We talk about skills-based hiring a lot—and the idea that your top talent should be evaluated based on their skills and abilities, not line items on a resume.

So why shouldn’t your internal mobility program be rooted in the same idea?

Skills-based hiring reaches beyond your external talent pool and into the core of your employee base as well. Ensuring you’re evaluating internal candidates fairly for lateral moves or promotions and making decisions that benefit individuals and teams as a whole is another piece to creating a positive hiring experience.

Below are three tips for incorporating a skills-based approach for internal mobility.

Combatting voluntary turnover

Did you know a third of employers are expecting higher turnover this year than last?

Learning how to engage your current employees in hopes of retaining them is critically important in an era when retention is top of mind.

Your employees want to feel respected, and ensuring there are fairer practices in place that promote people like them is critically important.

For the same reason, resume line items like alma maters and titles do little to predict success, the same factors hold no value when deciding on internal moves and promotions either. But remember that fairer internal mobility programs start with fairer hiring. And retention starts with hiring the right people for the right roles. Make sure you hire someone who is a good fit based upon more than what’s on a resume but rather the skills they possess.

Tech designed to evaluate skills

The HR tech space is crowded—there’s an app for this, a platform for that, and at the end of the day the latest and greatest can do little to create a cohesive experience for candidates or TA teams.

Where do you even start? We encourage teams to look for ethical vendors who offer automated solutions, engage consistently, and integrate with your ATS.

HireVue Human Potential Intelligence offers AI-driven solutions that are specially designed to evaluate skills and competencies

By leveraging structured interviews and assessments to measure key skills, teams can make smart hiring decisions backed by data and ensure all your candidates are evaluated the same. And with an assessment for any role at any level, teams can ensure all talent is evaluated equally and create more positive candidate experiences.

And when you start hiring the true top talent at the beginning, you can ensure you’re working with qualified employees for internal moves.

Assessing agility

HireVue offers a first-of-its-kind solution that measures an agile mindset. With millions of assessments, our IO Psychologists identified the critical competencies that align with agile leadership and success. This agile assessment model deploys a talent evaluation solution in a modern candidate experience that quickly assesses and measures 4 types of change:

People: Measures for problem-solving, adaptability, reasoning, visuospatial, working memory
Results: Measures for communication, leading and motivating others, agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability
Mental: Measures drive for results and initiative, leading and motivating others
Change: Measures for willingness to learn, openness to experience

It’s more important than ever to be prepared and find talent who can navigate complex situations, explore novel solutions, and help teams through challenging situations. Using HireVue’s assessments to measure an agile mindset gives organizations a robust understanding of a candidate’s and internal talent’s ability to adapt to change—helping you build tomorrow’s workforce today.

How Walmart boosted retention and internal mobility success

Walmart is at the top of the Fortune 100 list, so it comes as no surprise the magnitude of their global impact and hiring:

11,300 stores in 27 countries
2.2 million associates worldwide, including 1.5 million in the U.S.
Thousands of applicants a day

But Walmart’s hiring strategy isn’t just about filling roles, it’s about filling roles with people who will be there tomorrow. About 80% of their store managers are initially hired as hourly associates, and in 2019, Walmart promoted more than 215,000 of these associates to jobs with more responsibility and higher pay.

The key to their success? The custom HireVue Retail Associate Assessment. This Virtual Job Tryout® gives potential employees a detailed glimpse into what a day in the life of a Walmart Retail Associate looks like—giving candidates a clear idea of what they can expect and allowing them to decide if it’s really the fit for them.

As a result, Walmart has seen:

400,000 new hires in 4 months
100% candidates would recommend applying
95% completion rate

To measure the Retail Associate Assessment’s financial impact, Walmart conducted a retention predictor study with thousands of applicants who were hired. In the article, Futrell and Allen cite a multi-million return on investment by eliminating replacement costs from not hiring the lowest-scoring candidates.

Read more about Walmart’s Virtual Job Tryout® here.

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