Hiring based on education and a well-written cover letter should be a thing of the past. Here’s how skills-based hiring and skill training can change the game.
Who despises resumes and cover letters more? The candidates who have to tweak and refine them endlessly, or the hiring manager who has to go through a stack of hundreds every month?
There's a simple solution to the above – one that would satisfy all parties: merit-based hiring. Using skill aptitude rather than education and how well someone can sell themselves on paper is a much better litmus test on whether an employee will be a good (long-term) fit for your company.
Equally as important: skills-based hiring vastly diversifies the candidate pool. See how Apprentix and our partner, Vervoe, are making it easier than ever for businesses to modernize their hiring practices.
Frustrated by the status quo, Co-Founders Omer Molad and David Weinberg saw an opportunity to create a solution for current hiring trends.
"We were sick of people who were either privileged or good at selling themselves being prioritized," says Molad.
Before building Vervoe in 2016, Weinberg saw a story about a company called Automattic (the builders of WordPress) and their system of “auditioning” new potential hires. Candidates would work in the office for a few weeks, and Automattic would pay them the equivalent salary of the actual position. They found that these auditions were a much better indicator that someone could excel in the role than the traditional hiring process.
While Molad says this exercise certainly is admirable, it's not necessarily scalable. So he and Weinberg set out to build technology that would implement the concept of an audition in a condensed but data-rich format.
Vervoe is an end-to-end solution that revolutionizes the hiring process by allowing businesses to create unique skills assessments tailored to suit the specific requirements of a role. Companies can choose from a library of validated assessments or build their own. The goal is to make hiring about merit, not background.
"The game is rigged, and we're trying to unrig it," says Molad.
Vervoe's skills tests are assessments used to provide an unbiased, validated evaluation of the candidate's ability to perform duties listed in the job description. These can be immersive experiences like coding challenges or job simulations, or test for soft skills like emotional intelligence.
"We don't do 'tell me about a time' questions," says Molad. "Instead, we ask real-world application questions – like how would you fire someone?"
While current hiring practices reward self-salesmen/women, Vervoe's assessments give direct, no-BS insights on whether someone can actually do the job.
... wasn't actually that difficult, Molad says – because they opted to trek down the path of least resistance.
"We looked for people whose arms didn't need to be twisted," he says. "The people who [in 2017] were ready to change their hiring practices."
In fact, one of Vervoe's early adopters was Apprentix's founder, Andy Seth. He's been using the platform for all of his businesses since.
"Selling Vervoe isn't like selling a toaster oven. I can't just describe it to you. You need to experience it to understand the impact," says Molad.
Molad has found that clients who commission Vervoe typically start by implementing the technology into one of their departments but come back eager to deploy skills-based hiring into their entire operation three to six months later.
"Because it delivers two benefits: efficiency and the confidence to hire better."
The value alignment between Apprentix and Vervoe cannot be overstated. While Apprentix helps businesses create skills-based job descriptions to attract apprentices, Vervoe helps companies create skills-based assessments to hire candidates. Let's take a closer look at how these work together.
Skills-based job description: the first step in hiring someone is to create a skills-based job description. Staring at a blank sheet of paper and trying to write a job description is daunting and often takes weeks to complete. Apprentix automates this for hiring managers, so they have a skills-based job description for any occupation within seconds.
Skills-based hiring: with the skills determined, Vervoe helps build skills assessments to test whether candidates possess those skills. The grading process allows the best candidates to rise to the top and makes the hiring decision clear and straightforward.
Skills training: then comes the time to provide a clear training path for employees. This includes the onboarding process and the longer-term training in the classroom and on the job. Hiring managers can identify the skills needed to train their people through Apprentix.
Combining these methods not only ensures your business will hire the right person but that they'll stay with your company longer. What's more? These job descriptions and assessments will attract diverse candidates who otherwise would be hesitant to apply through traditional methods that prioritize degrees and experience.
"We speak the same language," says Molad. "Our philosophies are the same. If you want to know if someone can weld metal, watch them weld metal. Don't worry about if they went to Harvard or are introverted or extroverted. That stuff is irrelevant – and on all of that, Vervoe and Apprentix are completely aligned."
Now more than ever, young people are taking "unorthodox" paths to employment as college degrees prove to be less relevant and valuable in an oversaturated market. And that's why Vervoe and Apprentix came to fruition – to help businesses that are sick of spinning their wheels and losing new hires less than a year after employment to other jobs.
Because both platforms generate verified skills-based templates, companies don't need to spend hours starting from scratch unless they want to. By making it turnkey for business owners to adopt more equitable and sensible hiring and training practices, there's no reason to go back to the way things used to be.
"There's lots of ways to save time, but if you're not hiring the right people, it doesn't really matter in the end," says Molad.
With Vervoe and Apprentix – doing both is effortless.
