Skills Based Hiring for Frontline Roles: Why It Stalls, and Where to Start

What is skills based hiring?

Skills based hiring judges candidates on evidence of what the job needs. The OECD describes a skills first approach as one that puts people's competencies ahead of traditional credentials (OECD, 2025). In practice that means three changes: writing requirements as tasks, checking each task with evidence that can answer it, and deciding on that evidence rather than on what a CV happens to show.

Most writing on the subject comes from US office and technology roles, where the debate is about dropping a bachelor's degree. The authors of the most cited US study say these strategies are designed for the roles in between: jobs that clearly need a degree are at one end, jobs where nobody would require one at the other (Sigelman, Fuller and Martin, 2024).

Frontline roles in logistics, warehousing, production, cleaning and hospitality mostly sit in that second group. In our reading, the filters doing the damage there are different: "at least two years' experience", a job title that matches the vacancy, a forklift certificate on the CV that nobody has looked at, or "native Dutch" where the work needs someone who understands safety instructions. Each stands in for a task without showing whether the candidate can do it.

If you hire for several sites, the For companies page shows how Radius Hire approaches this for employers.

How common is skills based hiring in the Netherlands?

On the OECD's measure, it is less common here than in most OECD countries. An OECD report published on 24 June 2025 used LinkedIn Recruiter data from July 2023 to June 2024. Across OECD countries, 14% of searches filtered on skills only and 1% on both skills and degrees (OECD, 2025). The Netherlands was at the low end for searches filtered solely by skills, at 7%, close to the United Kingdom and Italy at 8%. At the top were countries such as Costa Rica at 23% (OECD, 2025, chapter 1).

Read that 7% carefully. It counts how recruiters filtered searches on one platform, not hires or assessments, and the chapter text gives a slightly different OECD average (15% filtered by skills). The OECD adds two limits: recruiters who use the service may already lean towards skills, and in some countries LinkedIn mainly fills white collar roles while trade and blue collar roles are filled through other channels, so skills based practice there can go unseen.

The OECD links the low Dutch share partly to the weight given to formal qualifications, through regulation, licensing and professional norms, especially in health, finance and law. Those are not frontline sectors. For a warehouse or a cleaning company the honest conclusion is narrow: Dutch recruiters on LinkedIn lean on qualifications more than most, and the data says almost nothing about how frontline candidates are judged. That gap is the opening.

Why do skills first pledges change so few hires?

Because changing an advert does not change how people are judged. The clearest evidence comes from the Burning Glass Institute and the Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work, published in February 2024 (Sigelman, Fuller and Martin, 2024). The researchers studied about 11,300 roles at large US firms and matched changes in job adverts to who was actually hired, using online career histories.

What they found:

The report's explanation matters more than the numbers. After the posting changes, managers still have to sort and assess candidates under pressure to fill an expensive vacancy and keep hiring costs down, and the authors argue this gives them a real incentive to fall back on familiar proxies instead of assessing each person's skills. The degree stays in the decision even after it has left the advert.

Frontline hiring has the same weakness with a different proxy. The CV is the one document every candidate has, so years of experience and job titles fill the space a check should fill. The research on prediction points the other way. In a 2022 review of many studies, years of job experience had an average link with later job performance of 0.07, against 0.42 for structured interviews, 0.40 for job knowledge tests and 0.33 for work sample tests (Sackett et al., 2022; restated in Sackett et al., 2023). These are averages with a wide spread between studies, not figures for Dutch frontline hiring. We explain the experience question in more detail in Three Years on Reach Trucks Tells You Less Than You Think.

What counts as a skill check for a frontline role?

A skill check is any step that answers one requirement against an agreed answer. For frontline roles there are four kinds, and most roles need only two or three of them:

The table below shows what this looks like for six common requirements. It is an illustrative example, not a validated test: adapt the questions and the agreed answers with the supervisor who knows the work.

Illustrative example. An order picker advert that read "minimum 2 years' warehouse experience, fluent Dutch, flexible" becomes four checks: the scanner question above, the 06:00 travel question, a structured question on which shifts in the rotation the candidate can work, and a short question that shows they understand a spoken safety instruction in the language the site uses. No degree was involved before or after. What changes is that years on a CV no longer decide who gets a call.

Which skills should you not test before hire?

Do not test anything you will teach in the first week. Using your scanner model, your site's routes or your labelling system is training, not selection. Testing it before hire rewards people who happen to have worked somewhere similar, which brings the experience proxy back in.

Three more limits:

The test for every check: does it answer a requirement the job really has, at the level the job needs?

What about certificates and diplomas?

A certificate proves past training, not current skill. That makes it strong evidence for one question ("is this certificate valid?") and weaker evidence for another ("can this person do the task well today?").

Take the reach truck. Dutch working conditions rules require that self propelled mobile work equipment is operated by employees who have the specific expertise to do so (Arbobesluit, article 7.17c). The rule asks for expertise; it does not name a certificate. So the certificate is useful evidence of training, and a knowledge question or a supervised check adds evidence of skill. We cover when certificate checks can happen in Why Do We Check Certificates After We Have Already Said Yes? and in Verifying Frontline Candidates.

Diplomas have a second problem: not every valid one can be looked up. DUO's diploma service covers diplomas from publicly funded MBO from 2007, secondary school from 2006 and higher education from 1996, with later start years for private institutions. Foreign diplomas and sector training (brancheopleidingen) are not in it, even when they are valid (DUO, Mijn diploma's). Candidates who trained abroad or before those years will not be found. If your process treats "not found in the register" as "not qualified", it will turn away qualified people. Treat a missing entry as a reason to ask for other evidence, not as a failed check.

What does skills based hiring mean for staffing agencies?

For agencies, it starts at the job order. Client requests often arrive as proxies: "three years on a reach truck, Dutch speaking, available now." The intake call is the moment to turn each line into a task and agree with the client which check answers it. A requirement agreed as a task is also easier to explain to a candidate who is turned down, and to a client who asks how a placement was screened.

Agencies also hold evidence no CV contains: how a returning worker did on earlier placements. Used lawfully, with the worker able to see and respond to what is recorded, that history can say more than any new CV.

What are the limits of skills based hiring?

It improves the evidence you collect; it does not promise better hires. The research on what predicts performance is not specific to Dutch frontline roles, and averages hide wide differences between settings. The OECD warns that poorly designed assessments or algorithm driven tools can carry bias into a process rather than remove it (OECD, 2025). We know of no study showing that skills based hiring closes discrimination gaps in Dutch frontline hiring.

The only way to know whether your checks work is to track your own results: who passed, who started, who stayed, and whether the evidence you collected matched what the supervisor saw.

Conclusion

Skills based hiring stalls when it stops at the job advert, and the US data shows how often that happens. For frontline roles the degree was rarely the barrier in the first place. The real work is replacing experience proxies and unchecked claims with one check per requirement, agreed before the first candidate applies. The Netherlands starts from a low base on the OECD measure, so there is room to stand out. Start with one role this month.

How Radius helps

Radius Hire is an AI hiring platform for frontline roles in the Netherlands. Its AI Interviewer gives every applicant a short, structured voice interview in the language set for the role, with the same questions built from the job's requirements. Match shows for each requirement whether it is backed by a document or a check, rests only on what the candidate said, or is still missing, with the moment in the interview that answered it. Where the employer uses Radius Passport, certificates are recorded with their expiry dates so a recruiter can review the evidence before an offer. Radius never rejects a candidate on its own; a recruiter reviews the evidence and makes every hiring decision. Radius is new, so this article explains how the product works rather than claiming results. See how this looks for warehouse roles.