This tool from the U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Commerce helps employers adopt and implement skills-first hiring, a strategy that prioritizes a worker’s actual skills and knowledge over traditional credentials like a college degree. Skills-first hiring promotes job quality by expanding access to high-quality jobs for skilled workers often overlooked due to non-traditional backgrounds. Employers benefit from this model by tapping into a broader, more diverse talent pool, which can lead to reduced time-to-hire, lower costs, and higher employee retention.
The kit provides a practical, step-by-step roadmap for implementation, advising employers to clearly identify their hiring goal, select a simple job role, break a job into “core” versus “great-to-have” skills, develop a scoring rubric, and use multiple, accessible evaluation methods beyond the resume, such as structured interviews and hands-on assessments. Finally, the guide emphasizes the importance of transparent recruiting and inclusive onboarding that addresses skill gaps, provides mentorship, and ensures the new hire is paid fairly based on their actual skills, not previous salary history.
This is part of a collection of resources created by the Department of Labor and other federal agencies, relating to job quality and implementing good jobs priorities through federal investments and beyond. Many of these resources are no longer publicly available on government websites, though they were all at one point public and shared with the intent of preserving these resources for public use.
Please note that we cannot guarantee that information contained in these resources related to specific programs, policies, and processes remains accurate, though many best practices and examples remain useful. In addition, many of these resources link out to government websites that do not exist anymore. You may be able to find these linked resources in the archive itself by searching the Overview document. For more resources, please visit the Data Rescue Project website, at https://www.datarescueproject.org/
