Skills-powered talent is how 63% of C-suite executives plan to prepare their organisations for the future, according to Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026. It’s a growing trend in talent acquisition, but how do you move to a skills-based hiring culture?

Skills-based hiring is becoming normalised in 2026. In fact, research from TestGorilla estimates that 85% of employers are already doing it. Of those employers that take a more holistic approach to recruitment, 60% say it leads to improved performance, 50% experience increased retention, and 58% see stronger team cohesion. 

This recruitment pivot is something that candidates also tend to view favourably. For example, Flexa's Talent Insights Report 2026 shows that 40% of candidates prioritise personal development in their next role, which is a clear signal that people are already thinking about their careers in terms of growth and capability rather than purely credentials.

But as we all know, it’s not easy to transform your hiring strategy overnight. 

To help you take your first steps towards skills-based hiring, we ran a webinar that explored how organisations are moving away from looking at job titles and years of experience, and towards a hiring and development model built around what people can actually do.

You can replay the webinar here, or catch up on the key points in this summary.

Meet our skills-based hiring experts

Christine Mulryne, Head of Retention and Partnerships at Flexa, sat down with a panel of experts to discuss this topic, including:

• Colline Kermarrec, Head of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Planning at Airbus.
• Raj Gill, Head of Talent Acquisition - Service at BT Group.
• Ana King, Chief People Officer at SAPI.
• Laura Greenhill, Chief Operating Officer at Hurree.

What skills-based hiring actually means

Raj described skills-based hiring as fundamentally about broadening how organisations recruit and assess candidates beyond a traditional job description, and admitted that the biggest early challenge can be that of taking hiring managers on the journey. Many are used to chasing a "unicorn" candidate who ticks every box and, in reality, doesn't exist.

Laura agreed, framing the shift as moving from "Does this person have the right title and experience?" to "Can this person actually do the job?" She was candid that some of Hurree's best hires may not have passed a traditional filter at all.

"The job spec feels like certainty, but I think it's just an often comfortable illusion." — Laura Greenhill, Hurree

Colline explained that moving to skills-based hiring is a genuine multi-year transformation at Airbus, not a quick policy change. Because the traditional job description sits behind everything from grading to career pathways and learning, moving to skills-based hiring means rebuilding the underlying job catalogue, terminology and structure from the ground up, a journey which she estimated can take two to three years.

The cost of hiring for titles instead of capability

Ana was clear that the real distinction organisations need to make is between past performance and future potential, and that businesses risk being left behind if they keep hiring for what someone has already done rather than how quickly they can adapt and learn.

Raj pointed to the knock-on cultural cost: disengagement, retention problems, and damage to employer brand when talent realises an organisation isn't investing in growth the way its competitors are. Colline brought scale to that point, noting that Airbus recruited more than 11,000 people last year alone, all expecting room to grow quickly, and warned that a static, title-based system makes it much harder to identify the right people internally when a major new programme, and a completely new set of technical skills, comes along.

Laura's view centred on cultural fit rather than qualifications on paper.

"Cultural misalignment is expensive. It costs time, it costs teams energy, and it often costs the hire itself." — Laura Greenhill, Hurree

Making invisible skills visible

Asked how skills-based hiring helps organisations meet rising candidate expectations around growth, Colline explained that the goal is transparency: making visible what a traditional job catalogue currently hides about what a person can do, not just what they’ve already done. Airbus has deliberately capped the number of skills attached to any one role, currently around 15, to keep the system meaningful rather than turning into what she called a "factory" of unlimited tags.

Advice for non-traditional career paths

For candidates who've built a career through freelancing, career breaks, or moves across industries, Laura's advice was to invest in storytelling. Her own background in events, she said, looked niche on paper but was really about operational intensity under pressure, and it took someone else reframing that for her before she could see her own transferable skills clearly.

Ana's advice was more structural: anchor every past achievement to a number wherever possible, then explicitly bridge it to the role being applied for. Raj encouraged candidates to think less about company names and job titles and more about the skills gathered along the way, and to make that the centrepiece of any application.

Building internal pathways around skills, not job ladders

Raj shared some tangible examples from BT, including a career returners programme supporting people who've been out of work for extended periods. One returner, out of work for 22 years, was hired into a data analyst role and has since been promoted; and a frontline staff programme, now four months into a six-month pilot, has already produced four internal placements based on transferable skills like stakeholder management, gained from years of handling customers, rather than formal experience.

