Beyond degrees: Embracing skills-based hiring models in 2025
Contributors:
Michelle Hainsworth
Managing Director, Skills Creation, AMS
Sailesh Hota
Practice Director, Everest Group
Jim Sykes
Chief Operation Officer, AMS
Shlomo Weiss
Chief Operating Officer, Gloat
A new AI-fueled future of work will require unique and up-to-the minute skills for new and current employees.
From deep data analysis to emotional intelligence, AMS can empower your TA team to find candidates with the skills your workforce needs for years to come.
Talent acquisition leaders are facing a new landscape of machine learning, a chaotic job market and looming fiscal challenges, their mission remains the same: Find candidates with the right skills for the open positions inside forward-thinking organizations.
The need for skilled workers has never been more insatiable but talent leaders are asking themselves the same questions in this climate: What are the skills that organizations need now and what skills will they need in five years’ time? In this article, we will explore the most urgently needed skills, what capabilities and expertise will be needed in the next two to three years and how AMS can help.
Mastering skills remains top of mind for talent acquisition teams despite being a hot topic for nearly a decade. According to Jim Sykes, Chief Operating Officer for AMS, the “vast majority” of organizations are considering how they can adapt to a skills-led hiring framework as other firms are still lagging behind in these efforts.
“"Whilst the vast majority of talent professionals are considering how they're addressing the skills gap in their candidate pools, very few have started on that journey and very few would say that they are necessarily leading the way to date. It's very much a journey for most organizations,"
says Jim Sykes, Chief Operating Officer for AMS.
Why the foot dragging on skills? In short, measuring and assessing technical and human skills remains a hugely complex challenge.
Sykes gives insight into how talent acquisition leaders are thinking about skills. “If you take the broadest aspirations that organizations have, which is how do we come up with a methodology through which we can hire, train, develop, progress and redeploy talent for existing roles and future roles, that is a broad and challenging mission. Most organizations are struggling to define what it means for them and how they go about starting this skills journey,” he says. Sykes adds that while there’s little shortage of software vendors that claim to offer a skills solution for talent acquisition professionals, many software providers only help with one element of that skills-hiring challenge as opposed to all elements of that challenge.
Global research firm Everest Group agrees that the future of the talent economy is skills-based. That said, amid the skills hype, HR, TA, and business leaders often overlook the fact that transitioning to a skills-based organization is a marathon, not a sprint.
“Success starts with building enterprise-wide skill intelligence and embedding those insights into core talent decisions. To achieve meaningful, long-term outcomes, leaders must embrace a sustainable execution roadmap that ensures consistency and impact over time,”
says Sailesh Hota, Practice Director for Everest Group.
Skills Creation, formally known as TalentLab, is a service where AMS professionals find and vet candidates who have aptitude or adjacent skills to the open role, and they then train or reskill those individuals to place them in jobs requiring critical skills that weren’t readily available in the market.
“They’ll look at people who haven’t yet got the skills, but have aptitude and motivation to develop the necessary skills, whether they are experienced individuals, or those starting out in their career journey, AMS Skills Creation invest in those individuals to help them into otherwise unattainable roles, bridging the gap and helping our clients to fill their critical skills,”
says Michelle Hainsworth, Managing Director of AMS Skills Creation.
Skills Creation looks for those skills that are either difficult to fill because there isn't enough talent in the external market, the location might not have a specifically skilled population or there’s a lack of diversity in those particular roles. “Skills Creation also identifies people who have aptitude, and we train them and we build those skills,” says Hainsworth.
Inside the hot tech skills
What skills will your organization and your talent teams need in the coming years? Although there are some obvious answers, the reason they will be vital may be surprising.
AI. Right now, AI can help more broadly than most talent acquisition professionals would realize, says Sykes. At the moment, teams are using generative AI in relatively tactical and non-disruptive use cases for more transactional and mundane tasks such as scheduling interviews, drafting questions, providing transcripts of candidate interviews, and optimizing job descriptions and job adverts. But AI is capable of doing far more today and will be capable of doing significantly more at the end of this year, let alone the end of 2026. Talent leaders need to have a strategy for how they will adopt AI in recruiting, and they need to be focused as a leader on bottom-up and top-down adoption of this new tool.
