assess their skills requirements, ensuring that only qualifications and credentials essential to the role are required, preventing bias and exclusion within the hiring process. Reported data suggests that employers are open to this, with 84% of employers in one Local Sills Improvement Plan Trailblazer responding that employability skills were the most important attribute when seeking an employee, more so than experience and qualifications.
One method of ensuring Fairer Hiring is to implement skills-based hiring, a recruitment approach that focuses on evaluating prospective employees on their skills rather than their education or previous work experience.
As such, organisations should engage with stakeholders at a local and national level to ensure that the future labour pipeline is better equipped with the skills required by organisations in the short and long term. Employers should consider the following steps:
1. Identify skills requirements within your organisation by using IfATE’s Occuptional Maps.
2. Work with colleagues nationally within your Better Hiring Institute subcommittee to identify (transferable) skills relevant across your sector.
3. Engage locally with your Local Skills Improvement Plan providers (LSIP) to drive change in local talent pools.
4. Where skills can be trained, remove these requirements from the essential success criteria of your organisation’s job adverts and consider using Values Based Recruitment, hiring workers with the values that align with your organisation.
See below for the appropriate links on skills based hiring:
SFIA - The global skills and competency framework for the digital world
Local Skills Improvement Plan providers
