A hard skill is a specific technical or task-related capability demonstrated through knowledge or performance. In hiring, it answers whether someone can perform the defined work, often from the first day. The relevant skills depend on the role: a database position may require SQL, while software work may require coding knowledge, design patterns, or software development lifecycle knowledge. section 4.1.2 section 5.2.1
Use hard skills as objective, role-specific criteria rather than as loosely worded interview questions:
- Define the tasks the person will perform a few weeks into the role. section 5.2.1
- Translate those tasks into demonstrable capabilities, such as determining database counts with SQL or configuring cloud infrastructure. section 5.2.1
- List roughly 10 to 20 objective criteria and rate each candidate on a 1-to-10 scale. section 5.2.1
- Define score ranges with evidence of increasing capability instead of treating every technical skill as simply present or absent. section 5.2.1
Scaling an AWS criterion
A candidate with no AWS experience could score 0; limited use of services such as S3 or EC2 could score 1–3; configuring an account and IAM users could score 4–6; and creating VPC subnets with security groups and NAT gateways could score 7–10. The scale makes the expected level more defensible than a general claim of “AWS experience.” section 5.2.1
Hard skills matter especially when assigning a contractor to a bounded task, such as designing a mobile-app user experience or creating database-extraction jobs. Interview technical capability directly, check references for independent contractors, and keep rejection feedback focused on the specific hard-skill gap rather than subjective soft-skill judgments. section 4.1.2 section 5.3.1
