4 Reasons To Embed Skills Mapping in Your Recruitment Software

Recruiting employees is time-consuming for your customers. It can take months to hire the right profile—at a considerable cost in terms of managers' and HR specialists’ time. Skills mapping is a strategic tool that makes it easier to identify and analyze the skills that recruiters, managers, and HR specialists should be looking for in applicants. Skills maps help optimize the recruitment process. Let’s look at the main benefits of skills mapping.

What is skills mapping?

A skills map lists the skills related to the occupations and families of occupations present within the organization. This skills inventory of available resources helps meet both the immediate and the future needs of the company in terms of recruitment and training.

Every person responsible for managing employees’ skills within the company benefits from skills mapping—from executive sponsors to HR teams to people managers. For best results, the jobs and skills map should cover all the company’s employees—not just managers and high-potential profiles.

How can skills mapping improve the recruitment process?

The skills map proves useful to the recruitment process in a number of ways. It enables your customers to identify the skills that are useful to the company, analyze them more objectively, and know where there are skills gaps. Here are four key ways skills mapping enables you to support your customers and improve the recruitment process. 

1. Identify the skills missing in the organization

It is not uncommon for companies to publish ads on job boards with a long list of demanding criteria: skills, experience, diplomas, etc. These vacancies are often advertised without a crucial step, wherein companies review the skills they have and the skills they need to compose the new job description.

The skills map enables your customers to clearly identify both the skills available internally and those that need to be hired or acquired through programs like upskilling. Mastering these elements enables recruitment professionals to better target their searches and avoid dedicating time to applicants who do not meet the minimum criteria established beforehand.

2. Analyze skills more objectively

By definition, interviews involve human contact. This always leaves room for biases both positive and negative, rooted in the interviewer’s personal value system. These biases can compromise the recruitment process, making it more likely that the best candidate is overlooked. As employers well know, “casting mistakes” can be costly. The resources allocated to the search, hiring, and training of an unsuited profile are lost forever.

The skills map enables the recruiters and managers to compare the skills desired and required with those of the applicants. The tool makes it easier to read and analyze profiles—and the resulting assessment is significantly more objective.

3. Improve interviews

Identifying the required skills for requisitions simplifies interview preparation. Recruiters can prioritize the skills they need to cover during the interview, focus directly on the most relevant questions, and adapt any tests intended for candidates accordingly. Additionally, objective matching of skills requirements and analyses for each requisition helps to reduce any personal bias within the interview process.

4. Identify available in-house resources

Skills mapping informs companies whether they can leverage internal mobility. Sometimes the profile most qualified for a position is already in the company. Considering these existing employees can be highly advantageous:

• Cut the acquisition costs of finding and hiring candidates. When moving talent within the organization, you can cut costs associated with the talent acquisition and onboarding stages.

• Decrease time to productivity. Employees already have valuable knowledge of the company’s business and specificities. This makes it much easier for them to take on their new duties.

Skills mapping is a task that is often postponed or feared by companies because it takes time. However, it is very useful for optimizing recruitment and facilitating internal mobility. Adding this capability to your recruitment software helps your customers streamline their hiring processes and strategies.

Embed skills mapping in your recruitment software

Visier Skills Intelligence APIs allow HR software vendors to integrate their preferred skills intelligence capabilities into their product suite to modernize recruitment, talent management, and learning tactics for their customers. Our skills engine consists of 3,300 standardized occupations and over 14,000 standardized skills across 27 industries in more than 100 languages. With APIs ranging from jobs and skills ontology, job standardization, skills extraction, and skills matching, plug and play based on your software needs. For more information, visit here.

On the Outsmart blog, we write about workforce-related topics like the top talent acquisition metrics your software should offer, how to add insights where they matter with contextual analytics, and how predictive people analytics helps businesses of all sizes thrive. We also report on trending topics like ESG and EU CSRD requirements and preparing for a recession, and advise on HR best practices like how to create a strategic compensation strategy, metrics every CHRO should track, and connecting people data to business data. But if you really want to know the bread and butter of Visier, read our post about the benefits of people analytics.