The Hiring Blind Spot: When Skills Are Right, but the Bar Is Wrong

Unfilled positions or unfit hires?

You hire someone who seems like a solid fit for a role, but they are struggling to perform well. Or maybe you have an open role where you have clearly identified the skills important to the job, but you are not able to find anyone who seems to meet the bar, so the position goes unfilled.

While these may seem like two different challenges, the underlying cause could be the same: not considering both skill importance and skill proficiency.

Importance tells you what matters, not how much

When determining what is needed for being successful in a job role, organizations often think in terms of skills. Typically, and appropriately, consideration first goes to what skills are important in carrying out the role requirements. If an important skill is left off the list of requirements, then new hires who have all the qualifications listed in the requirements may be missing a skill critical to success on the job.

For example, the posting for a project manager may cover skills around scheduling, budgeting, and using planning tools, but beyond these technical skills, a project manager needs to be able to pick up on behaviors and responses of project team members that may indicate a person is overloaded and at risk of missing a key deadline. Without the skill of Understands Others, they may manage the plan perfectly while missing the human signals that predict where the plan is about to break.

A job analysis based on a skills model such as SHL’s Universal Competency Framework (UCF) is instrumental in capturing all the skills that are important to a job. Models like the UCF are helpful as they standardize skill definitions across job roles and situations.

For example, let’s define Understands Others as “Observes and analyzes behavior to understand others' reactions and perspectives.” Two jobs that seem very different might both require this skill. Security personnel in a large retail store may be required to identify suspicious behavior which might be a precursor to criminal activity within the store. In the same store a retail salesperson may be required to understand when a customer wants assistance and when they want to be left alone. So, Understands Others would be an important skill for both the security personnel and for the retail salesperson as it supports behaviors required of them every day. But is this really the same requirement for each job?

Proficiency levels, not job levels, set the bar

While not including an important skill in the job requirement can lead to unqualified hires, defaulting to the highest proficiency requirement for all jobs where a skill is important can lead to qualified candidates not being hired. And setting it too low undercuts the point of calling the skill important in the first place — unqualified candidates can slip through anyway.

When we think about the roles of security personnel and retail salespeople, we intuitively understand that the nuances and complexity of the behaviors associated with understanding others are different for each role. But this difference is not captured by an importance rating of the skill. This is where proficiency levels come into play. Proficiency levels capture how complex or nuanced a skill's application needs to be, not just whether the skill matters. 

For the retail salesperson, the required behavior might simply be noticing when a customer is struggling to find an item. This is a direct read on a straightforward situation. Security personnel may need to anticipate how a disruptive person is likely to react before intervening. This is a harder, more subtle judgment call. Same skill, same importance rating, but a very different bar to clear.

To help organizations arrive at the appropriate proficiency level for a job, SHL has defined three proficiency levels for each of the 96 skills in the UCF. The use of a model like the UCF can help organizations avoid the common problem of confusing job levels with proficiency levels. It is not necessarily true that higher level positions always require a higher proficiency level.

For example, the skill Makes Quick Decisions could be required both for a financial controller position at a hospital and for a paramedic. The controller may need a level two proficiency involving making quick decisions that take significant effort to reverse, The paramedic who is regularly administering aid to save lives at accidents may require a level three proficiency, underlining the more serious and irreversible consequences that bad decisions could result in.

Two questions, one better hire

Organizations need to be deliberate in how they use proficiency levels. Generally multiple skills are needed to define the requirements for a job, so hiring decisions are usually informed by composite scores across multiple skills that indicate overall how a person compares to others on the required skill set.

Assessments of proficiency levels are well suited for development and training situations and can also be useful when comparing individuals who have similar scores on skill composites, by showing differences in specific skills that may be important for the role or assignment. Assessments such as SHL’s Global Skills Assessment (GSA) can be provide an estimate of an individual’s proficiency level in those skills that are deemed important, adding a crucial extra layer into determining if a candidate is the right fit for the role.

Going back to that struggling new hire, or that role sitting open for months, the problem was not that skills weren’t considered, the challenges arose because importance and proficiency got treated as one question instead of two. Getting them both right helps get the right people into the right roles and sets them and the company up for success.

See how SHL can help you measure the most important skills and the right proficiency for those skills with our Global Skills Assessment that can measure 96 behavioral skills measured in 15 minutes.