Start making better, faster hiring decisions in under 15 minutes

The U.S. Department of Labor launched the Good Jobs Initiative to make it easier to get workers into good jobs that help them get ahead. Not just for the sake of workers, but employers too. 

Adopting the Goods Jobs Principles is good for employers because the working conditions they provide lead to increased productivity and savings from lower turnover. But hiring can be hard, with many potholes and barriers that prevent employers from reaching excellent talent who can fill their good jobs. 

That is why we and the Department of Commerce worked with dozens of experts—from corporate thinkers to labor leaders—to build the Good Jobs Initiative Skills-First Hiring Starter Kit. Announced today at the White House, this user-friendly guide tells readers in plain and concrete terms what skills-first hiring is and how they can do it well. It also shares tools that can reduce the organizational lift of moving from traditional hiring to skills-first hiring. 

You may have heard about skills-first hiring in the news. Also known as “skills-based hiring,” this strategy, mentioned in our Good Jobs Principles, means hiring or promoting around skills, knowledge, and abilities that workers can show they actually have—no matter how workers got those skills. Skills-first hiring removes barriers to good, family-sustaining jobs for workers who have ample talent but cannot reach good jobs because of hiring processes that require that they show they got their skills a certain way. 

Much of the national conversation on skills-first hiring has focused on removing degree requirements. But successfully using these strategies involves much more than that.  Research has found employers struggling to implement these strategies.  

We built the Starter Kit to help address these challenges. The Starter Kit provides a transparent, step-by-step view on how to hire based on skills and do it well. 

Better yet, you can get the essentials of skills-based hiring in fewer than 15 minutes. Those who want to read the guide a little more closely can absorb everything in fewer than 20 minutes. For a truly deep dive, you can also follow our links to other skills-first guides. 

One thing we are especially proud of is how the Starter Kit brought together dozens of people to provide employers the best possible resource. We strengthened the Starter Kit through consultations with a diverse group of 16 organizations who have led the way on these issues. These include employer and business experts at the Business Roundtable and the SHRM Foundation; labor leaders at AFL-CIO, AFSCME and NABTU; tech and talent thinkers at LinkedIn and Indeed; and visionary groundbreakers in skill-first hiring at Grads of Life and Opportunity@Work.

We also are lucky to work with some of the world’s best experts in workforce development and the employment matters vital to successful skills-first hiring. Accordingly, this product also pooled the knowledge of experts from our Employment Training Administration, Office of Disability Employment Policy, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, Women’s Bureau, Veterans’ Employment and Training Service, and many other colleagues with expertise in this area. 

You can read the Starter Kit here and learn more about our Good Jobs Initiative here. 

Nick Beadle is a policy counselor for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Good Jobs Initiative.