At SAPI, Ana described three pillars: unlimited access to a learning platform, a wellbeing app to support what she called "a slightly anxious time" for many employees, and active encouragement to experiment with AI tools already available in the business's existing software. At Hurree, Laura described a deliberately organic approach, rejecting a single progression path in favour of honest, individual conversations about where someone's untapped capability actually lies.

Colline shared Airbus's most ambitious plan: a system she described as the "Netflix of careers," using AI to generate personalised career and learning recommendations tied to an individual's own aspirations and mobility, expected to roll out over the next couple of years.

"It's a kind of interactive and dynamic conversation between a tool, an agent, and AI, at the end capable of really understanding and reading you as a unique person in order to have a unique recommendation." — Colline Kermarrec, Airbus

Equipping managers to lead the shift

Laura argued that equipping managers starts with honest, two-sided conversations: they need support to see potential beyond a job title, and employees often don't recognise their own capability without someone naming it for them. Raj added that clarity on the "why" and the "how," backed by real internal success stories, is what actually gets sceptical managers on board. Ana shared a candid example of her own approach at SAPI: hiring a handful of candidates who didn't match the job description on paper, but tested well on cognitive and ethical measures, and using their strong first-year performance to build trust in the approach across the wider business.

Closing the gender gap

Flexa's data shows men are 51% more represented than average among users searching specifically for career progression, with women 19% less represented. Colline linked this directly to confidence: Airbus's own research found women are less likely to proactively state their ambition or say outright that they believe they're capable of doing a role. She argued that skills-based, multi-dimensional assessment could reduce reliance on that kind of self-declared confidence.

"We do hope, from an inclusion and diversity point of view, that this shift will absolutely give more chances to women to progress as much as they deserve to." — Colline Kermarrec, Airbus

Ana pointed to role modelling and mentoring as immediate, low-cost actions any leader can take, alongside shifting interview questions from behavioural ("tell me about a time when…") to hypothetical ("what would you do if…"), which she felt allows candidates to demonstrate potential rather than relying on past experience alone.

Staying ahead of AI-driven change

Laura argued that a skills-based approach is precisely what allows organisations and individuals to stay ahead of AI-driven disruption, because capability can evolve in a way that a fixed credential can't. Colline drew on decades of experience managing large-scale workforce redeployment at Airbus, describing how painful it was working from static CVs during past transformations, and framed the current shift to skills as a chance to get ahead of the next wave of disruption before it hits, driven by individuals themselves rather than top-down redeployment.

Making the business case to leadership

Ana's advice to HR leaders pushing for this shift was to claim the same authority in the room that a finance or marketing leader would expect, and to lead with the commercial case above all else. Laura argued that sometimes it takes living through a bad, credential-matched hire, or watching an unconventional hire thrive, to genuinely shift a leadership team's perspective, and that a diverse hiring panel reduces risk rather than increasing it. Raj suggested combining that lived experience with hard data, and making the hidden equivalence between skills explicit, pointing out that a frontline employee's "customer on the phone" is functionally the same stakeholder management experience a more senior hire would list on a CV.

Advice for candidates right now

Colline's closing advice was a note of caution about AI: use it to support your application, but don't delegate the process so completely that your CV no longer tells your own story. Ana emphasised clear communication, numerical evidence of past achievement, and genuine enthusiasm in the interview. Laura recommended keeping multiple tailored versions of a CV, picking out the right story for each specific role. Raj's parting thought was simple: no one knows your own skills and background better than you do, so own that story with confidence.

"There is no one who knows your skills and your background better than you do." — Raj Gill, BT Group

Key Takeaways

• Skills-based hiring is a structural shift, not a quick policy change. It typically means rebuilding job catalogues, career pathways and assessment criteria from the ground up, which can be a multi-year journey for large organisations.
• Hiring and developing for title and tenure carries a real cost: disengagement, retention risk, damage to employer brand, and an inability to identify the right people internally when business needs change fast.
• Making skills visible, while still keeping structure (such as capping the number of skills tied to a role), helps meet rising candidate demand for growth and development without the system becoming meaningless.
• Storytelling and numerical evidence of past achievements help non-traditional candidates bridge the gap between what they've done and what they can do next.
• Skills-based approaches may help close persistent gender gaps in career progression by reducing reliance on self-declared confidence and shifting interview questions from behavioural to hypothetical.
• A skills-based culture is also a hedge against AI-driven disruption: capability can evolve, static credentials can't, and organisations that build for adaptability now will be better placed for the changes still to come.