Mercy Health partnered with a local consulting firm, Metrics Reporting, Inc., to analyze the skills and competencies needed for their open roles. Instead of analyzing every single role across the organization, the team grouped roles into job families based on job characteristics defined by O*NET—the Department of Labor’s publicly available database of knowledge, skills, abilities, and work activities. Twenty-two O*NET job families covered 95% of Mercy Health's employees.

They then isolated the key skills and competencies for each job family. Based on O*NET’s Generalized Activities of Work (GWAs), they identified job-specific competencies for each of the 22 job families, and industry-specific competencies which span across all job families. They mapped foundational competencies, like listening or critical thinking, to occupational competencies to determine the impact of various foundational competencies on job performance for each role.

In addition to employing evidenced-based skills assessments, the team designed a series of standardized interviewing guides for recruiters and hiring managers, which helps to ensure a consistent candidates interview experience.

Scores on the assessments outlined in Step 2 are banded and combined to provide the recruiters with a five-star rating scale that indicates the overall fit of a candidate for the job family requirements. Hiring teams can use results from the assessments to inform decisions about hiring and onboarding.