What is skills based hiring?

Table of Contents

• Focus of the Week: Skills Based Hiring

• Mindset: Progressive Overload

• Life Skill: Always Ask, Never Expect

• Career Advice: Canadian Skill Imbalances

• This is Cool: Koru Hackathon Update

• Bonus: Tips for Applying to Stanford

FOCUS OF THE WEEK
Skills Based Hiring

It feels like it’s everywhere right now. At least in my algorithms.

It’s still a little surprising to me that we’ve had to come up for a term to describe this.

I thought it was common sense.

Post a role that requires candidate to do A, B, C.

Hire them if they can demonstrate evidence of A, B, C (or Z - you believe those skills are teachable, and you believe this person can learn them).

But it doesn’t always work that way. Partly because a lot of people have been making hiring decisions based off resumes and vibes for a long time.

Resumes are a good filtering tool. I can filter to see if you have a university degree, or worked at a similar type of company. For a lot of hiring managers, those filters used to be enough.

But skills based hiring is changing that up.

One assumption as to why is because we’ve finally got to a place where at least from a technological standpoint, things are moving so quickly, people are starting to realize a university degree, or lived experiences, doesn’t guarantee that by default you have the skills to do the job.

That skill you picked up 3 years ago? It might be obsolete now. That’s a new thing.

Lifelong learning is no longer just a buzzword.

• If you’re an optimist, it’s an equalizer.

• If you’re a pessimist, it’s an annoyance.

Regardless of how you feel, it’s here.

Our team at SpacesEDU by myBlueprint even got in on the action.

Last week, as an early Valentines Day gift to our partners, we hosted webinar called: Building the Future Workforce: Integrating Durable Skills into K-12 Education.

Check out the 3 min clip below to hear what Michael Crawford, VP @ America Succeeds and Sabba Quidwai, CEO @ Designing Schools have to say about skills based hiring, and what we can do in our schools to support students with it.

• You can also watch the full recording here.

Here’s why you should:

Michael was one of the panelists in that webinar. You met him in the clip above.

We have a few things in common.

Including the desire to create a better bridge between industry and the classroom.

Everyone understands the importance of helping young people see evidence of these durable skills in action, outside of the classroom.

But we need to be doing more to make that happen.

Durable skills might be a new term to you. Think of it like a rebranding of soft/21st century skills, and competencies, with evidence from analysis of millions of job postings that point to why these are the skills worth developing today.

Another new term for you: Evidential Currency.

That one is from Amit, via the Human Progress Report his team recently published.

Evidential currency is really just a fancy way of saying…

“skills pay the bills. prove you have em”

… but you can’t put that in a fancy report.

Like I do with any 50 page pdf, my first visit was to NotebookLM.

If you’re new to this newsletter, I talk about it often. It works like any other LLM, except instead of relying on general training data, i.e. all of the internet, it only uses the sources you feed it in that notebook.

You can have a conversation with your sources, and it then cites where it’s pulling that info from - those are the little numbers in the screenshots.

The report seems to be in favour of skills based hiring. From the people they talked to, many tend to believe that evaluating candidates based on evidence of skills is the right way to go.

• “evidence-based, market-relevant credentials are seen as valuable as traditional university degrees”

• “71% say that skills-based assessments help create a fairer job market”

Look. I am not shy about my bias. In last weeks edition, I wrote about how I would short higher ed if it were a stock.

But bias aside, I think it’s hard for anyone to argue that in general, traditional post-secondary is doing enough to help young people develop the skills they need to succeed today.

The respondents in this report tend to agree with me.

Main difference is they’re talking 2035, I’m talking 2025.

Not sure why we have to wait. Here’s a great data point to support my 2025 argument.

And a great clip you can should play for your students to demonstrate the importance of developing adaptability/lifelong learning as a critical skill in today’s world.

• Watch this 15 minute presentation from a meetup in NYC earlier this month. I summarize it below, but it’s worth a watch.

A big part of why I write this newsletter is to provide another perspective. So often in schools, we surround ourselves with other educators, or students who think similarly to us, read the same news, have the same biases, etc.

It’s important to burst those bubbles. Learning about what’s happening in industry today is a great way of doing that.

You can probably guess from the title what the recording is about.

Presentations are one thing.

Comments like this one below from a VP at a well known company are another. My intention is that sharing these helps people understand it’s real. Not just me talking.

