Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
To all the HR Managers out there! How was your job-hunting experience last year? Taxing? Stressful? Frustrating? Well, the kind of skill gap in the employment sector we’re seeing today are likely adjectives that describe your hiring experience.
Disruptive technologies like AI have entered the scene, and the skill gap only increases every year. This has only served to give more headaches to HR managers everywhere. The only way out of this misery is to develop a skill taxonomy for each job role in your organization.
A note on the rising skill gap across industries
The Workplace Learning Report 2023 sheds light on the skill status prevalent in the industry. It says that the skill gap in the job market has widened by 25% since 2015. This gap is not focused on any particular industry.
It’s more of a universal phenomenon. School and university education falls terribly short of delivering job-oriented skills.
It doesn’t equip candidates with actual actionable knowledge they can use to thrive in the job market. And even if it does, they aren’t always able to get the match they’re looking for on online job portals.
Similar is the case with HR managers whose main job is to hire the right person who fits the designated role. If you’re an HR yourself, you can relate to the endless hours you’ve spent on
LinkedIn and other job portals are useful for looking for the right candidate. And if you don’t employ a skill taxonomy, your hiring job is only going to be all the more difficult.
So, let’s discuss this term and see if there’s any skill management software that could help you hire better people.
What is skill taxonomy?
To find a lasting solution to the problem mentioned above, the HR managers need to do two things:
First, they need to identify specific skills for a particular job role and communicate them effectively in the job description segment.
Second, they need to find people who possess these particular skills and hire them.
But this is easier said than done and only possible without errors with the help of skill taxonomy. The latter is an inventory of skills for a particular industry and job role.
For example, the skills for a data analyst role would mean the candidate has to be proficient in tools like Excel, Power BI, and SQL. Ideally, he or she would also benefit from Python coding experience.
Making a skill inventory for specific roles like the one mentioned above is easy. It consists of knowledge of a particular technology or software tool.
But what if the skills needed are diverse? For example, a sales, marketing, or advertising job. The ideal candidate would be one who has excellent communication skills, persuasive abilities, and copywriting and design experience.
Finding the right candidate becomes difficult in such cases. However, when you have skill management software in place, it allows you to navigate better in vague territory. It helps you find candidates with diverse skills and figure out a role more suitable to them.
How can HR managers use skill taxonomy to hire the right people?
It may seem like a fancy term but skill taxonomy is extremely useful in scoping the right profile. It has deep implications for an organization’s growth and productivity. When you find the right employees for your organization, it thrives and vice versa. So here’s how you put skill taxonomy to good use and hire the perfect candidate:
Catalog the necessary skills
Your first order of business should be to categorize the skills that are needed in your organization. There are two kinds of necessary skills.
Hard skills: This means technical and tangible skills like the knowledge of coding, analysis, and design tools. Beyond the realm of the services industry, it means the skills to operate machines and physical tools to create a product. Hard skills could be anything from carpentry and masonry to Java, Python, and R programming.
Soft skills: These are more nuanced skills that deal with language, communication, and presentation. It includes many intangible aspects like the skill of persuasion and negotiation.
The job of an HR manager is to know which skill is needed in which role. Cataloging these skills helps to distinguish the right fit for a particular job role.
Make skill clusters
There are many skills that are organically related to one another and fall under the same category. It is important to group them in different skill clusters to avoid confusion and make better skill assessments.
For example, teamwork is a broad skill category and includes things like conflict resolution and collaboration. Similarly, sales encompasses lead generation, clear communication, and customer service. Making skill clusters like this helps you find candidates that tick all the right boxes.
Key Takeaway
Skill taxonomy is crucial in finding the right candidate that fits a job role in the industry perfectly well. It involves selecting various skill categories and organizing the related skills into clusters. This could be done with skill management software and narrow your search down. This will eventually lead to a better and more effective hiring process.
