A new trend has been steadily rising in IT hiring: skills-first hiring. 

A degree is no longer the deciding factor when screening applicants. What matters more than a formal education is whether a candidate has the skills, capabilities, and adaptability to get the job done. 

For IT hiring managers, especially in high-demand fields like data, application development, security, and platform engineering, this shift is both a challenge and an opportunity. It opens the door to a wider, more diverse talent pool while also requiring new ways to assess candidates beyond what’s written on a resume. 

Let’s explore how to put skills-first hiring into practice without sacrificing speed, quality, or culture fit. 

What Skills-First Hiring Looks Like in IT 

At its core, skills-first hiring focuses on what a candidate can do now and their capacity to grow. This approach is especially valuable in IT, where tech stacks evolve quickly, and the best hires often come from unexpected backgrounds. 

When evaluating IT candidates, there are four main categories to consider: 

• Technical Proficiency – Can they use the tools, frameworks, and languages your role requires? 

• Problem-Solving Ability – How do they approach a challenge, from diagnosis to solution? 

• Collaboration & Communication – Can they work effectively with cross-functional teams and translate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders? 

• Adaptability & Continuous Learning – Are they staying current with emerging technologies and willing to grow with the role? 

The ROI of Skills-First Hiring in IT 

When done well, skills-first hiring benefits both hiring managers and candidates: 

• Wider Talent Pool – Tapping into self-taught professionals, career changers, and non-traditional backgrounds. 

• Better Retention – Candidates hired for ability and adaptability tend to stay longer and grow with the role. 

• Faster Time-to-Fill – Less time spent waiting for the “perfect” credential match, more focus on who can do the job. 

In a field where demand for top talent consistently outpaces supply, skills-first hiring is an important competitive advantage. 

Practical Ways to Evaluate for Skills-Based Hiring 

Review Portfolios & Real-World Projects 

Resumes are a useful summary of a candidate’s experience, but a portfolio gives you an up close look at their capabilities.  

• For data roles: Look for dashboards, data models, or analysis reports. 

• For application development: Check GitHub repos, code samples, or contributions to open-source projects. 

• For security: Review documented incident response plans or security audits they’ve participated in. 

• For platform engineering: Evaluate architecture diagrams, automation scripts, or cloud infrastructure designs. 

Seeing their work in context gives you a more accurate read on their experience than a bullet point ever could. It gives you direct insight into how candidates think, design, and deliver. 

Use Role-Specific Technical Assessments 

Generic tests rarely show how someone will perform in your environment. Instead, simulate real-world challenges tied to the role. 

Examples: 

• Data – Provide a messy dataset and ask them to clean, model, and visualize it. See how they approach ambiguity and efficiency. 

• Applications – Assign a small feature to build, ensuring it integrates into an existing code base or API. 

• Security – Give them a simulated incident and ask for their containment and recovery plan. 

• Platform – Ask them to design a fault-tolerant cloud deployment architecture for a given workload. 

Real-world scenarios are a great measure of a candidate’s fit for the role. It reveals how they think, work, and tackle projects. 

Structured Behavioral & Scenario-Based Interviews 

Resumes can tell you what a candidate did, but interview questions help you dig deeper. This gives candidates an opportunity to share how they operate under pressure or adapt to change. 

Sample behavioral prompts: 

• “Tell me about a time you had to learn a new technology quickly to meet a deadline. How did you approach it?” 

• “Describe a time you identified a critical issue no one else saw. What was the impact?” 

Scenario-based examples: 

• Data: “You’re given conflicting data from two sources feeding a critical dashboard. How do you decide which to trust?” 

• Security: “A vulnerability is discovered in production right before a product launch, what’s your immediate next step?” 

• Platform: “A critical service is failing intermittently across regions. How do you troubleshoot and communicate the issue?” 

Include Peer Interviews 

Peer interviews are one of the most underutilized parts of a skills-first hiring process. They give candidates a chance to interact with potential teammates in a way that’s less formal than a manager-led interview, but often more telling. 

Why it works: 

• Real-world insight: Teammates know the technical realities of the role and can better gauge whether a candidate’s skills translate into day-to-day success. 

• Culture and communication check: You’ll see how the candidate collaborates with people they’d actually be working alongside, and how they explain complex ideas to peers. 

• Reduced performance bias: Some candidates get interview jitters in front of hiring managers but perform more naturally when talking shop with peers, leading to a more accurate evaluation. 

The best IT hires aren’t always the ones with the longest resumes or the most prestigious degrees. They’re the ones who can solve problems, adapt quickly, and deliver results in the real world. In fact, 94% of skills-first hires outperform those who were hired on the basis of degree or experience.

By focusing on skills-first hiring, you’ll fill roles faster and build stronger, more capable teams.