EP 153: Skill-based hiring and AI's role in evolving talent acquisition with Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse

So I guess let's just start with skill-based hiring.

You mentioned that this is something that's top of mind for a lot of people right now.

Could you... provide, maybe like we'll just start with a definition of skill-based hiring and then we could just riff back and forth on that for a little

bit.

Yeah, great question because it's one of those jargon words that people throw around and what do you really mean by it? And are we doing it or is it the future or whatever? The way I think about it is very simple.

It's hiring people based on your assessment of their capabilities, as opposed to based on a set of qualifications or on maybe like a degree or a college that they've gone to or a place that they've worked, which is the traditional look at their resume.

And we want to hire people from quote, good companies or from quote, good universities.

And I think people have started to wake up to the idea that Not everyone who worked at Facebook is the same.

Not everyone who is awesome at the skills you need for the job went to an Ivy League university.

And so if you're going to hire the best people for your company, you need to think about how do you assess what those skills really are? And then how do you separate that out from what's on their background, which may or may not reflect that perfectly at all.

Yeah.

And so when you talk about how to assess the skills that they have, right, the transferable skills, is there a specific method that you recommend to customers in terms of a cover? Is it as simple as just like jotting down a list of different things that they're doing in their current role and then trying to find match different parallels, stuff like that? I mean,

Yeah, look, at a high level, it's about assessment.

And it's about identifying, like you say, here are the skills that we need in this role.

And here are the different assessments we're going to run to identify who has those skills and to rate them on those skills.

Obviously, depending on what the skill is, you're going to use a different technique.

If you're looking for a programmer versus if you're looking for an accountant versus if you're looking for a delivery driver, you're going to do a different assessment.

Obviously, but the methodology, the approach is the same, which is like, what are those key skills that you need? And then match up the right assessment to it all.

I think the great opportunities that you have are, number one, you can attract a much broader and more diverse group of talent for the same roles.

because you're not fishing in the same pond as everyone else.

Number two is you can find new career paths for people within your organization, as opposed to having to take on the cost, expense, and risk of going outside.

Because you might have people in your, for example, at Greenhouse, in our SDR department, our kind of entry-level sales roles, that have gone on to roles in programming and software development and QA and customer service and everything.

other areas, because you don't just look at what job title they've had, but you can look at what the skills are that they bring to the table.

And so I think it gives you a number of advantages, but it takes some doing and it takes some, it takes really first and foremost, an intentionality and a commitment on the part of the organization that you're going to look past the headlines on the resume, and you're going to get over your hangups about certain companies and certain schools, and you're going to get on with finding the right people for the job.

Yeah, and I think also probably some of it comes down to trying to analyze which roles it makes more sense to do this with.