Join/Renew
For as long as Jill Chapman has been at Insperity, the firm has used behavioral-based interviewing to identify candidates’ qualities and experience.
“This has made for an easy transition into more skills-based hiring,” says Chapman, director of early talent programs, who has been with Insperity for 14 years.
Chapman describes Insperity as an HR consulting organization positioned on the “leading edge of HR, talent acquisition, and talent management matters.”
A move to the Workday platform in 2025 provided the firm with an opportunity to redo work around its job families, architectures, descriptions, and more.
“This launched a conversation around skills-based hiring,” Chapman recalls.
“Once we started talking about it, it wasn't a huge leap for us to do anything different with some of the ways that we were doing things. But in looking at where our company was, the jobs that we have, and what we see ourselves needing in the future, it just seemed like we could widen the nets if we started talking more and more about skills-based hiring.”
She cited evidence that if somebody's well suited for a role, they're going to do better in that role, have more job satisfaction, and be more productive. This aligned with internal conversations at Insperity about the different ways that people may find careers in the future.
“Skills-based hiring fits better with our ideas of what the future is going to look like for the workforce, for us, and for the market,” Chapman notes.
All of Insperity’s hiring is conducted through its corporate talent acquisition group, which manages the entire hiring process to ensure consistency across the organization.
Insperity has woven the NACE Career Readiness Competencies into its internship hiring. This, in turn, informs its full-time early talent hires because the firm has a strong track record of converting available interns to hires, including 100% of its Class of 2024 interns and 94% from the Class of 2025.
Insperity uses the competencies to boost its internship program, which, Chapman explains, is largely curriculum based.
“We have interns from many different schools, so we don't know what they know, who all of their professors are, and what they are learning in class,” she notes.
“Because our interns move as a cohort, we have to level-set frequently, such as when we introduce new topics and work schemes. There is a strong curriculum component to our internship program.”
To track intern learning, Insperity has reviewed its curriculum and assigned badges to the competencies and their associated learning mechanisms. For example, students earn badges for Insperity’s Professional Development Day, when the firm offers programming around business acumen, project management, and critical thinking.
“We are stamping each piece that the programming supports, so at the end of the day, our interns and we, as early talent sponsors, can go to our hiring managers and say that our interns had 17 hours of teamwork training and they had 14 hours of critical thinking development,” Chapman explains.
Other factors come into play during hiring decisions. Depending on the role, Insperity conducts hard skills, personality, and/or cognitive assessments. It uses behavioral interviews: Insperity recruiters might ask candidates to share the steps they took to resolve a conflict with somebody. Or, they might ask a candidate to share a time when the candidate proposed a new idea to improve a process, a product, or a situation. For some positions, recruiters may also ask candidates to do a simulation or give a presentation before they're hired.
The company considers candidates who don’t have college degrees and, as it hosts high school interns, some move straight into roles within the organization after graduation.
“We open the funnel as wide as we possibly can when we're looking externally to bring people into the organization,” Chapman says.
“To reach a wider pool, we use AI platforms, sites like LinkedIn, and job boards. We very much believe that if our funnel is wide enough, the right people are going to drop through.”
To measure the effectiveness of its skills-based hiring approach, Insperity reviews retention rates, performance reviews, and employee progression.
“We also look at recruitment costs,” Chapman says.
“If we're doing this right, we should have lower recruitment costs because we make better hires and retain them.”
Insperity takes leadership development seriously, providing employees with a wide range of programs and learning opportunities designed to help them cultivate essential leadership skills.
“By investing in ongoing development, the organization ensures that team members are equipped to take on greater responsibilities and contribute meaningfully to the company’s continued success,” Chapman says.
In addition to these development pathways, Insperity offers meaningful experiences for early talent, such as the Intern Capstone project. In a recent initiative, Gen Z interns were invited to review entry-level job descriptions, critically evaluating the language and highlighting the unique skills their generation brings to the workplace.
“Their insights helped shape job postings, ensuring the requirements reflect the strengths and relevance of today’s talent,” Chapman explains.
Skills-based hiring and skill development are foundational elements at Insperity that allow for opportunity and growth.
“At Insperity, if students have the key skills and potential for a position, we can teach them the technical abilities,” Chapman points out.
“Our hiring managers offer opportunities to students who demonstrate interest, excitement, eagerness, and potential. We can teach anybody to use our systems and programs the way we use them, but we can't teach them to have the heart and the passion for what we do. They have to come in with that.”
