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Most organizations don’t. Here’s what job architecture readiness actually looks like—and how to close the gap before your pilot launches.
Pull up a job description from your three most frequently filled roles. Read the requirements section.
How much of it describes what someone needs to be able to do? How much of it describes what they need to have done before?
For most organizations, the honest answer is: mostly the latter. “5+ years of experience in X.” “Bachelor’s degree required.” “Familiarity with Y platform.” These aren’t skills criteria. They’re proxies—shortcuts that substituted for the harder work of defining what actually predicts success in the role.
Skills-based hiring requires doing that harder work. And most organizations haven’t done it yet.
A job description that specifies “7+ years of experience” is not a skills-based document. It’s a credential document with the credential renamed.
Why This Gap Exists
Job architecture built around credentials and experience levels wasn’t designed to be lazy. It was designed to be efficient. When you’re screening 300 applicants, “Bachelor’s degree required” does a lot of filtering work very quickly. The problem isn’t the intention. It’s that the proxy has drifted far from what it was originally meant to predict.
Research from the Burning Glass Institute found that degree requirements were added to millions of job postings between 2010 and 2020 without any evidence that degree holders performed better in those roles—a phenomenon they called “degree inflation.” The credential requirement outlasted the rationale for it.
The result is a generation of job descriptions that filter confidently on criteria that don’t actually predict what they’re supposed to predict. Removing those criteria without replacing them with something better isn’t skills-based hiring. It’s just a shorter job description.
What “Skills” Actually Means
Before you can assess whether your job architecture is ready, it’s worth being precise about what skills-based criteria look like in practice. “Skills” is not a monolith—especially in this age of massive technological shifts impacting EVERYONE’s workflows.
Technical skills are the most visible and the easiest to define: specific tools, methodologies, domain knowledge. These are important, but they’re also the most perishable—their relevance decays as technologies and methods evolve.
A CHRO recently described this to us directly: you hire for today’s tools and your hires are behind before the probation period ends. The specific tools get superseded; the people who know how to learn new ones stay valuable. (We explored this dynamic in depth in our Distance Traveled Substack series — Part 4 is worth your time if this pattern sounds familiar.)
Transferable skills sit one level up: communication, project management, problem-solving, collaboration. These travel across roles and contexts. They’re harder to assess from a resume but more predictive of sustained performance.
Behavioral and cognitive competencies are the highest-leverage layer: critical thinking, learning agility, and the constellation of traits—grit, resourcefulness, resilience, self-efficacy—that research consistently shows predict performance across roles, industries, and career stages. These are the least visible on a resume and the most predictive of long-term success. They’re also what validated assessment is specifically designed to surface.
A job architecture that only defines technical requirements is partially skills-based at best. Full readiness means defining criteria across all three layers for your pilot roles.
A Practical Starting Point
You don’t need to redesign your entire job architecture before you launch a pilot. You need to redesign it for the roles you’re piloting. Here’s a practical approach:
Start with a role inventory. For each pilot role, ask: what does strong performance actually look like at 90 days? At one year? Not what the job description says—what do your best performers in that role actually do differently from your average performers?
Work backwards from performance to criteria. If your best performers in a customer success role consistently figure out creative solutions under pressure, “resourcefulness under constraint” is a real criterion—even if it’s never appeared in a job description. Name it. Define what it looks like. Then ask: how would you identify it in a candidate?
Audit your existing requirements for credential drift. For each requirement in your current job descriptions, ask: is this a real predictor of the performance behaviors we just identified, or is it a proxy we’ve been using because it’s easy to screen for? If it’s the latter, it’s a candidate for replacement.
Replace proxies with real criteria—and define how you’ll assess them. This is the step most organizations skip: they remove the credential requirement without specifying what replaces it. Every criterion you add needs an assessment method. Behavioral interview questions for transferable skills. Validated instruments for cognitive and behavioral competencies. Work samples or structured exercises for technical skills where appropriate.
The goal isn’t to remove requirements. It’s to replace requirements that predict the wrong thing with criteria that predict the right thing.
The Hiring Manager Conversation
One more thing that’s easy to skip: your hiring managers need to be part of this process, not recipients of its outputs.
The people who know what strong performance looks like in a given role are usually the hiring managers who have managed that role—or done it—often for years.
Involving them in the criteria development process does two things.
It produces better criteria, because their knowledge is irreplaceable. And it builds the buy-in that’s otherwise missing when a new job description shows up in their inbox and they don’t recognize it.
A hiring manager who helped define what “strong critical thinking looks like in this role” is far more likely to engage seriously with assessment results than one who was handed a criteria framework they had no part in creating.
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Part of the SBH Readiness & Implementation Series. For the full diagnostic framework and job architecture audit template, download the SBH Readiness & Implementation Guide at getclara.io.
Sources
Burning Glass Institute & Harvard Business School. (2024). Skills-based hiring: The long road from pronouncements to practice.
Workday. (2025). Tapping into the talent of tomorrow with skills-based hiring. Workday Perspectives.
About CLARA
CLARA is a skills-based hiring platform built for mid-market companies. We measure critical thinking, learning agility, and Distance Traveled—the validated competencies that predict performance, not pedigree. Filter great talent in, not out. Learn more at getclara.io.