New collar hiring: How HiBob’s skill-based strategy helps win the war for talent

It’s no secret that today’s job market is competitive. But what’s the cause of a tighter market than ever?

One of the biggest culprits is organizations’ refusal to adapt to the realities of the new world of work: Degrees can’t guarantee a candidate has the experience your company needs to get ahead and stay ahead. 

Technology and market demands are simply evolving too quickly for degrees to keep up, especially when universities continue teaching obsolete theories that no longer match the skills companies need their people to apply to rapidly advancing technologies, tools, and processes. 

Companies’ dependence on degree-based hiring in a world where degrees can’t match their practical needs is at the heart of today’s massive talent shortage, and it’s putting business growth and innovation at risk.

Breaking out of this traditional approach to recruitment and embracing what IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty, coined “new collar jobs” is key to winning the best talent and staying at the cutting edge of growth and innovation. 

What are new collar jobs?

New collar jobs don’t necessarily require a degree. Instead, they prioritize skills and experience over formal education, including on-the-job and vocational training. 

As demand for this kind of talent grows along with technological advancements, new collar jobs are key to any recruitment strategy that aims to bridge the growing talent gap—especially in the tech industry.

How new collar jobs improve modern recruitment

More than degrees, companies today need people with proven competence and experience in adapting and innovating. This helps us avoid risk and overcome the skills shortage.

Top-tier organizations are already on board. According to Harvard Business Review, state governments in the US and companies like IBM and Google are leading the charge by removing degree requirements for many of their technical roles.

Dropping degree requirements for certain roles opens organizations up to a much larger talent pool. It also promotes diversity by giving opportunities to talented individuals from various backgrounds who may not have had access to traditional higher education​.

On top of that, taking a new collar approach to hiring helps businesses bolster their bottom line by reducing hiring costs, encouraging innovation, and improving retention, engagement, and satisfaction rates.

How HiBob embraces new collar recruitment practices

Especially as a high-growth startup and now scale-up company, HiBob’s new collar approach to recruitment has been key to helping us find the best talent for our teams around the world. 

We’ve found that the most successful employees aren’t necessarily those who follow the traditional career path. To find the right people for some specific roles, we’re training our recruiters and hiring managers to step out of the traditional hiring strategy box and prioritize candidates with relevant skills, competencies, and hands-on experience over those with only traditional degree-based qualifications but no practical experience.

Adapting to today’s world is essential

When I was a young recruiter, around 15 years ago, a master’s degree was often mandatory, especially for leadership roles. Over the years, this requirement shifted to a “nice-to-have.” Today, it’s no longer required at all. The focus has shifted toward a candidate’s skill set. The results speak for themselves.

As a leading tech company in Israel, HiBob’s hiring team constantly faces a huge talent gap in software development. We know we can close this gap with talent who’ve self-taught themselves to code and don’t have an official degree. This is why we moved away from requiring formal computer science degrees in our development department long ago.

The same goes for self-taught team members across the business. 

For example, product marketing professionals can come from diverse backgrounds—such as influencers, podcasters, and others with strong marketing skills like writing, design, and more. 

In fact, many of our marketing specialists are native English speakers who developed their professional expertise on the job—whether they’re in product marketing, content marketing, field marketing, or other niche fields. These stellar team members are all masters of their craft who excel at adapting and leveraging their language skills to give us an advantage over our competition.

We also often take a new collar approach when we recruit for customer success and analyst positions. These team members have a wide range of skills, including expertise in database navigation, analytical tools, and other relevant areas. They’ve developed these skills through on-the-job training and formal certifications.

Hiring for soft skills is another crucial piece of our hiring strategy

Beyond technical skills, qualities like personality, values, and behavioral traits have become equally important to winning and keeping top talent.

At HiBob, our job “scorecards” in our ATS evaluate hard skills and soft skills and cultural alignment. We’ve learned that long-term success is strongly tied to these behavioral factors—how well individuals align with our culture, values, and ways of working.

This is why we work actively to close the talent gap by not only hiring skilled external candidates (with or without a traditional degree) but also by encouraging our Bobbers to apply for internal positions and acquire new skills.

We take a proactively future-first approach to hiring

At HiBob, we know that a future-first hiring strategy means taking a proactive approach to recruitment that constantly evolves with the needs of the company and the market. 

It means getting everyone involved in recruitment to step out of their comfort zones and explore new, future-fit approaches to talent acquisition, including skill-based and internal hiring practices. This broadens our talent pool and allows our people to explore new roles, learn new things, and grow within the organization.

Committing to a proactive approach has been essential to maintaining our rapid growth, saving on hiring costs and onboarding time, and (most importantly) helping us keep talent within the company. To make it work, we’ve implemented the following initiatives:

• Skills training for managers: All managers undergo training to emphasize the importance of ensuring their teams have the right skill sets.
• Career conversation workshops: We lead year-round global workshops to teach managers how to have effective career conversations with their direct reports, reinforcing the importance of developing their team members’ skills.
• Skill sets for all roles in the ATS: To help identify the right candidates, we implemented role-specific skill sets and built scorecards in our ATS.
• Competency-focused hiring: We hold training workshops for our hiring managers around the world to focus on competencies, skills, and relevant experience during recruitment.
• Junior recruiting: We launched a “Dev Academy” for junior candidates that focuses on skills and high-potential leadership qualities (e.g., work experience in intelligence, etc.) rather than degree-based qualifications.

Skill-based hiring is the new gold standard

For modern companies with goals to scale and thrive now and in the future, there’s no way around new collar jobs and skill-based hiring. The employment landscape has already shifted. 

In the race for talent, organizations that champion skill-based hiring are trailblazers shaping the modern world of work. As the world pivots towards new collar jobs and skill-based recruitment strategies, we’re not just adapting to change, we’re leading a workplace revolution that promises to deliver a more inclusive, agile, and successful future for everyone.