For the role she was hiring for, I can guarantee she didn’t care about which school that person went to.

She did however want that sweet sweet evidential currency, in this case, with a specific focus on generative ai skills, and as a direct byproduct, curiosity.

Right now being that person that has strong experience with ai tools is enough to be a differentiator.

For most industries, that will soon shift to becoming a necessity.

• “As an employer, I don’t want to invest in you if you don’t invest in yourself first.”

More importantly - you don’t have control over whether your employer invests in you or not.

Imagine applying for a job and you tell me your last place of work didn’t upskill you sufficiently? That’s why you don’t have X, Y, or Z skill. That’s an immediate red flag that you didn’t take the initiative to figure it out for yourself.

That’s my personal perspective, but I know many others in hiring positions who would agree.

Students: don’t wait for someone to tell you what to learn, or what to build. It’s your life. Take control.

Educators: to the extent that you can, get your students in the habit of building portfolios, and reflecting on the skills they’re developing in the process.

If we continue to focus on credentials, institutions, and resumes alone, we’re setting them up for failure.

MINDSET OF THE WEEK
Progressive Overload

My old workout routine = adjustable dumbbells 💪 

New workout routine = carrying around a newborn calf 🐮 

Apply this concept to any skill, mindset, or muscle you’re looking to develop.

LIFE SKILL
Always Ask, Never Expect

What’s the worst that’s going to happen?

They say no.

What’s the best thing that could happen?

You won’t know, unless you ask. But it might just change your life.

CAREER ADVICE
Canadian Skill Imbalances

Buying Canadian made products is one way to support the country.

Another way is to help people develop in demand skills.

Read the full article here.

THIS IS COOL
Koru Hackathon

On January 22nd, I got this message, at 5pm from someone I don’t remember connecting with, telling me about an upcoming event.

It was a 5th anniversary party for Koru, and would feature 3 teams competing for some prizes as part of a 10 day hackathon in February.

The event sounded interesting, but not interesting enough to drive into Toronto for.

So I thought - why not compete in the hackathon? Koru is part of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, so the hackathon problem statements were actual problems that Ontario teachers face.

That’s my jam.

But applications to apply to be part of the hackathon were due on the 23rd - the next day - so I had to fire off some urgent WhatsApp messages to people who I know had an interest in education, and were more technical than me.

To my surprise, everyone I messaged agreed to join me on a two week part time hackathon that meant more responsibility for them outside of their 9-5.

We didn’t know what the problem statements would be specifically, or what the prizes were. We just knew we wanted to build something.

Our team was accepted, and off we went.

We’d spend the next two weeks talking to Ontario educators to figure out what we could build that would solve a legitimate problem for them.

We chose to tackle problem statement number 2.

It was an effort to make the process of teacher documentation easier.

We talked to a lot of educators along the way.

We learned in Ontario that every teacher across K-12 has to report on Learning Skills & Work Habits during every reporting cycle.

These are things like: Organization, Responsibility, Independent Work, etc.

But there isn’t really a great way of doing it.

So we built Obi.

Obi makes it easy to:

• capture observations in real time

• gives students the agency to participate

• provides a window into a students journey for families at home.

This image below is showing a snapshot view of Charlie’s documentations this term. The right hand side would be a feed of all the evidence. From here, I could drill down on a specific work habit for more insight, choose to give Charlie opportunities to develop his Organization rating, or generate my report card comments with the click of a button.

Paired with a slightly unconventional presentation demo (only team to do it without any slides, the judges liked what they had to see.

Out of 27 teams, we were invited to the final 3 to pitch in front of the +300 people were coming to the evening anniversary party that Koru was hosting.

We would be their entertainment.

And entertain them, we did.

Our team took home first place, bragging rights, and along with it, some Air Canada flight vouchers to look forward to.

I’m not sure where the product will go next, but I am sure I need to be part of another hackathon.

For 3 years at TKS I coached dozens of hackathon teams. Fun to be on the other side for a change.

BONUS
Tips for Applying to Stanford

Here’s a great clip from a recent You Do What!? episode that I will soon be adding to our Youtube channel.

Aaryan went to a public high school in the Ottawa area, then later Sudbury when his family moved.

He’s now at Stanford.

I asked him what advice current high schoolers interested in a similar path could apply in their pursuit of the Ivys.