You Can’t Microwave Skills Based Hiring! Here’s the Five Star Recipe!

You Can’t Microwave Skills Based Hiring! Here’s the Five Star Recipe!

From Psych Tech @ Work by Charles Handler

October 27, 2025 · 46 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the complexities of implementing skills-based hiring with insights from Ashley Walvoord of Verizon.

“You can’t implement skills-based hiring by flipping a switch. It’s about changing mindsets, systems, and the language your organization uses to describe talent.” -Ashley Wallvoord In this episode of Psych Tech @ Work , me and my AI co-host, Mayda Tokens, welcome fellow I/O psychologist (and LSU Tiger!) Ashley Walvoord , Senior Vice President of Talent at Verizon. We are joined by my AI co-host Mayda Tokens who continues to impress at times and but showing a tendency to be pretty boring at other times and always telling really bad jokes (I think the API to Chat-GPT 5o gets a very different sense of humor than the consumer version). I reached out to Ashley after seeing her SIOP presentation about Verizon’s skills based hiring (and organizational transformation) program. Her and her fellow presenters- Max McDaniel (Verizon) Christina-Norris Watts (J & J) Ruth Imose (J & J) Jason Frizel (Walmart) provided amazing insights into their company’s’ amazing and inspiring skills based hiring programs. The hype around skills based hiring these days makes it seem easy. But talk is cheap- and doing skills based hiring right takes a total ALL IN approach. - one that is rooted in the commitment…

People in this episode

Host: Charles Handler

Guest: Ashley Walvoord

Topics covered

  • skills-based hiring
  • organizational transformation
  • talent management
  • AI in hiring
  • I/O psychology

Keywords

  • skills-based hiring
  • organizational change
  • talent acquisition
  • I/O psychology
  • AI in recruitment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Verizon, Walmart, J & J, SIOP

More episodes of Psych Tech @ Work

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Psych Tech @ Work podcast page.