A candidate applies with relevant skills, strong examples and clear evidence that they could perform the role well.
There is just one problem: their current job title is not the one you expected.
Perhaps you are recruiting a Marketing Manager, but their title is Senior Campaign Executive. You need someone to lead client relationships, but their experience sits under Account Director rather than Client Services Director. Or you are building an in-house team, and their background has mainly been agency-side.
Do you continue the conversation, or decide they are not quite right?
More employers are beginning to focus on what people can actually do, rather than relying as heavily on degrees, job titles or perfectly linear career paths. This is often described as skills-based or skills-first hiring.
It sounds simple, but it requires more than removing a degree requirement from a job advert. Employers need to become clearer about the skills a role genuinely requires and better at recognising evidence of those skills in different places.
Job titles are not as reliable as they look
The same title can describe very different jobs from one organisation to another.
One Marketing Manager may lead strategy, manage a team and control a significant budget. Another may be the only marketer in a smaller business, personally delivering content, campaigns, events and reporting.
A Creative Lead could be responsible for setting the direction of an entire department, or they might be a highly experienced hands-on Designer with no formal management responsibility.
The reverse is also true. Two people with different titles may have developed very similar capabilities.
When an employer screens too rigidly by title, they risk rejecting relevant candidates before understanding what those people have actually done.
Skills-based hiring does not mean lowering the bar
Looking beyond a familiar job title does not mean overlooking experience that genuinely matters.
Some roles require specific technical knowledge, regulated-sector experience or evidence that the candidate has operated at a particular level. A senior leader may need to have managed a team of a certain size or worked directly with a board.
The aim is not to remove every requirement. It is to separate what is genuinely essential from what simply feels familiar or reassuring.
For each requirement, ask:
What would prevent this person from succeeding if they did not already have this experience?
Where there is a clear answer, it may be a genuine essential.
Where the answer is that someone from the same sector or with the same previous title would feel safer, there may be room to consider a wider range of people.
Start with what the person needs to achieve
Many recruitment processes begin by describing an ideal profile.
The candidate might need five years of sector experience, a particular qualification, knowledge of several named platforms and a history of working for similar businesses.
A skills-based brief begins with the work itself.
Rather than immediately asking for a Marketing Manager from a particular industry, the organisation might need someone who can:
- Develop and deliver a practical marketing plan
- Translate a complex product into clear messaging
- Build a stronger relationship between marketing and sales
- Improve campaign measurement
- Manage several priorities with limited internal support
Once those outcomes are clear, the hiring team can identify the skills required to deliver them.
It can also separate the brief into three groups:
Needed from day one: Capabilities without which the person would struggle to perform the core role.
Can be developed: Skills the right person could realistically learn after joining.
Helpful rather than essential: Experience that may add value but should not automatically determine who reaches interview.
This creates a more focused brief without reducing the standard expected.
Look for evidence rather than keywords
A CV may say that someone has led campaigns, developed strategy or managed stakeholders. It rarely shows exactly what they did, how much responsibility they held or how they made decisions.
That evidence needs to come through the assessment process.
Instead of simply asking whether a candidate has stakeholder management experience, ask them to describe a situation in which several stakeholders wanted different things.
Explore what they were personally responsible for, how they decided what to prioritise, what resistance they faced and what happened as a result.
The detail behind the answer will usually tell you far more than the title under which the experience was gained.
A short, realistic task can also help where practical ability is central to the role. A marketing candidate could review a brief and explain their priorities. A client services candidate could talk through how they would handle a difficult customer situation.
The task should resemble the real work, remain proportionate and never become a request for hours of free consultancy. CIPD guidance recommends structured interviews and relevant skills-based assessments because they allow candidates to be compared more consistently against the actual requirements of the job.
Keep the assessment consistent
Skills-based hiring should make recruitment more objective, not more dependent on instinct.
Agree the core capabilities before interviews begin, ask every candidate a consistent set of questions and record the evidence against clear criteria.
Without that structure, employers can still fall back on familiarity. The person with the expected title, sector background or type of employer may simply feel safer, even when another candidate provides stronger evidence against the real requirements.
A straightforward interview scorecard can help the hiring team compare what candidates have demonstrated, rather than who most closely resembles the person they originally imagined.
To help with this, we have created a free Interview Scorecard Template that you can adapt to your own role and use to assess every candidate against the same agreed criteria.
The right candidate may not look exactly as expected
Job titles, degrees and previous employers all provide useful context. They should not make the decision on their own.
Someone who has already held the exact title may be the strongest candidate. Another person may have developed the same core skills through a different route and bring experience or perspective the business had not originally considered.
The most useful question is not:
Has this person followed the career path we expected?
It is:
What evidence do we have that this person can succeed in this role and continue developing with the business?
At Beyond The Book, we help clients define what genuinely matters within a role, recognise relevant skills across different career paths and understand the person behind the CV.
Planning your next hire? Get in touch and we can help you shape the brief, understand the available market and decide how best to assess the skills you need.
