You know this problem well…
Turnover that doesn’t make sense
You’re paying competitively. People still leave, or worse, should never have been hired.
Mistakes that cost real money
A wrong hire doesn’t just cost a salary. It includes the cost of hiring and training them, and starting over.
Your best people doing the wrong job
Every hour your ops manager or your VP spends screening resumes is an hour they're not spending on the work that actually grows the business.
Most small businesses don't have an HR department to catch this before it happens. That's the gap Built by Skill fills.
How we work
Most recruiters fill a role. We figure out what "good" actually looks like in it and then build a hiring process around that, so you get it right the first time, and every time after.
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Shadowing, interviews, and real data — not a job title or a template. We shadow employees, conduct interviews, and analyze the work itself to understand what success looks like on day one and long term.
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A clear, specific picture of the skills, judgment, and habits that separate your best people from everyone else — not a compliance document, a decision-making tool you'll actually use.
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Structured interviews, work-based evaluations, and clear criteria — built specifically for your team.
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Including onboarding, and regular check-ins with hires and supervisors to make sure it’s working.
The method behind Built by Skill, called competency modeling, comes from decades of research in industrial-organizational psychology. A 2011 study in Personnel Psychology (the leading academic journal in the field) laid out what separates a competency model that actually works from one that doesn't.
Why this works
Most "skills lists" are guesswork
The same research that shapes our approach also found that a lot of competency work ends up a "hodge podge" of vague ideas with no real definition. We build ours the rigorous way: specific, observable, and tied to what actually separates your best people from everyone else.
It doesn't have to be complicated to be right.
You don't need 50 competencies and a 40-page binder. The research points to roughly a dozen well-defined skills per role as the sweet spot. That’s enough to be accurate, and small enough that you and your team will actually use it.
One model, every people decision.
A well-built competency model doesn't just help you hire. The same criteria can guide onboarding, performance conversations, and who's ready for more responsibility, so you're not inventing new criteria every time.