Skills-based hiring falls short, study finds

PENNSYLVANIA and MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES — A new study from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School reveals that dropping college degree requirements has not significantly diversified hiring.
“Simply dropping stated requirements seldom opens jobs to those who don’t have a college degree,” the report said.
“For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring was borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year… the net effect is a change of only 0.14 percentage points in incremental hiring of candidates without degrees.”
The “Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice” report categorizes firms that trumpeted the removal of degree prerequisites into “in name only” companies that made no substantive changes and “backsliders” that initially hired more non-degree candidates but reverted over time.
Together, about 65% of employers announcing an end to bachelor’s demands maintained or increased their hiring of college graduates.
While citing potential cost savings and lower turnover rates among non-degree hires, the analysis acknowledges substantial obstacles to genuine skills-based hiring. “Companies revert to relying on proxies rather than engage in the hard work of assessing an individual candidate’s strengths and skills,” the report said.
Ultimately, the findings question whether eliminating degree requirements can meaningfully expand access, given the stickiness of college credentials.
Previously, an Intelligent.com survey revealed that approximately 45% of U.S. employers plan to eliminate bachelor’s degree requirements for certain positions in 2024. Experts also said that skills-based hiring may replace traditional resumes to expand talent pools amid tight labor markets.
However, Derek Newton, a former vice president at The Century Foundation, a public policy think tank with an emphasis on education, believes that dropping college education requirements is a “bad idea” that’s why it has not taken hold.
“Maybe these companies tried it, and it didn’t work. Maybe they realized that skills and experiences learned in college matter. Maybe, as employers themselves have told us for years, the socializing and broad-based learning that goes on in college are valuable,” Newton wrote in a Forbes article.
“If removing degree requirements from jobs was really better, you should wonder why so many companies are not doing it, even after they say they will.”