There are not many feelings as warm and exciting as stepping foot in a foreign country for the first time and watching a customs agent add a fresh stamp to your passport. It’s sorta akin to that feeling of finishing a really interesting and challenging new project and walking away with a few new skills under your belt.
Even if you think that analogy is a bit of a stretch, at graphic design platform Canva, employee skills are viewed and cherished like stamps on a passport. New ones are acquired on projects and revered the way globetrotters flip through old passports, ogling at their stamps with pride and joy.
Canva employs its “Skills Passport” framework as part of its skills-based hiring approach. The company—which fields 300,000 resumes annually—looks at candidate and employee talent as transferrable and fluid through a skills lens; the right fit for a role is the sum of skills, rather than simply the last job title a candidate held.
“As we work…we acquire skills,” said Canva’s Amy Schultz, global head of talent acquisition. “Being able to have those skills in a passport enables you to—hopefully—move on to the next goal or to the next role.”
The skills passport concept at Canva enables employees to focus more on skills-based growth and development—while opening up internal mobility in a more fluid way for its TA team.
You are now free to move about the company. Canva’s skills passport journey began as a result of a 360-feedback program at Canva ahead of performance evaluations, dubbed internally as the “Impact Cycle.” Execs noticed that much of the feedback gleaned from that process fit into four broad categories: craft (aka technical expertise), communication, strategy, and leadership.
“Canva grows because our employees grow, and our employees grow because they’re developing new skills by working on new goals and bigger goals,” said Schultz, referring to the foundational philosophy of her boss, CEO Melanie Perkins.
Launched more than three years ago following a company-wide “vision day,” Schultz said, the skills passport has allowed the company to “tweak” its hiring process to more closely align it with its burgeoning emphasis on skills: rethinking how the company writes job ads, interviews and assesses candidates, and documents skills data in the ATS.
Skills at Canva are organized in a 12-skills framework, where each skill lines up with one of four company pillars.
In recruiting. Skills passports made all the difference when Canva launched its new applicant tracking system (ATS), Schultz said, because it allowed the company to integrate its skills data across its entire HR techstack—recruiting and talent acquisition, performance management, and learning and development—allowing her to create a “people data warehouse” and a coherent framework that every company stakeholder could understand.
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
“For us in recruiting, when we’re sitting down to kick off a new role with a hiring manager, we can talk to them about which of the 12 skills do you need to add to your team,” she said.
This framework has made it easier for hiring managers to discuss their personnel needs with TA.
“It’s such a good common language, because when I speak to peers…one of the biggest challenges for companies to adopt skills-based hiring is getting some commonality between skills,” she said. “Now, skills are changing at such a rapid rate, having a baseline by which you can start with [that] everyone sort of understands, for us, has been super helpful.”
TA pros at Canva can focus more on skills needed than traditional job descriptions and titles.
Schultz did point out, however, that the “craft” pillar for technical expertise is often where differences between job families and roles show up at Canva. Some roles require deep technical skills, while others do not.
Talent development and mobility. “Canva is more of a rock climbing wall as opposed to a career ladder,” Schultz said.
Canva employees work on cross-functional teams and deliver on goals; after achieving goals, employees can take the skills they’ve honed and apply them to new projects, sometimes with entirely new cross-functional teams, she said.
The company’s internal platform, Canva World, documents the skills acquired by completing new projects or being assessed with new skills through the “growth and impact process” within the company. Employee profiles don skill badges, creating a visual representation of your skills…like a passport stamp, perhaps.
Schultz pointed to Canva executives as examples of employees with lots of stamps in their skills passports. Canva CMO Zach Kitschke started with the company as an intern and worked in HR and product before moving to his leadership role in marketing. Global head of people, Jennie Rogerson, began as an executive assistant to the company’s founders before moving into a chief of staff role and then headed over to lead the people team.