By Lee Flanagan
Dr. Naresh Kumar Puritipati, President-HR at Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals Corporation, is expanding the company’s manufacturing footprint and building a self-paced learning platform to go with it, according to hiring trends reported by ETHRWorld.com. He also cites a number from those trends: 70 percent of employers now use skills-based hiring for entry-level recruitment, up from 65 percent the year before. No study is named. No methodology is described. The number simply arrives, attached to one executive’s framing, and gets repeated as if it settles something.
The trade press wants readers to believe skills are replacing degrees. They are not. The same executives quoted for that adoption number also say degrees are not disappearing, only that what they are expected to signal is changing. The real story is that a stat like ’70 percent of employers use skills-based hiring’ tells you nothing about whether those employers can prove it. Adoption is not evidence. A claim is not a method.
The Number Nobody Can Trace
That 70 percent figure comes from DFPCL’s own cited hiring trends, not an independent study you could go verify. That matters, because the entire argument that skills-based hiring is now the dominant model rests on a statistic produced by an interested party describing their own industry shift. Treat it the way you would treat any vendor’s headline number: as a claim worth checking, not a finding to build a strategy on.
The irony is worth sitting with. A statistic meant to demonstrate that hiring has gotten more rigorous arrives with none of the rigor it is describing. If your organisation would not accept an unsourced number as evidence in a business case, do not accept one as evidence that the industry has changed.
One Label Covers Five Different Practices
Look at what different companies mean by ‘skills-based hiring,’ and the label starts to fall apart. Veena Bansal, CHRO at M3M India, describes evaluating how candidates approach problems, work with different people and situations, and learn something new, using conversations, assignments, case situations and previous work as evidence. Balkishan Sharma, Group CHRO at Paras Health, describes standardized interview assessments plus simulations, structured interviews, on-the-job observation and peer feedback. Karishma Parikh at Adecco India points to assessment-led evaluation becoming integral to technology recruitment specifically.
Those are structured, evidence-generating methods. Compare that to DFPCL’s own description of its shift: strengthening a skilled resource base and introducing self-paced learning through an LMS. Puritipati put it this way: “As we expand our manufacturing footprint, including our upcoming facilities at Gopalpur and Dahej, we are strengthening our skilled resource base across both functional and behavioural competencies.” He added that the company has “introduced self-paced learning through our LMS to encourage employees to continuously build and update their skills.” That is a capability-building programme for existing employees, not a hiring assessment. Both companies would answer ‘yes’ to a survey question asking if they practise skills-based hiring. Only one of them has described a method for measuring a skill before someone is hired.
Familiarity Is Not Capability, and the Numbers Prove It
Puritipati also cites India-focused research finding that 94 percent of surveyed learners reported using AI tools, while only 20 percent had built an AI-powered automation, agent or application. That stat deserves the same scrutiny as the adoption figure. It is cited secondhand, without a named study attached, so treat it as a data point worth verifying rather than a settled fact. The gap it describes, though, is real and worth sitting with.
Ninety-four percent familiarity against 20 percent demonstrated output is the exact failure mode that swallows a lazy ‘skills-based hiring’ claim. If your interview process asks a candidate whether they have used a tool, or whether they are comfortable with a competency, you have measured exposure. You have not measured capability. The gap between those two things is where bad hires live, and no adoption percentage closes it.
The Interview Is the Method, or There Is No Method
Puritipati made a sharper point than his own statistic gave him credit for: “The idea of a finished qualification is becoming less relevant.” That is true of degrees, and it is equally true of the label ‘skills-based hiring.’ A degree earned once and never revisited stops signalling much. A skills-based hiring claim made once, in a press quote, and never backed by a rubric, stops meaning anything too.
In our work with hiring teams, the organisations that can point to a specific rubric and a specific evidence trail for a given hire are the exception, not the rule, even among teams who describe themselves as skills-based. That is where the industry’s confidence outpaces its documentation.
Skills-based hiring is a label. Structured, evidence-based interviewing is the method that makes the label true. Without scorecards tied to role-specific competencies, without a documented reason a candidate scored higher on judgement or problem-solving than another candidate, ‘we hire on skills now’ is a sentence, not a system. Ask a VP of talent acquisition what share of their hires are skills-based, and most will give you a number. Ask them to produce the rubric and the score behind ten of those hires, and the number gets a lot quieter.
The Gap Closes With a Rubric, Not a Percentage
None of this argues against the shift these executives describe. Bansal’s read that judgement, ownership, curiosity and resilience cannot be captured on a certificate is correct, and it matches what practical hiring, done properly, is trying to solve for. Sharma’s position, that formal qualifications still establish regulatory eligibility in healthcare even as they stop being the final proof of capability, is a sensible way to hold both truths at once.
The gap between claiming skills-based hiring and practising it will not be closed by another adoption survey. It closes when someone in your organisation can produce the rubric, the score and the evidence behind a hiring decision on demand, not when they can produce a percentage.
Original reporting: ETHRWorld.com.
Frequently asked questions
What separates real skills-based hiring from a relabelled CV screen?
Evidence-generating methods such as standardized assessments, simulations, case exercises and structured interviews scored against role-specific competencies. A learning programme for existing employees, on its own, does not qualify because it never measures a candidate before they are hired.
Is the 70 percent skills-based hiring adoption figure independently verified?
No. It comes from hiring trends cited by one executive, Dr. Naresh Kumar Puritipati of DFPCL, without a named independent study or methodology attached, so it should be treated as a claim rather than confirmed industry-wide data.
Why does the 94 percent versus 20 percent AI figure matter to a hiring story?
It shows a large gap between people who report using AI tools and the much smaller share who have actually built something with them. That same gap, between familiarity and demonstrated capability, is what a shallow skills-based hiring process fails to catch.
Are degrees becoming irrelevant to hiring?
No. The executives cited in this reporting are explicit that degrees are not disappearing. What is changing is what a degree is expected to signal, moving from a finished qualification to a starting point for continuous capability building.
What should a hiring leader check before repeating a ‘skills-based hiring’ claim?
Whether an actual rubric, a scored assessment, and a documented evidence trail sit behind recent hires, rather than a learning framework or programme that was never designed to measure candidates before they are hired.