Nobody Agrees What "Qualified" Means in Hiring – And It’s Costing You

21 Oct 2026
Solutions SnapShot Theater - Expo Hall
Solution Snapshot

Ask any talent leader about hiring right now and you'll hear about the bottleneck: not enough qualified candidates. It's not the pay. It's not the job description. It's that nobody inside the company agrees what "qualified" actually means — and that misalignment shows up as rework: re-opened briefs, re-run searches, weeks added to time-to-fill, and strong candidates lost in the churn.

This Solution Snapshot looks at role calibration — building a shared, editable definition of the role, in the form of candidate personas and a skills profile, before a single application is reviewed. You'll see what changes when the recruiter and the hiring manager argue about the brief instead of the candidates, how transferable and adjacent skills become defensible rather than debatable, and what it costs when the definition never gets written down.

You'll leave with a practical calibration approach you can run at your next kickoff — with or without new software — and a clear view of where this capability fits alongside the ATS you already own.

Speakers
Natasha Nuytten
Natasha Nuytten, CEO, CLARA, Inc. - CLARA

Learning Objective 1

Diagnose the cost of misalignment in your own process — trace how often the definition of qualified changed after candidates were already in review, and use that number as your baseline.

Learning Objective 2

Apply a role-calibration approach that turns a job description into two or three concrete candidate profiles and a skills profile your hiring manager will edit rather than rubber-stamp.

Learning Objective 3

Evaluate transferable and adjacent skills against a role using standardized criteria, so shortlist decisions turn on evidence instead of instinct.

Access Level

Open to All Pass Holders