Does Skills-Based Hiring Actually Work?

Does skills based hiring work? Mostly not yet. Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School's Managing the Future of Work project tracked 11,300 roles at large firms for at least a year before and after each one dropped its degree requirement, and found the actual shift in who got hired came to a net change of only 0.14 percentage points. Removing a line from a job posting turned out to be the easy part.

Why the headline number and the hiring number do not match

The same study found that firms which dropped a degree requirement went on to hire, on average, about 3.5 percentage points more non-degreed workers into that role. That sounds meaningful until it is weighed against how few roles this happened to. Only 3.6% of the roles in the study had a requirement dropped at all, so the 3.5 point shift nets out to new opportunity for roughly 97,000 workers a year, against 77 million annual US hires, or, in the report's own wording, not even 1 in 700 hires. The gap between the pronouncement and the practice is the whole story.

The three groups hiding inside "we dropped the requirement"

Sorting the firms that removed a degree requirement by what happened next splits them into three groups, not two. Skills-Based Hiring Leaders, 37% of the firms studied, hired about 18% more non-degreed workers into the roles they changed. Another 45%, the largest group, removed the requirement and kept hiring almost the same share of degree holders as before, what the report calls In Name Only. The remaining fifth made a short-term gain that did not last and slid back toward their old hiring pattern.

The report's own explanation for the middle group is direct: even when a degree is no longer required, it stays the fastest comparison a hiring manager has between two candidates, so without something to put in its place, the old filter comes right back by habit rather than by policy.

What actually replaces the degree as a filter

A hiring manager who can no longer screen on a degree still has to choose between candidates in an hour, and a rewritten job posting does not hand them a new way to do that. A work sample, a specific checkable claim, or a completed assessment score is what fills that gap, and it appears to be the piece the Leader firms actually built, not just the policy they announced. The same study found the payoff was real where it happened: non-degreed workers hired into roles that used to require a degree earned about 25% more than in their previous role, and stayed roughly 10 percentage points longer than their degree-holding colleagues over two years.

What this means whether you are hiring or applying

For anyone applying into this gap, the fix does not have to wait for an employer's process to catch up. The same pattern that explains why entry-level postings keep asking for experience nobody at entry level has is at work here too: a hiring manager without a reliable way to compare candidates reaches for the safest proxy available, a degree, a senior title, a familiar employer name, unless a candidate hands them something better to compare against first. A specific, checkable claim on a CV does some of that work before an interview even starts.

For anyone doing the hiring, the report's conclusion is closer to a checklist than a verdict. Dropping a requirement from a posting is the visible part of skills-based hiring and the least of it. The check exists for the harder part, a score that is comparable across candidates the way a degree used to be, without asking anyone to have gone to college to prove it.