Sykes explains that the bottom-up use of AI consists of tactical use cases in which recruiters rely on widely-available tools such as ChatGPT to enable them to be better at their jobs. One of the earliest use cases AMS had with AI was utilizing generative AI to refine emails that clients would send to prospective candidates via LinkedIn. Sources doing that on their own initiative improved their InMail hit rates. “It's a great example of a bottom-up innovation that is simple to do and relies on publicly available and zero cost Chat GPT licenses for transformational tasks,” says Sykes.
Data analysis: Organizations often receive thousands of resumes and job applications. But can teams efficiently sift through this vast amount of data to identify the right candidates? For example, your next hire might currently work at a competitor or even within your own organization. Data analysis will be essential in uncovering these hidden talent pools.
“Data is fundamental to everything we do today,” says Hainsworth. “In the world of AI, we have access to unprecedented amounts of information, but we need to interpret that data correctly to drive meaningful outcomes. Without analyzing the data and asking the ‘so what,’ we won’t know which actions to take or which direction to pursue. So we should be using data deliberately to inform targeted hiring strategies and select the right candidates.”
“It's important to consider what types of roles we’ve been hiring for and how those trends are shifting,” Hainsworth explains.
“By aggregating data across all our clients, we can identify trends, gaps in demand versus supply, and emerging skill shortages. This insight helps us understand the evolving skill sets needed and where organizations should focus their reskilling efforts, now as well as in the medium term.”
To capitalize on these opportunities, HR teams will need training in data analysis skills. “The more organizations invest in developing their people’s analytical capabilities, the higher the likelihood that they’ll retain top talent,” Hainsworth emphasizes.
Blockchain: This isn't only for crypto bros who are day trading on their smartphones. Your talent team will need to use this cutting-edge technology which is basically, a transparent “digital notebook of transactions" that people can view but not erase or edit old pages. Some proponents believe that it can offer instant verification of candidates and help decentralize talent pools. While not in widespread use, more ambitious recruiters could rely on blockchain for filling roles.
Along with security, users of blockchain won’t need to rely on third-party AI tools or large language models to achieve results. Sykes says that while blockchain will not change the nature of sourcing candidates, it will improve the utilization of AI in the hiring process and help TA teams to ask questions using normal everyday language.
Internal skills marketplace. One skills survey found that employees reported having a mere eight skills related to their profession when they actually possessed more than 20. This is why an internal skills marketplace is more critical than ever. Sadly, an established and properly outfitted internal marketplace is still a rarity in even the most forward-thinking organizations.
“At the root of all of this, we have to ask why we are focusing on this move towards skills? It's because there are profound shortages of talent and skills in the world today, and that problem is only going to be exasperated with declining population rates,” says Sykes. “Also, because the changing nature of skills means that you're going to hire someone for a sales role today, and within five years, 40% of the skills that we need them to have will be different. That's why we're going on this journey.”
It’s do or die, according to Sykes. “If we're not nurturing those skills when someone's joined the organization and we're not able to rehire them internally with the right skills, then we're failing,” he says.
The technology for an internal skills marketplace requires maintenance, buy-in from leaders, and plenty of information, advises Hainsworth. And add this to the hiring manager’s frustrations with the TA process. “So many times I hear it's easier to leave and get another job than it is to find a job internally because managers are hanging onto their resource,” she says.
Don't forget critical human skills
Assessing skills. Talent teams will need even more help in assessing the skills that a candidate possesses and the role requires. AMS’s Sykes believes that AI will be indispensable in matching the right skilled candidates to the job opening.
And as job roles and position requirements evolve, be honest, are you using the same skills you had at your first job? It also helps determine if your candidate has the mental flexibility to adapt and mature with their new role. This is where AI comes in again.
“We can assess for that,” says Sykes. “If you were a very forward-thinking talent leader, I suggest that you start asking how do I ensure that every single person I hire has a high level of cognitive dexterity, so that as my organization goes through increasing amounts of change, my employees go on the journey.”
