Jason-Green-WIP

Transparency is key to matching job to jobseeker

A conversation with Jason Green, co-founder, SkillSmart
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Employers. Job seekers. Educators. These three stakeholders need to talk to each other if we’re going to close the skills gap in hiring.

“There are changing perspectives around the way in which we identify talent, because there’s an acknowledgement that the old way isn’t, or wasn’t, working,” says Jason Green, co-founder of SkillSmart, a tech platform that brings the three pieces of the hiring puzzle together.

For decades, companies looking for new employees have simply relied on simply posting a job description, a litany of the tasks a worker would do, not a list of the skills that worker should have.

SkillSmart Seeker makes a business’ “job requirements more transparent and makes it easy for job seekers to enter and qualify their skills. Job seekers get more insight into the skills they need and links to resources to gain them.” according to the company.

“As tools like skills-based matching, skills-based hiring are demonstrating their business efficacy, we’re seeing more businesses open their eyes and express a willingness to employ those types of solutions,” he says in this episode of the Work in Progress podcast.

Green and his company believe that creating a stronger talent pipeline requires education to take a more interactive role in the process. “Part of the reason why we have those three institutions on the same platform, because they all influence one another. The employer is able to define the skill sets that they’re looking to hire. And that sort of dictates what the job seeker is able to see.”

“We’re showing qualifications from the job seekers experiences, but ultimately where there’s a gap were now knowing where someone only is 40 percent qualified, they need to be able to see with their limited resources and time, which training programs are actually going to equip them with the skill sets, perhaps the certifications and credentials that they need to be qualified for that job,”

Green says that this three-way communication needs to be dynamic and regular for the educational institution to be able to say, “well, what are the skills that our local employers actually want our students to have?”

You can listen to the entire Work in Progress episode here, or download it wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

Episode 148: Jason Green, Co-founder, SkillSmart
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts