Skills

This resource provides a powerful framework for crafting compelling stories that show employers why skill-based hiring works. The framework helps highlight employer mindsets, hiring challenges, and the real-world impact of focusing on skills over degrees. Using the narrative structure—People, Goals, Problems, Solutions, and Call to Action—the guide includes prompts, story-building elements, and a sample employer story to show how this approach strengthens teams and drives business success.

This communications toolkit is designed to help organizations and advocates effectively engage learners and employers regarding the value of career education and training programs as well as skill-based hiring. It offers research-backed messaging that reflects what people care about most—and what motivates them to take action. These messages don’t just describe the benefits of pathways programs, they also help audiences see these options as relevant, accessible, and worth pursuing. The guidance in this manual is grounded in science-based communication practices and shaped by extensive research, including a landscape analysis of messaging in the field and media, a nationally representative survey with message testing, roundtable discussions with learners and employers, and a series of pulse surveys.

This toolkit offers adaptable, ready-to-use messages, language, and themes to support outreach, engagement, and storytelling. Use them to strengthen your communications—whether you're writing a social post, developing a presentation, or talking with partners and stakeholders. The messages are designed to be flexible; feel free to use them as written or tailor them to fit your audience and voice.

After years of workforce disruption, employers are rethinking what it means to hire well. They’re increasingly open to skill-based hiring, but change takes more than good intentions. This fact sheet highlights what employers believe, what’s holding them back, and what supports them in taking the next step.

This playbook is a step-by-step guide to implementing more equitable and effective approaches to employee recruiting, hiring, and advancement by embracing skills-first talent management practices.

This resource includes a set of skills-based hiring toolkits that include a skills-based job-posting, interview questions, and onboarding plans. Each Skills-Based Hiring Toolkit is packed with valuable resources that will help you transform your hiring strategy.

The State of the Future U.S. Workforce: Student Ability Report analyzes anonymized data from the YouScience Discovery aptitude-based career guidance assessments taken in U.S. high schools (grades 9 through 12) across all 50 states in 2021. They outline our findings and suggest solutions that address the challenge in a holistic, practical way in this report.

In 2023, SHRM Foundation commissioned Topos Foundation to investigate the effectiveness of various framing, language, and argumentation deployed in an ongoing effort, by SHRM Foundation and many other partners, to promote hiring that puts less emphasis on academic degrees and considers all the ways job candidates may be qualified for a position. This report contains valuable insights into effectively communicating the case for skills-first hiring with the broadest audience.

The Tear the Paper Ceiling: STARs Hiring Playbook gives human resource professionals, talent leaders, and hiring managers practical tools and guidance to shift their hiring to include STARs - workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

This report highlights the significant presence of Hispanic workers who are skilled through alternative routes (STARs) in the workforce and their overrepresentation in lower-wage occupations. It discusses the barriers these workers face due to degree requirements and suggests that employers prioritize skills over formal education to improve economic mobility for Hispanic STARs.

As employers seek to revitalize and diversify their talent pipelines, Opportunity@Work offers insights to inform employers’ understanding of where to find Black talent and the skills that Black STARs can bring to their talent pipelines. This report shares three key insights that every employer should know.