I’ll be the first person in the world to write about this.
The future is not “skill-based hiring,” but “problem-based hiring.” I already bought the domain, so it’s official. ;-)
Websites like Brilliant.org do a decent job of being ahead of the curve on this, but they’re focused mainly on kinda fun ‘pop science’ upskilling courses for hipsters in the professional-managerial class (like me) who are bored of Netflix and looking to ‘stretch their brain.’
Some of the software engineering ‘quiz’-based websites like Triplebyte feign to do something like assess ‘problem solving,’ but they’re really just reporting out ‘problem solving’ as a scoring dimension, not actually tapping multi-dimensional, real-world PROBLEM SOLVING in their assessments.
There is something called “Problem-Based Learning.” This isn’t project-based learning; in real life, projects roll up into problems. Problem-based learning assigns students ‘real-world’, open-ended problems, often with amorphous or incomplete information available, and asks them to ‘solve them.’
In real life, skills are embedded within projects, and projects are embedded within problems. So the actual ontological hierarchy is:
Problems > Projects > Skills
There is nothing more axiomatic than the existence of problems. (Isn’t this what the Buddha was getting at?) Solving problems is, literally, all we do in our work lives—it’s what we, theoretically, get paid for. (I’m using the word “problem” here loosely, both to refer in its narrow sense to ‘obstacles’ we want to overcome, as well as in its broader math/computer science sense of a kind of space or topology to consider, reduce, and optimize/understand/explain/’solve’.)
My contention is that any business’s real-world problems (the things they are trying to ‘solve for’) can be chunked into categories—types of problems. And, obviously, complex real-world problems are comprised of multiple, nested, interacting problem types.
Regardless of the approach to taxonomizing and parsing real-world ‘problems’ (are you a lumper or a splitter?), we can see that certain types of problems will be more or less similar to others.
And, similarly, someone who is good at solving certain types of problems will be good at solving adjacent types of problems, and so on.
This brings us back to hiring. For jobs, instead of deconstructing their nonsensical job descriptions (job tasks) into ‘skills,’ and then searching for people who demonstrate those ‘skills,’ we should ask the employer what problems they want/need/anticipate needing to be solved.
Then, we should categorize those real-world (business) problems into certain abstract types of problems, according to our ‘problem taxonomy’. Lastly, we should assess people to see what types of problems they are good at solving AND enjoy solving, and match companies and people based on their shared problem solving spaces and interests.
There’s a lot more I can write about this, but you get the gist. In 10 years this will be a fact. Bookmark the search if you want to keep checking: https://www.google.com/search?ei=toAGYJKeO8Lb5gL_6pPwBA&q=%22problem-based+hiring%22