A founder in Manchester emailed me last month. Fifty engineering roles open, sixteen months of hiring, and the strongest candidates were closing the tab after the first paragraph of her ad. The ones who did apply were nowhere near what she needed.
She was convinced it was the market.
It was mostly her job description.
Because most job descriptions still list qualifications and years of experience instead of the actual skills the work requires. Strong candidates read that, decide they don’t tick every box, and move on. The ad filters out the people you most want.
The data backs this up. The CIPD 2024 Resourcing and Talent Planning report found that 69% of UK organisations said competition for talent had intensified over the past year, and 52% reported an increase in unsuitable applicants. More noise, less signal. Some of that is market pressure. A good chunk of it is that ads are pulling in the wrong people because they were written for the wrong people.
Job descriptions are still being written the way they were in 2012. A degree here, five years there, a list of software tools nobody has touched since Covid. Meanwhile the actual work has changed. What you need someone to do on a Tuesday morning bears very little resemblance to the shopping list at the top of your ad.
And this is the thing I keep coming back to. Every SME I speak to is worried about the talent shortage. Very few are looking at whether their own hiring signals are creating one.
Skills-based hiring means designing your role around the specific skills and outcomes the job needs, then assessing candidates on those skills directly. Qualifications and job titles become supporting evidence, not entry gates.
It sounds obvious. In practice it is a real shift. You stop writing “must have a 2:1 in a related discipline and five years’ experience in a similar role” and start writing “you can translate a messy client brief into a working prototype in two weeks.”
One tells you nothing. The other tells you everything.
The difference matters commercially. LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team, in their Skills-First: Reimagining the Labor Market report, found that a skills-first approach expands the candidate pool for a role by around 9x for Millennial workers, 8.5x for Gen X, and over 10x for Gen Z. Their Future of Recruiting 2025 research adds that companies running the most skills-based searches are 12% more likely to make a quality hire. IBM, Accenture and Unilever have all publicly moved this way. UK SMEs actually benefit more than large employers here, because their salary budgets cannot compete on paper, but their roles can compete on interest.
A 40-person UK software SME I worked with was hunting for a mid-level product manager. Their old ad asked for a PM certification, three years in SaaS, and experience with a specific analytics tool.
We rewrote it around four skills. The ability to prioritise a roadmap when engineering and sales disagree. The ability to run a discovery interview and come out with a decision, not more questions. The ability to write a spec that a developer can build from without a meeting. The ability to say no to a stakeholder without losing them.
Applications tripled. Two of the three shortlisted candidates had no formal PM title on their CV. One had come from teaching. She got the role. She is still there.
OLD: Product Manager (SaaS). Bachelor’s degree in a relevant discipline required. 3+ years’ experience in a similar role. Familiarity with agile methodologies essential.
NEW: We need someone who can turn a messy customer problem into a decision our engineers can build in two weeks. You will own the roadmap, run the discovery calls, and be the person who says the honest thing in the room. Formal PM experience welcome but not required.
Both ads describe the same role. Only one of them makes the right person lean in.
SKILLS-BASED HIRING: THE NUMBERS
Start with what the person will actually do in the first ninety days, then work backwards to the skills that make each of those things possible. Cut everything else.
This is where AI genuinely helps, by the way. Not to write the ad for you, but to pressure-test it. Paste your draft into a decent model and ask it to identify which requirements are proxies rather than genuine needs. You will be surprised how much of it is proxy.
If this feels like an alien way to think about hiring, it connects to a wider pattern. AI literacy is one of the harder capabilities to find in the current UK market, and the reason is the same reason job descriptions are broken. We are still describing jobs the way we used to, even though the work has changed underneath us. I wrote more about that in the growing AI skills gap in UK small businesses.
Yes, meaningfully. When you hire on skills rather than pedigree, people are more likely to be in the right role, less likely to leave in the first year, and more likely to be promotable from within.
Deloitte’s global research on skills-based organisations found that companies with a skills-based approach are 98% more likely to retain high performers, and 107% more likely to place talent effectively. That is Deloitte’s international benchmark, not UK-specific, but the underlying logic travels. When you hire someone because they can do the work, they end up doing work they can do. When you hire someone because they look right on paper, you find out in month four whether the paper was true.
For SMEs this shift is quiet gold. Industry estimates commonly place the cost of a bad hire in the UK at between 1.5 and 3 times the employee’s annual salary, once you factor in recruitment fees, ramp time, lost productivity, and the workload absorbed by everyone else. For a £40,000 role, that is a rough range of £60,000 to £120,000. The exact number will vary by role and business, but the direction of travel is clear enough. Skills-based hiring reduces that risk at the source. You are not hoping the CV was accurate. You have already seen the person do a version of the work.
Take one open role this week. Rewrite the top of the ad so the first three lines describe the work, not the wishlist. In my experience, applicant quality shifts noticeably within the first two or three weeks of a rewrite like that.
You do not need a new ATS. You do not need a consultant. You do not need to overhaul your hiring process before Monday. You need to look at one live job ad and be honest about who it is written for.
Most of the ads I read are written for the hiring manager’s sense of safety. Not for the candidate you want to reach.
Change that, and you change what shows up in your inbox.
IF THIS FEELS FAMILIAR
The fastest win is usually a job-ad audit on one live role. If you would like a second pair of eyes on an ad that is not attracting the candidates you want, I offer a short paid review that includes a rewrite of the first three lines and a skills-based structure for the rest. Details on meetsabiha.com.
No. It works across finance, operations, marketing, care sector roles, hospitality, professional services. Anywhere the actual work is more specific than the job title implies, this approach adds signal. Some of the strongest results I have seen have come from social care and finance, not tech.
Not to start. You need a rewritten job ad and a structured interview with two or three skill-based questions per must-have. Software helps at scale, but the biggest lift comes from clearer thinking upstream, not tools downstream.
The evidence points the other way. Degree requirements act as a filter for background, not for capability. Removing them where the work does not need them widens the pool without lowering the bar, as long as your assessment is genuinely testing the skills the job needs.
AI is useful in three places. Rewriting job ads to remove proxy requirements, generating structured interview questions tied to specific skills, and scoring work samples consistently across a shortlist. It is not useful as a final decision-maker, and it should not be treated as one.
Applicant quality usually shifts within two to three weeks of rewriting one ad. Retention improvements show up over the next twelve months, once the hires you make on this basis reach their first performance review.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sabiha is a Talent Acquisition Director, speaker and author with more than 16 years of hiring experience across the UK, Dubai, South Africa and Malaysia. She helps UK organisations move past reactive hiring and build workforce strategies that hold up for the long run, using AI alongside human judgement. Shortlisted as Best Career Coach UK by the CDI, she has helped businesses improve the way they hire and retain talent.
Learn more at meetsabiha.com.
Global Talent. Ethical AI. Strategic Hiring. Sustainable Retention.
