Concise Guide to Strategic RecruitmentPart 1: Creating a Skill Canvas
Employees serve as the driving force behind a company's success, fueling product development, service provision, and fostering growth and innovation. Thus, meticulous care must be taken when selecting individuals to join the organization.
This guide aims to provide insights into the challenges of identifying exceptional candidates and offers a systematic approach to specialized recruitment.
Contents
What is a Skill Canvas The Skill List Skill Definitions and Expertise Levels Quantifying the Skills Importance Teachability
Next Steps
What is a Skill Canvas
The recruitment process involves various stages, including crafting job descriptions, candidate pre-screening, interview preparation, and designing onboarding and training procedures.
To ensure an effective process, all these components should work cohesively towards a well-defined goal and the skill canvas serves as a tool that enables the articulation of this goal by fostering shared understanding among all stakeholders involved in the recruitment process.
The skill canvas primarily consists of a comprehensive list of clearly defined and quantified skills that we seek in potential candidates, accompanied by the rationale behind each skill requirement.
Creating the skill canvas represents a critical step in the recruitment process, yet it is often overlooked or approached casually, often completed by a single individual within a short timeframe.
The Skill List
The initial step in creating a skill canvas is to compile a comprehensive list of skills relevant to the specific position. It is important to note that the objective is not to seek a perfect human being. Instead, the focus should be on identifying the skills that are most relevant for the job at hand.
To enhance the effectiveness of the skill canvas, it is highly beneficial to provide a concise justification for each skill included. This practice ensures alignment among stakeholders and facilitates future analysis.
While not obligatory, it can be advantageous to categorize the skills into two main groups:
Technical skills encompass expertise related to specific technologies, software, or specialized knowledge directly associated with a particular field of study. Typically, these skills are identified by the engineering team.
Personal skills, also known as soft skills, are not tied to a specific field of study. They encompass attributes such as mentoring ability, organizational skills, problem-solving approach, interpersonal capabilities, and working under pressure, among others.
Skill Definitions and Expertise Levels
Rather than relying solely on years of experience for defining a level of expertise, it is crucial to provide explicit definitions and expectations for each skill.
For instance, instead of stating The candidate must have at least 5 years of experience working in microservices architectures, a more precise requirement could be articulated, such as The candidate should be able to autonomously investigate and identify race conditions within a complex microservice architecture.
This level of detail aids in crafting accurate job descriptions and interview scenarios, while fostering shared understanding throughout the recruitment process.
Quantifying the Skills
It is unlikely that every candidate can be thoroughly assessed on every skill listed in the canvas in the timeframe of the recruitment process. To address this challenge, it is necessary to implement a system that helps define our strategy.
To achieve this, each skill on the canvas should be classified based on a couple of characteristics:
01 Importance
This classification permits the concentration of efforts on pivotal elements during the advanced stages of the process. Generally, three types of skills are recognized:
- Core - these skills constitute essential prerequisites for the job, without which it cannot be effectively pursued.
- Auxiliary - Although not obligatory, these skills exert a substantial impact on the role and its outcomes.
- Tangent - these skills bear some tangential relevance to the job, but a skilled professional may lack them without significant detriment.
02 Teachability
To determine the feasibility of imparting skills, each should be evaluated in terms of teachability. Skills can fall into three categories:
- Internally teachable - these skills can be cultivated within the organization through available resources. Typically, the temporal commitment of willing and competent personnel to facilitate training programs
- Externally teachable - these skills surpass the internal training capacities. Outsourcing their training to third-party entities becomes a viable option, albeit incurring financial costs.
- Unteachable - skills that defy reasonable acquisition within the confines of available temporal or resource constraints.
Next Steps
In the subsequent parts of this guide, we will delve into defining recruitment strategies that leverage the skill canvas, ensuring the acquisition of top-tier talent.