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The choice of which roles to pilot first isn’t logistical. It’s strategic. Here’s how to make it deliberately—and why getting it wrong is one of the most common ways strong initiatives fail.
There’s a version of this conversation that happens in a lot of SBH planning meetings. Someone asks: “Which roles should we start with?” And the answer that comes back is some version of: “The ones where the hiring manager is already on board” or “The ones where we have the most open reqs right now” or—most dangerously—“The ones leadership is watching most closely.”
These are reasonable-sounding answers. They’re also, in most cases, the wrong answers.
The choice of where to pilot skills-based hiring is one of the highest-leverage decisions in your entire implementation. It determines whether your initiative builds organizational credibility or loses it—often before you’ve had a real chance to see what it can do.
Starting your pilot where the mandate is loudest is exactly backwards. Start where success is most likely. Credibility travels up the organization. Failure does too.
The Two Failure Modes
Organizations tend to get pilot selection wrong in one of two directions.
The first is piloting at maximum visibility. These are the high-profile roles—the ones that report directly to the C-suite, the ones that everyone in the organization has an opinion about, the ones that come with the most scrutiny and the least tolerance for a learning curve.
The logic is understandable: if SBH works here, it works everywhere, and leadership will see it.
The problem is that you’re running your first experiment under maximum pressure, before your process is refined, before your hiring managers are fluent with the approach, and before you have any organizational track record to point to.
One stumble—a hire that doesn’t work out, a shortlist that gets questioned, a process that takes longer than expected—and the initiative gets relitigated from the top.
The second failure mode is piloting where it’s easiest, not where it’s most representative.
Choosing the one hiring manager who was already doing something like skills-based hiring anyway, in a role that’s so low-volume you won’t have data for a year, produces a successful pilot that doesn’t prove anything.
When you try to expand, you don’t have the evidence base—or the organizational learning—that makes expansion credible.
What a Good Pilot Role Actually Looks Like
The right pilot role sits at the intersection of four criteria. Not all four are always achievable—but the more of them you can satisfy, the stronger your pilot will be.
A sympathetic hiring manager. Not a convert—someone who was already a believer.
A professional who is genuinely curious about the approach, willing to engage with assessment results, and secure enough not to feel threatened by a process that works differently than what they’re used to. The hiring manager is your frontline partner in this experiment. Their disposition matters.
Sufficient volume. A pilot role needs enough requisitions in your time window to produce patterns, not just anecdotes.
A single hire tells you almost nothing. Five to ten hires in a defined period gives you data you can actually analyze—acceptance rates, time-to-fill comparisons, early performance signals.
Reasonable visibility. You want the pilot to be visible enough that success builds organizational credibility—but not so visible that every decision is scrutinized in real time before your process is refined. Middle management roles, team leads, specialist positions in growing functions: these tend to hit the right level.
A measurable baseline. You need to know how this role has been hired before—what the typical time-to-fill looked like, what the early-tenure performance patterns have been, what the retention rate has been—so that you can make a genuine before/after comparison. Without a baseline, even a successful pilot is hard to defend.
The Expansion Plan Starts at Pilot Selection
Here’s something most organizations don’t think about when choosing a pilot role: the path to expansion starts with where you start.
A pilot in a customer success function, done well, gives you a template and a track record that makes expanding to adjacent customer-facing roles straightforward.
A pilot in a single isolated function—even a successful one—produces learning that doesn’t transfer easily. When you’re selecting your pilot, think one step ahead: if this works, where does it go next? Choose a starting point that has a natural adjacency.
This also applies to the hiring manager relationship. The hiring manager who partners with you on a successful pilot becomes your internal advocate when you expand.
They can speak to the experience in a way no presentation can. Investing in that relationship during the pilot—more touchpoints, more transparency, more genuine collaboration—pays dividends in the expansion phase.
One More Consideration: The Failure Plan
Even a well-designed pilot will hit friction. Before you launch, it’s worth asking: if something goes wrong in this pilot—a hire that doesn’t work out, a shortlist that gets questioned—is this role a good place to absorb that friction without it becoming a referendum on the whole initiative?
High-visibility roles are bad places to absorb friction. Lower-visibility roles with strong leadership backing are good ones. The goal isn’t to hide your pilot—it’s to give your process room to learn before it’s tested at full organizational pressure.
Part of the SBH Readiness & Implementation Series. For the full pilot selection framework and readiness diagnostic, 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.
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2026). Job Outlook 2026.
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.