Everyone Has Skills. What Can They Actually Do?

Two people apply for the same job. Both say they’re good at leadership.

One has spent ten years managing a department of fifty people. The other has never held a management position but has brought together volunteers, persuaded local businesses to contribute and delivered a successful community project.

Who has the better leadership skills?

It’s a trick question, of course. We haven’t learned enough about either person to know. The experienced manager may have built an outstanding team. The volunteer organiser may have demonstrated remarkable initiative and influence. Both may have struggled in ways that their achievements don’t reveal.

Yet increasingly, we’re being encouraged to describe people and opportunities through lists of skills. Leadership. Communication. Problem solving. Adaptability.

Those labels might help us find people worth considering. But they don’t tell us what those people can actually do.

If we’re not careful, skills-based recruitment could become another version of the keyword matching.

The Problem With Putting People Into Categories

Skills-based hiring is a welcome development. Moving beyond job titles, qualifications and years of experience can help employers discover people whose capabilities might otherwise be overlooked.

It can also help candidates recognise the value of experience gained outside conventional employment. Someone who has cared for a family member, organised a community project or changed careers may have developed capabilities that don’t fit neatly into a traditional CV.

Naming those capabilities matters. But a label is only a starting point.

Take problem solving. Almost everyone could reasonably claim to be good at it. Yet resolving a technical fault, negotiating between colleagues and finding a way to deliver a project with half the expected budget are very different experiences.

All involve problem solving. Whether they demonstrate the capability an employer needs depends on the circumstances, the decisions involved and what happened as a result.

Recent research offers a useful warning. A study published in October 2026 examined whether adding standardised skills information improved AI models predicting people’s next career moves. Across two datasets, the additional skills produced only marginal or inconsistent improvements. Much of the information was already present in people’s career histories, while many skill labels were too generic to distinguish between different paths.

The research concerned career prediction rather than actual hiring decisions, so it doesn’t establish that skills-based recruitment is ineffective. It does illustrate a potential weakness in replacing rich descriptions of experience with standard labels.

We’ve changed the vocabulary without necessarily improving our understanding.

What Did You Actually Do?

Let’s return to our two candidates who both claim leadership as a strength.

Suppose the experienced manager describes rebuilding a struggling team, improving retention and developing two colleagues into leadership roles.

The volunteer organiser explains how they persuaded twelve people to contribute their time, negotiated free use of a venue and delivered a successful community event despite losing a major sponsor.

These are illustrative examples, but they reveal something important. Both candidates have demonstrated leadership, although in different circumstances and with different responsibilities.

The manager has experience of developing people within an organisation, making decisions with formal authority and improving an established team. The volunteer has demonstrated initiative, persuasion and the ability to bring people together without being able to instruct them.

Which experience matters more depends on the opportunity.

A growing business establishing its first management team may value somebody who can introduce structure while remaining flexible. An established organisation facing a difficult transformation may need someone who has led change across multiple departments.

Both might advertise for leadership skills, but they’re looking for different contributions.

A better conversation would explore the evidence behind each candidate’s claim. What were they trying to achieve? What obstacles did they face? What did they personally contribute? What changed as a result, and what would they do differently?

Those questions help employers understand the capability rather than simply recognise the label.

They also create opportunities to discover relevant experience from places the employer might not originally have considered.

Start With the Work, Not the Skills List

There’s another side to this problem. Employers often begin recruitment by deciding which skills they want before clearly defining what they need somebody to accomplish.

The result can be a familiar collection of requirements: communication, leadership, problem solving, adaptability and commercial awareness.

All perfectly reasonable. None particularly revealing.

A more useful starting point is the work itself. What needs to change? Which problems need solving? What would a successful contribution look like six or twelve months from now?

Once that’s clear, employers can consider what evidence would give them confidence that someone could make that contribution.

That evidence may come from an equivalent role in the same industry. Equally, it may come from a different sector, a project, volunteering or another setting where similar challenges were encountered.

The important thing is to understand the connection rather than assume that identical job titles or matching skills labels provide the answer.

There are three useful questions to ask before recruiting:

1. What are we actually asking this person to accomplish? Describe the work and the outcomes rather than beginning with a list of desirable attributes.
2. What evidence would convince us they could do it? Consider the different circumstances in which someone might have demonstrated the relevant capability.
3. What do we still need to discover? Use the selection process to explore uncertainty rather than simply confirm what the application already suggests.

Skills frameworks and matching technology can help organise this information and identify connections that might otherwise remain hidden. But a percentage match is only useful if we understand what sits behind it.

A good hiring decision also considers what the candidate wants to do next. Someone may have the capability to perform a role without having any real interest in doing it.

The best opportunities emerge when relevant capability meets work that somebody genuinely wants to pursue.

Our two candidates both claimed leadership as a strength. Perhaps either could do the job. Perhaps neither could.

The answer depends on what the employer needs them to achieve and what their experience tells us about their ability to do it.

If all you have is a list of skills, how would you know?