Merita Consulting

Skills First

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, one truth remains constant: a company is only as strong as its workforce. This is where skills-first hiring and promoting come to the forefront, offering a means to fill positions and a catalyst for driving your company’s growth. When you strategically hire for skills, you open doors to enhanced innovation, heightened productivity, and an overall surge in business success.

Skill Definitions

Determining the skills for each role is a critical first step in building an adaptive workforce. These definitions are the foundation for your job descriptions, job postings, career pathways, and workforce development programs, all of which provide the platform for implementing a skills-first hiring and promotion program.



Skills Assessments

Skills assessments are crucial to the skills-based hiring process. They are the litmus test that helps employers determine if a candidate’s abilities align with the role’s requirements. Yet evaluating technical skills alone is not enough.

You must embrace a holistic approach to skills assessments to find the perfect fit for your team.


US moves to smart credit cards in October, 2015. What took so long?

Posted on by Dwayne Nesmith
Smart Card

MasterCard and Visa have indicated October, 2015 as the timeline for the big shift from swipe and sign credit cards to EMV or smart cards requiring a PIN. The EMV system comes out of an early 1990’s joint project by international payment processors to set standards for smart-card specifications. Most of the world has already adapted this process, but the US is slow to make the transition.
Why has this taken so long? In 2003, Clear Technology was helping a payment processor issue bank smart-cards across much of Eastern Europe and Africa. The cards were in high demand and the processor was under pressure to cut the time from card program request to issuance. More than 10 years has passed and little has changed in the US. There are 3 primary reasons for this. Embedded infrastructure in the old system is a huge drag on new investment. In addition, there is limited need for offline transaction processing. Finally, the main reason is a misunderstanding of the increasing risk to banks and merchants under the old system. How costly is it for a big brand to expose millions of customers to identity theft?
It’s ironic that the main driver of smart-card adoption in many markets was the high rate of fraud. Fraud which predictably has migrated to the US as the smart-card systems made it more and more difficult to succeed in less developed economies.
Transition won’t happen quickly as the road maps issued in 2012 by both Visa and MasterCard show. How many more multiple million ID thefts will occur before 10/15?