July 12, 2024
Skills-based hiring holds promise for millions of young adults who lack the credentials most employers still look for in hiring entry-level talent. With the Young Adult Talent Development Network, JFF highlights five actionable skills-based hiring strategies that youth-serving institutions can implement with employers.
Obtaining a degree is still a valid way of gaining skills, but too often, young adults without degrees are not given the opportunity to talk about their skills and speak directly to how they would apply them on the job. At a recent convening, the Young Adult Talent Development Network (YATDN), a network of 50-plus organizations working to train and place young adults into quality jobs, expressed deep frustration with many employers who still, to this day, continue to overlook skills and show preference for pedigree and credentials. This shuts many young adults out of opportunities for advancement.
Who are these young adults? A 2023 report from Measure of America offers a snapshot: They are estimated to be about 5 million who face multiple barriers to advancement, including insufficient income for basic needs and disconnection from school and work. They are mostly Black, Native American, and Latine. They represent an untapped asset in our country and economy not just because of their age, but also because they have learned and applied skills such as resilience, persistence, empathy, creativity, adaptability, and leadership; skills that any employer will tell you that they value and look for in any potential hire.
Despite the challenges, network members are not giving up on their effort to change the mindsets that will yield quality jobs for these young people. They are determined to continue pushing to change employers’ mindsets and behaviors by advocating for broader adoption of skills-first hiring and sharing tools and best practices with their partners. This includes strategic engagement and relationship building and return on investment tools that prove employers can minimize hiring costs and access vetted, reliable, and well-trained young talent by partnering with network members on talent acquisition. These skills-first partnerships can improve retention and allow young adults to succeed on day one of their job by aligning their skills to what is truly required for a role.
One promising development is that many leading national employers, including Walmart, are removing degree requirements and prioritizing skills, experiences, and hard work for their associates at all levels. This is an important step as Walmart’s reach and influence, along with the lessons it learns from implementing skills-based hiring, will undoubtedly draw attention from many more employers around the country. At the end of the day, using skills-first hiring helps employers of all sizes and industries create pathways for success for their employees. We at Jobs for the Future (JFF) and the YATDN, whose members collectively reach one million young adults across the country, are excited about pathways for young adults that begin with an acknowledgment and validation of their skills, and the promise of opportunities for advancement through continuous learning and skill development.
Here are five next steps, drawn from the conversation between JFF and members of the network, to embark on if you are a community-based or youth advocacy organization interested in boosting skills-first approaches. These strategies resonated with network members and deserve further attention from organizations that serve young adults, their employer partners, advocates, and policymakers as we collectively work to make skills-based hiring truly work for the most vulnerable young adults:
To create lasting opportunities for youth and young adults, we need to propel a mindset shift whereby employers celebrate the skills and contributions of their young employees, as opposed to lamenting the lack of talent available for hire. To facilitate this shift, create narrative and storytelling highlighting young adults as skilled, able, excited, and ready to work. Enable young adults to identify and highlight the skills they’ve gained during school, work, volunteering, and other life experiences. Additionally, create space to validate skills that might be hard to name or measure but have come from the lived experience of overcoming barriers, including leadership, empathy, resilience, and interpersonal skills. Use your curriculum to emphasize and reinforce these skills in the young adults you work with, confirming that these skills can indeed translate to skills needed on the job, and they can highlight these assets on their resumes and during interviews. Share these stories with your community and employer partners and encourage them to tell success stories that feature skills-first hiring.
Apprenticeship is inherently a skills-first hiring approach that requires partnership with training institutions and investment from employers. Take inspiration from the recruitment, partnership, and workforce readiness strategies of high-quality youth apprenticeship programs. Just as youth apprenticeship can be a pathway to quality jobs for young people ages 16 to 24 who aren’t in school and aren’t working (sometimes referred to as “opportunity youth”), skills-first approaches can offer confidence-boosting and affirming career exploration and employment experiences.
Many tools can help facilitate the adoption of skills-first hiring among your staff, employer partners, and young adults themselves.
The Skillitizer: A Skills-Based Job Posting Generator for Employers
Skills-Based Sourcing and Hiring Playbook
Use your interest, learning, and engagement in skills-first approaches as an opportunity to deepen your relationships with your employer partners. Share the impressive return on investment statistics on the benefits of skills-first hiring with your partners, including increased retention and job performance among individuals hired for skills rather than degrees. For youth-serving programs, as you build your expertise in skills-first approaches, share your knowledge with your partners. In a survey conducted by the Rework America Alliance, employers cited sourcing, validating skills, and scaling skills-based practices as common challenges in their implementation of skills-based hiring and advancement. Employers interested in addressing these challenges are ripe for collaboration and learning with community-based organizations that are experienced in assessment, program development, and scaling.
Share your challenges and successes with other organizations working to break down barriers for youth and young adults. Find networks, such as the YATDN, that offer community and support for implementing innovative skills-first hiring approaches. JFF is working, together with its partners, toward an ambitious North Star: by 2033, 75 million people who face systemic barriers to advancement will work in quality jobs. We believe the adoption of skills-first approaches will be a key driver toward achieving this goal and can be especially impactful for young adults.
Adopting a skills-first talent management strategy allows employers to emphasize young adults’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, regardless of whether or not those jobseekers have obtained a four-year degree. By removing the traditional view of degree attainment as a proxy for skills, employers expand their pool of potential applicants and fill open roles more quickly. In embracing the mindset that a lack of credential does not indicate a lack of skills, employers provide young adults an opportunity to demonstrate that they are a good fit for open positions. Employers who practice skills-first hiring are often interested in demonstrating nimble, worker-centered ways to attract, select, and retain quality talent. Youth-serving community-based organizations have an opportunity to partner with these forward-thinking employers, to lend the CBO vantage point and experience and help shape skills-first approaches that effectively serve young adult populations who face barriers.
We invite you to join us as we invest in and learn from collaborations that prove that youth and young adults belong at, and can thrive in, quality jobs.
Interested in learning more about the Young Adult Talent Development Network?
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“Obtaining a degree is still a valid way of gaining skills, but too often, young adults without degrees are not given the opportunity to talk about their skills and speak directly to how they would apply them on the job.”
Employers who practice skills-first hiring are often interested in demonstrating nimble, worker-centered ways to attract, select, and retain quality talent. Youth-serving community-based organizations have an opportunity to partner with these forward-thinking employers, to lend the CBO vantage point and experience and help shape skills-first approaches that effectively serve young adult populations who face barriers.
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