Skills-Based Hiring has a Hiring Manager Problem - Part 1

We’ve spent the last twenty or so years ‘tightening the bolts’, turning Recruitment into Talent Acquisition and making it a professional process underpinned by exciting and evolving technology.

We haven’t done the same for Hiring Managers

I am very lucky to be able to attend some fab summits and conferences with HR and TA leaders and these topics are highly prevalent and discussed with fervour.

Spend five minutes at any Talent Acquisition event, and you’ll very probably hear these themes.

• AI-enabled recruitment.
• Skills-based hiring.
• Skills intelligence.
• Skills taxonomies and ontologies.
• Common language.
• CV-less hiring.
• Talent marketplaces.
• Workforce planning and mapping.
• Internal mobility.
• Skills-based organisations.
• Talent intelligence.

The language evolves every year, but the message remains remarkably consistent - technology will transform hiring. And to be fair, Talent Acquisition has transformed.

There is a lot of sage nodding, with colleagues, and peers agreeing that these are the ‘direction of travel.’

The work being done by many organisations across the talent journey, particularly tech firms, is really important. The idea of moving away from outdated CV screening, focusing on skills rather than pedigree, widening access to talent, improving diversity and creating more agile workforces is absolutely right. But I keep coming back to the same question.

What if the biggest obstacle to hiring transformation isn’t the process, technology or CV? What if it’s the Hiring Manager?

Is the wrong problem being looked at?

Because whenever the presentations finish and the real conversations start, there is one topic that gets universal agreement around the room. The Hiring Manager.

We smile knowingly, occasionally laugh, and shrug and everyone in TA has a story.

The recruitment industry is passionate about skills-based hiring with industry bodies continuing to champion skills-first approaches as the answer to improving mobility, diversity, candidate experience and workforce agility. But are we solving the wrong problem?

Over the last 10 to 15 years, organisations have heavily invested in ATS and VMS platforms, CRMs, sourcing technology, automation, talent intelligence, assessment tools, recruitment marketing and now AI. TA teams have become more data-driven, more commercial and more sophisticated than ever before.

Yet so often the feedback we hear from TA leaders is that the problem isn’t (always) the technology, or the recruiters…… The problem is the Hiring Manager.

And the uncomfortable truth is that they’re probably right.

Recruitment still being treated like an admin function.

There is a lot of love for ‘strategic talent acquisition’, but I expect that many organisations continue to operate with the same mindset they had 15 years ago; Recruitment takes orders and is perpetually expected to do ‘more with less’.

It’s a model that fundamentally positions Talent Acquisition as a service function rather than a strategic partner, and no amount of AI can solve that. It can automate tasks, but it cannot automate accountability.

The contradiction nobody talks about

Businesses expect Talent Acquisition to hire faster, cheaper, with higher quality and with fewer resources. And of course, with AI that’s easy… isn’t it?

• But how exactly does AI fix a Hiring Manager who submits a poor brief?
• How does automation improve a job description that is little more than an unrealistic wish list of what the last person did?
• How does talent intelligence help when a manager takes two weeks to review CVs and then wants more, ‘in case there’s more out there’?
• How does skills-based hiring work when the person making the hiring decision doesn’t know which skills are genuinely essential and which are simply “nice to have”?

We keep talking about transforming recruitment whilst largely ignoring the part of the process that hasn’t transformed at all - the Hiring Manager.

Let’s talk about Workforce Planning

One of the biggest conversations in the skills movement is workforce planning. The industry talks extensively about future skills demand, yet many organisations struggle with basic workforce forecasting let alone more advanced.

Familiar discussion points.

• Forecasting future capability.
• Identifying skills gaps.
• Understanding future demand.
• Building AI-ready workforces.

This is admirable and again, the right direction. but some organisations who speak passionately about ‘strategic workforce planning’ often have hiring managers who fail to anticipate predictable attrition like maternity leave.

There are regular discussions from TA, who can speak passionately about ‘future workforce intelligence’ while simultaneously being completely surprised by vacancies that they should have been told were coming.

If a hiring manager knows somebody is leaving to have a baby or retiring and does nothing until they hand their notice in, that isn’t a skills problem. That’s a management problem.

If a business repeatedly loses key talent because succession planning doesn’t exist, that isn’t a talent intelligence problem. That’s a leadership problem.

So why do businesses focus energy on solving ever increasingly complex future problems while failing to solve obvious present ones. Skills-based hiring is valuable, but it cannot compensate for poor planning at the front end of the hiring process.

The Hiring Manager bottleneck

Most Talent Acquisition teams can identify the same recurring issues:

Unrealistic Job Descriptions

Many hiring managers continue to recycle outdated job descriptions packed with years-old requirements and inflated wish lists. The result is the search for something tantamount to ‘mythical’; a perfect specimen who possesses every technical capability, every soft skill and every qualification.

This reduces talent pools, increases costs and time-to-hire draws out.

Unstructured and Biased Interviewing

While organisations invest heavily in DEI initiatives and fair hiring practices, many managers still conduct interviews based on instinct rather than evidence. Without structured assessment criteria and competency-based scorecards, decisions are often influenced by familiarity, similarity bias or subjective impressions rather than capability. No skills taxonomy can solve this problem.

Delayed Feedback and Slow Decision-Making

Ask almost any recruiter why a strong candidate was lost and the answer is often “the manager took too long.”

Delayed CV reviews, postponed interviews and late feedback continue to undermine the recruitment process and in competitive markets, candidates simply move on.

Recruitment/TA often blamed for speed and quality metrics that are largely outside their control.

The Front End and Back End Problem

The conversation around skills-based hiring focuses heavily on the middle of the process. Assessment, matching and selection, but success depends just as much on what happens before and after.

Many organisations measure recruiter performance relentlessly while measuring hiring manager effectiveness rarely, if at all.

So, who actually ‘owns’ Hiring quality?