88% of tech employers are using skills-based hiring, with more and more employers adopting a multi-measure approach to hiring to ensure they find the right candidates amid an ever-changing work landscape.

This is according to TestGorilla‘s global The State of Skills-Based Hiring 2024 report, which surveyed over 2,000 employers and employees in the UK, US, Australia, Europe, and Latin America.

The report found that soft-skills are increasingly in demand, even as AI continues to be adopted across industries, and employers adopting a multi-measure approach to hiring are seeing positive results.

Globally and across industries, 81% of employers are using skills-based hiring in 2024, an increased from 2023 (73%), and 2022 (57%).

While tech employers are above average when it comes to skills-based hiring, around half (48%) are finding it harder to find great tech talent in 2024 than 2023.

Despite this, 89% of tech employers are satisfied with the hires they have made in the last 12 months – an increase of 5% compared to the rest of the industry.

Further, 79% of employees across all industries are planning on staying in their role for three or more years in 2024, a major factor in employee satisfaction. It seems skills-based hiring is promoting employee and employer satisfaction.

As well, skills-based hiring could be the solution to tech’s diversity problem, with almost all (93%) of tech employers saying skills-based hiring has resulted in improved diversity, and 84% of employers across all industries agreeing that skills-based hiring helps reduce bias in the hiring process.

This is vitally important in tech, an industry in which 41% claim to experience bias during the recruitment process, compared to the industry-wide average of 31%.

But part of skills-based hiring success in the tech industry has to do with the nature of the tech sector itself.

“Testing is definitely important, especially now in this age where the cognitive requirements for most tasks are increasing,” Jonas Atil, director of recruitment at NexusHR said.

“That alone warrants an assessment tool measuring cognitive capacity. And then, of course, we need to test for specific skills that can’t be demonstrated in a resume, like coding. Someone can claim they’ve been coding for ten years, but the technology changes extremely fast.”

Software development is a remote-friendly career option, and skills-based hiring lends itself well to remote working models as it can be largley completed online.

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Further, over half (56%) of business leaders in the tech sector are still identifying skills-shortages as one of their biggest challenges, so hiring based on skills makes sense.

Still, soft-skills are highly sought after as they are more difficult to replace with AI advancements, leading many to turn to multi-measure models. 89% of employers think it’s more important for candidates to have soft skills than it was five years ago, the survey found.