Skills Tell You "Can." Not "Will."

Claire Monroe

Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, there's one hiring trend that almost everyone agrees is progress: skills-based hiring. Stop screening on degrees and job titles, start testing what people can actually do. In NACE's Job Outlook 2026 survey, seventy percent of employers said they use skills-based hiring for new graduates, up from sixty-five percent the year before. So, good news? It is. A validated behavioral assessment looks at how someone tends to operate under the kind of pressure the role brings. And the most useful benchmark is your own top performers in that seat, so you’re not asking whether someone is impressive in general. You’re asking whether they operate the way your best people do. But it doesn’t replace your skills tests or your interviews. It answers the one question they were never built to answer. And it’s one structured input, never the sole basis for a hire.

Edwin Carrington

It is good news, Claire, and I want to say that clearly before I complicate it. Testing what someone can actually do is far better than assuming it from a diploma or a famous company name on an application. But a skills test answers one question. Can this person do the work? It was never designed to answer the second question, which usually matters more. Will they?

Claire Monroe

Before we get to that, I have to push back on the good news a little. Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute looked at whether companies that announced skills-based hiring actually changed who they hired. Their 2024 report found that in 2023, the changes affected fewer than one in seven hundred hires. Lots of announcements. Very little change in practice.

Edwin Carrington

That's an important correction, and it's a pattern we see with every hiring trend. The press release moves faster than the process. But let's assume a company does it properly. It removes the degree filter, it builds a solid work sample, and it tests every candidate fairly. It's still only seeing part of the picture.

Claire Monroe

Which part is it missing?

Edwin Carrington

Think about the conditions of a skills test. The candidate is prepared, motivated, rested, and focused on one task for an hour. That tells you what they can do on their best day. The job isn't their best day. The job is month nine, when the client is difficult, the deadline moved, the manager is distracted, and nobody is watching. What someone can do and what they will do under that kind of pressure are two different measurements.

Claire Monroe

There's data on where new hires actually fail. Mark Murphy and Leadership IQ surveyed more than five thousand hiring managers across three hundred twelve organizations, who together had hired more than twenty thousand people. Forty-six percent of those new hires were considered failures within eighteen months. And when the managers explained why, eighty-nine percent of the failures came down to attitude. Only eleven percent were about technical skill.

Edwin Carrington

Eleven percent. So a well-designed skills test is guarding the door that only one in ten failures walks through.

Claire Monroe

And the other reasons are telling. The biggest was coachability, at twenty-six percent. Then emotional intelligence, then motivation, then temperament. I should be fair, though. That's hiring managers' judgment of why people failed, not a controlled experiment.

Edwin Carrington

That's a fair caution, Claire, and worth saying. But the direction matches what I've seen for decades. People are rarely let go because they couldn't learn the software. They're let go because of how they operate when things get hard. Whether they take feedback. Whether they hold up under pressure. Whether they push or wait.

Claire Monroe

So what actually predicts performance, if skills only tell part of the story?

Edwin Carrington

No single tool does. That's the first thing to accept.

Claire Monroe

That fits the most recent research. Paul Sackett and his colleagues re-ran the big meta-analyses on hiring methods in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2022. They concluded that the validity of many traditional selection tools had been overstated for years. And the method that came out on top was the structured interview, with an average validity of about point four two. Good, but nowhere near perfect.

Edwin Carrington

Which tells you the answer is layering, not replacing. Use the skills test for can. Use a structured interview, with the same questions and a scoring guide, for how they think. And add a measure of will: how someone is wired to operate under the specific pressure of that role. That last layer is the one most hiring processes simply don't have.

Claire Monroe

And that's where behavioral data comes in.

Edwin Carrington

It is. OAD measures behavioral drive, how someone is wired to operate under role-specific pressure, across five dimensions: Drive, Influence, Resilience, Structure and Leadership. It's measured against a benchmark built from your own top performers in that role, so you're not asking whether someone is impressive in general. You're asking whether they operate the way your best people do, in that seat. It's built on thirty-eight years of behavioral science and more than ten million assessments, and OAD clients see a sixty percent average reduction in mis-hires. But it doesn't replace your skills tests or your interviews, Claire. It answers the one question they were never built to answer. And it's one structured input, never the sole basis for a hire.

Claire Monroe

So if someone listening wants to start this quarter, what's the first move?

Edwin Carrington

Keep it small. Pick one critical role, the one where a mis-hire hurts most. For your finalists, pair the skills test with a behavioral diagnostic. Then look back at the people you've already hired into that role. Who succeeded, who struggled, and what did the skills tests say about each of them? If the skills scores didn't separate your stars from your strugglers, you'll know exactly which question your process has been leaving unanswered.

Claire Monroe

And a good place to start is with the people who already succeed in that role. OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

Anyone can perform on test day, Claire. Hire for month nine.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to leave it. Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always a pleasure, Claire.