
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
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- The Truth About AI Based Talent Assessment · February 23, 2026 · 49 min
- Why Recruiting Tech is (Still) Not Helping Candidates and How to Fix It · January 19, 2026 · 48 min
- AI Education, Personalized Learning, and the Future of Work · December 19, 2025 · 44 min
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