Candidate Screening Criteria and Transferable Skills

Organizations, be it manufacturing or service delivery, have open positions that are hard to fill due to the low availability of candidates that exactly fit the specifications of the hiring manager. In conformance to a seemingly natural inverse law, the more specific the requirements are, the less candidates there are that perfectly meet those specifications. The specificity of requirements exists for a reason. The manager, so focused on maintaining the organization's operational excellence, considers any qualifications deviating from personal norm to most likely pull performance down. As criteria equivalence is integrated in the development of the target candidate profile with transferable skills, the supply of candidates for the position expands.

The savvy recruiter presented with such scarcity will begin to recognize candidates with equivalent or transferable skills. For example, the organization maybe using a chemical production control software, A. The requirement for an engineer qualified with software A is obvious when production capacity and product quality is immediately at risk. With formal on-the-job training, an engineer with hands-on experience with generic production control software, B, will likely do as well. In the same token, a social worker that has lengthy experience in case management of developmentally disabled children can function well as a child protection social worker.

The recruiter begins the process of including transferable skills into the hiring manager’s search specifications by converting them into prospective candidate search criteria. The manager’s requirements are reconciled with the organization's manpower plan, hiring policies as well as defined recruiting and on-boarding processes. The recruiter communicates the equivalence between a candidate exactly fitting specifications and another candidate with equivalent academic training, experience and work management attributes. The ideal discussion is similar to the one that takes place when the recruiter has both recruiting and operational backgrounds. Equivalent criteria may include the trade-offs between current staffing need and the longer term human resources plan as well as the degree of diversity in the workplace. Making the search criteria an organic template also adds to its acceptability. Continual refinement is facilitated by scaling all search criterion and reviewing the quantified criterion during the six-month and twelve month anniversary from the new employee’s hiring date.

By Mgmtlaboratory.com Staff, 2018