Hard skills
Also called:technical skills, hard skill
Hard skills are the easiest competencies to put on a CV and the easiest to fake there. The fix isn't a better keyword filter — it's making the candidate do the work.
What counts as a hard skill
A hard skill is something you can name, teach, and grade. The test: could you write a pass/fail rubric for it?
- A programming language, a CAD tool, a payroll system.
- A spoken or written language at a defined level.
- A regulated competence — a CDL, a nursing license, an electrician’s certification.
If you can’t write the rubric, it’s probably a soft skill — and a different evaluation method applies.
Why the CV lies about them
Hard skills are the section of a CV candidates inflate most, because they’re concrete enough to claim and rarely checked. “Advanced Excel” and “fluent French” cost nothing to type.
Credential inflation makes it worse. A decade of degree and certification spread means the line on the CV tells you less every year. The keyword filter many ATS workflows run — match the JD’s required skills against the CV text — rewards whoever stuffed the right words, not whoever can do the job.
How to actually test them
Make the candidate do a small version of the real work:
- Work sample. A two-hour task that mirrors the job. A work sample predicts performance better than years-of-experience claims.
- Live exercise. A technical interview where they solve something in front of you, not recite definitions.
- Graded take-home. Bounded, paid if substantial, scored against a rubric written before anyone applied.
The order matters: test the skill, then read the CV to explain the result — not the other way around.
What they don’t tell you
Whether the person will be good to work with, will keep learning, or will still be useful when the tool changes. Hard skills decay; a framework you tested for in 2022 may be legacy now. Pair the hard-skill test with soft skills evidence and a read on how fast someone picks up the new thing.
Where Join fits
Join’s interview scorecards let you score hard skills against an explicit rubric per role, so the decision rests on a graded work sample rather than how many keywords matched the CV. See the features page.
