Skills Are Not Keywords

Skills Are Not Keywords

December 17, 2025

Why Skills-Based Hiring Is Stuck — and What a Skill Actually Is

For the last decade, we’ve been telling ourselves a comforting story:

If we can just agree on a common skills taxonomy — or build better crosswalks between them — skills-based hiring will finally work.

It won’t.

Not because the effort is misguided, but because the premise is wrong.

A skill is not a keyword. And it is not a static label that can be standardized into meaning.

That misunderstanding is the root cause of why skills-based hiring keeps stalling — even as taxonomies, ontologies, and AI matching systems multiply.

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