Most Companies Say They Hire for Skills But Their Data Tells a Different Story

If you have followed hiring trends at all over the past few years, you have seen the headline statistic repeated everywhere: a large majority of employers now say they practice skills based hiring, evaluating what candidates can actually do rather than screening for a college degree. Companies like IBM, