“Can’t find talent, hire or recruit candidates with valuable transferrable skills!”  Identifying and hiring individuals who have transferrable skills sounds like a great idea and seems like it would be a great strategy. After all, everyone brings life experience and both hard and soft skills to the table.  It’s just a matter of identifying how those skills could work for you, right?

The term “transferable skills” is an over-discussed and under-utilized asset in most interviewing and hiring processes.  Everyone agrees transferable skills are valuable and the solution to many hiring issues, but few leaders have learned how to identify them.

The reality is that most recruiters are under extreme pressure to fill your open job orders, contracts, or temp assignments and do not have the bandwidth, or time to consider how transferrable skills could impact their ability to fill this business with top talent. The other side of this equation are candidates who are unaware of how to showcase their transferrable skills and abilities through their resume, CV, or LinkedIn Profile.

If you’re serious about being open to hiring employees with transferable skills internally or to fill more or your open business, listed below are pros and cons to consider.

PRO

Recruiters are often the first to identify the benefits of hiring candidates with transferrable skills

CON

Without the buy-in of 100% of the individuals involved in the hiring process, qualified candidates with transferrable skills will be screened out

SOLUTION

Set up meetings between your recruiters and hiring managers to explain how they will benefit by embracing transferrable soft skills.  

• Larger Candidate Pool
• Candidate will become engaged and retained 

• Learning new industry | profession
• Professional development
• Increase marketability
• Understand performance objectives

PRO

Every candidate has transferrable talents and abilities (hard and soft skills) that can be utilized in many different jobs and career paths

CON

While hard skills are easy to identify and qualify, there is no formal classification system to grade proficiency levels of soft skills

SOLUTION

Quantify hard and soft skills on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the highest

PRO

Removes the importance and focus of specific job titles

CON

Job titles vary greatly from industry to industry which can be misleading

SOLUTION

Your recruiting and sales team should break down the job to identify core hard and soft skills needed to perform the job and achieve performance objectives.

PRO

Transferrable skills can be identified by utilizing assessment tools

CON

Assessment tools are a cost factor and can delay the hiring decision

SOLUTION

Identify assessment tools that can identify both soft and hard skills.  Practical skill assessment tests are the most effective for hard skills.  Skill assessment tests also allow candidates to demonstrate they can perform specific tasks.

Personality assessments are excellent for identifying soft skills.  We have utilized the DiSC assessment tool for years when hiring recruiters.  We have proven that individuals who score a high “I” influencer, have become our most successful team members.  Contact us at support@staffingandrecruiting.com for additional information

PRO

Veterans have incredible transferrable skills that would benefit your company

CON

It takes time to understand transferrable skills, but if hiring military is part of your company culture and core values, it is well worth the time.

SOLUTION

There are great tools that translate codes from the Military into skills and responsibilities in the private sector.  Bookmark these tools to understand how military experience translates into transferrable skills you can utilize.

Some examples of the resources include Military Skills Translator (military.com), Military Skills Translator (VA.gov), Military to Civilian Occupation Translator (careeronestop.com) or Crosswalk that translates codes from military into skills and responsibilities.

Now that you understand the benefits of teaching your sales and recruiting team how to identify transferable skills, it’s time to have this discussion with your hiring managers.  To show the relevance of this topic, I taped two courses for LinkedIn Learning in my home the week after Labor Day.  One course is addressing the value of transferrable skills.  If your clients do not embrace transferable skills, suggest they review this course, (November release date) to also show them how these candidates are more likely to be engaged and retained employees.