Talent leaders need to ask not only if the candidate possesses the right skills but are open to game changers such as AI and other disruptive innovations as well as external factors that have an impact. “If we're skills focused, we must be able to assess those skills and measure such attributes as cognitive dexterity and change readiness,” says Sykes.
Emotional intelligence. Hot on the heels of technological and business skills, talent teams must be prepared to measure so-called EQ or interpersonal skills, especially for leadership roles. While it’s easier to test for hard skills such as coding and specific business tasks, soft skills are even more vital in an AI-powered workplace.
“Within the field of talent acquisition, we are automating the more transactional parts of people’s roles, and we want them to be able to take the time they're saving and reinvest that time in the candidate experience. They can also reinvest that time in advising hiring managers,” says Sykes.
This means that the team’s ability to have a convincing and realistic conversation with hiring managers will also require what Sykes calls “psychometric assessments.” He adds that this will become an increasingly important aspect of any business.
Adaptability & resilience. Change is as constant as it is difficult to navigate in the workplace so measuring a candidate’s ability to adapt and thrive is more important than ever. Can your teams adapt as well or are they stuck in the past?
Sykes points to an AMS client who needed specific skills for color matching at a cosmetics company. They eventually hired an individual from the automotive industry where color matching is a vital skill. “They found that they could successfully hire people from the automotive industry to work in this wildly different industry because skills are a great enabler,” he says.
Also, looking for skills from different business sectors could save employees from burnout by giving them a fresh start with the skills they already possess. “It's not just another car shop. They can actually work someplace different and learn something new,” he says.
Gig & project-based hiring. Not every employee wants to be a company person. Finding and nurturing skilled workers will be a greater challenge in the future as companies look to their budgets when hiring with greater scrutiny. Contingent workers also provide flexibility for businesses which allows workers to showcase their skills before making a full-time commitment, however Hainsworth believes we still have some work to do to overcome the challenges of thinking about talent more holistically, rather than in traditional category silo’s. When we think about talent holistically, skills become the common currency, and the organisations that are focussing on what candidates can do and learn are accelerating the shift to a skills based labour market, where ongoing active learning and adaptability to AI are key.
“Well, AI can help with everything,” she says. She adds that despite projections showing the continued rise in project-based hiring, talent teams still struggle to think about talent holistically.
“If I'm a hiring manager and I need to hire someone, the starting point for that process is either I have to ask for a contractor or ask for permission to hire someone on a permanent basis,” she says. “The fact that that’s the trigger point for getting any support means that no one is going to holistically look at my requirements and say, these are the skills that you're looking for.”
In the near future, AI will assess the responsibilities and the tasks in a better, smarter and more efficient way. AI will be able to prioritize these needs for the best source of talent whether it is a permanent hire or a freelance worker. “Before we even get to the mechanics of how do you find that person, AI is assessing the requirement and triaging that need by the end of the next year, without a doubt,” says Sykes.
Conclusion: Skills have the final say
Organizations that continue to struggle with their skills hiring journey should not lose hope. AMS, and its Skills Creation, can help bring candidates with the right skills with practical experience, often from diverse backgrounds, to help them achieve success.
The future of work isn’t just about filling roles—it’s about unlocking the full potential of every individual through a skills-first approach, according to Shlomo Weiss, COO at Gloat. AI is transforming how TA leaders assess, match, and develop talent, enabling organizations to build more dynamic and resilient workforces.
“Companies that embrace this shift—leveraging AI, skills intelligence, and agile talent models—won’t just future-proof their workforce,” says Weiss.
“They’ll also drive measurable business outcomes, from increasing productivity and reducing costs to mitigating workforce risks and staying ahead in an evolving market."
“Every organization is in a different place, but most forward-thinking CHROs are on that journey thinking about the future and in particular because the value of a business is so dependent on the quality of people." says Hainsworth. "If it improves the bottom line and you get the best talent, your business will grow exponentially.”
written by Phil Albinus in partnership with the Catalyst Editorial Board.
With contribution from:
Michelle Hainsworth
Managing Director, Skills Creation, AMS
Sailesh Hota
Practice Director, Everest Group
Jim Sykes
Chief Operation Officer, AMS
Shlomo Weiss
Chief Operating Officer, Gloat
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