Posted on: January 29, 2025                                                                                                  

Update: The Department of Labor has removed the guide, the Good Jobs Initiative's Skills - First Hiring Starter Kit, from its website.

The U.S. Department of Labor has published a guide to help promote the benefits of using skills-first hiring practices and to help show employers how to implement them. We’ve broken this down to help you learn more about this approach and to see if it could be applicable to your hiring practices.

What is skills-first hiring?

Skills-first hiring refers to the hiring or promotion of workers around skills, knowledge and abilities that workers can demonstrate they have, regardless of how or where they attained those skills.

These strategies are meant to recognize talent no matter how a worker got it, such as associate’s degrees, earn-and-learn registered apprenticeships, credentials or certificates, self-teaching, past experience, or any other way.

What types of workers could benefit from this hiring approach?

Examples of workers who could benefit from such strategies include:

• A restaurant assistant manager who handles bookkeeping despite no formal training.
• A high school student who taught themselves how to code to make their own video games and earned an Unreal Engine online certification.
• A former servicemember who managed people in the military and earned an associate’s degree in business management at a community college.
• A previously incarcerated person who earned a community college certificate in electrical systems in a prison skilling program.
• An individual with several uncompensated lived experiences, such as helping a family member’s small business or picking up skills through hobbies and interests.

What types of roles could align with a skills-first strategy?

The best roles for trying out this approach are ones that can be easily broken down into discrete skills and responsibilities, according to the guide. By contrast, the guide says that if a job wears many “hats,” or its responsibilities change often, it may be a poorer start for a skills-first strategy.

Conclusion

Explore the guide to see if it could align to your hiring and strategy for roles. The guide shares resources and best practices to help employers adopt skills-first hiring practices while meeting employment law requirements, including:

• Reviewing how employees work.
• Identifying a job’s skillsets.
• Evaluating a candidate’s skills.