A CV is a proxy. A degree says someone had access to study. A title says what one employer called the job.
Neither says whether they can do yours.
What is skills-based hiring? Deciding on what a candidate can show they do, in a work sample or a structured interview, instead of on degrees, titles and years. The CV stays. It just stops being the filter. In the Netherlands, the law is already pushing in this direction.
TL;DR
- Define three to five testable skills per role. That's most of the work.
- Test like the job, briefly. A short work sample beats a weekend take-home.
- Close the loop. Check after six months whether high scorers actually do better.
- Dutch law agrees. No maximum on experience in a vacancy, and no purely automated rejections.
Why the CV filter misfires
A CV screen is a classifier, and it fails in both directions.
- False negatives. The self-taught developer. The support engineer doing ops work under the wrong title. They never reach a human.
- False positives. The perfect title who mostly attended meetings about the thing. They reach the final round.
You pay for both: a smaller pool now, a bad hire later. And roles move faster than titles. In our September 2026 careers snapshot, AI Tools Literacy appeared in 36% of AI-related postings. Almost nobody has that in a past job title. Plenty of people have the skill.
Step 1: Write the role as skills, not as a person
Start with the vacancy, because that's where the filter is set.
- Three to five core skills. What the person does every week. "Debug a failing deployment", not "strong problem solver".
- How you'd see each one. A task, a question or past work that shows it.
- What's trainable. If they could learn it in three months, it isn't a filter.
This also keeps you inside Dutch equal-treatment law. The College voor de Rechten van de Mens' Vacaturecheck allows a minimum years of experience, not a maximum, and rules out "starter" or "recently graduated" as a description of the candidate. In ruling 2025-1, it found that requiring a "Dutch native speaker" was discrimination on nationality. Ask for the level of Dutch the work needs, and you've written a skill instead of a pedigree. More in our vacancy guide.
Step 2: Test like the job
The best test is a small slice of the real work.
- Work sample. Triage three tickets, review a pull request, clean a small dataset.
- Structured interview. Same questions, same order, same rubric. Less charming than a chat, much more comparable.
- Scenario. "The deploy failed at 16:55 on a Friday. Walk me through the next ten minutes." Score the reasoning. (The correct first answer is "why are we deploying at 16:55 on a Friday".)
Keep it short. A take-home that eats a weekend selects for people without kids or a current job. That's a filter you didn't mean to add.
Grade the sample before you see the name, school and last employer. It doesn't remove judgement. It just stops the CV from grading the test.
Step 3: Check that skills-based hiring predicts anything
A test is only useful if high scorers turn out to do the job better.
- Log every hire's score.
- At six and twelve months, compare with ramp-up, manager rating and whether they stayed.
- No difference between high and low scorers? The test measures something else. Fix it or drop it.
A test nobody checks is an alert nobody reads: it makes you feel monitored without monitoring anything.
Step 4: Let software sort, let people decide
AI is good at the boring half: mapping CVs and vacancies to the same skills, so "managed vendor budgets" meets "supplier negotiation".
It isn't allowed to do the deciding half alone.
- GDPR article 22: candidates can refuse a rejection made purely by automation. Keep a human who really reviews.
- EU AI Act: tools that filter or evaluate candidates are high-risk (Annex III), with duties on oversight and transparency.
- EU pay transparency directive: once in Dutch law, you can't ask candidates for their pay history. One more proxy gone.
That's where Hash fits: it rewrites a vacancy for the role as it works today and matches candidates on the same skills scale Slash uses for job seekers. It sorts. You decide. (Time to hire covers the rest of the process.)
FAQ
What is skills-based hiring? Hiring on what a candidate can show they do, through work samples or structured interviews, instead of on degrees, titles and years of experience.
Does it mean dropping the CV? No. The CV becomes context. Skills are tested first, and the CV explains the path that led there.
Is skills-based hiring legal in the Netherlands? Yes, and it fits Dutch rules. Vacancies may set a minimum but not a maximum on experience, and under GDPR article 22 a person must review before anyone is rejected by software.
How long does it take to set up for one role? A few weeks to define the skills and the test. Six to twelve months before you know if the test predicts performance.
Your move this week
- Pick one open role and write its three to five core skills.
- Strip the vacancy of any maximum experience and any "native speaker".
- Start a spreadsheet: candidate, score, hired, six-month check. Future you will thank present you.
Figures: SlashHash September 2026 careers snapshot, AI-related postings in the Netherlands and Australia, March–September 2026. Law: College voor de Rechten van de Mens, Vacaturecheck and ruling 2025-1; GDPR article 22; EU AI Act, Annex III; Directive (EU) 2023/970.