Employers Meet Talent Needs by Focusing on Skills First

Corporate leaders increasingly recognize that traditional screening qualifications, like bachelor’s degrees, no longer meet their talent needs. To help employers build strong talent pipelines based on job applicants’ skills and experience, Jobs for the Future (JFF) launched the free Talent of Tomorrow Fellowship for corporate HR professionals.

Participants learned how to strengthen their employers’ workforces by identifying the skills their businesses needed most and finding candidates with those skills. Many tapped into an often-overlooked source of talent: community college career and technical education (CTE) programs.

Recent participants included representatives from major employers, such as Meta, IBM, Delta Air Lines, Wells Fargo, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Katie Brown, founder of EnGen, a career-specific English language learning platform, credits the fellowship with helping her startup hire the highly skilled employees it needed to grow.

Her team was looking for people to fill full-time roles in management and client services, and part-time learner-success coaches. It was critical to find multilingual coaches who understood the constraints and opportunities facing EnGen’s learners, many of whom are immigrants restarting professional careers in the United States.

To start, EnGen removed all degree and credential requirements from job descriptions and instead listed the skills they considered most important to strong performance. The company also conducted a skills inventory, identifying the skills each employee had and those they wanted to develop.

By focusing on skills rather than credentials, prioritizing career development, and promoting from within, the company has grown from 10 to 40 employees in a few years. Many full-time employees started as part-time success coaches.

“The fellowship changed the way we think about hiring. It made me very deliberate about focusing on what someone needs to be able to do to do each job,” Brown said. “When we hire for skills, we expand access to meaningful careers–and that’s how we truly advance our mission to reduce barriers to employment for high-potential talent.”

Between 2022 and 2025, about 60 fellows from 45 companies completed JFF’s program; many found new pools of talent and strengthened retention.

Thank you to ECMC for supporting this work.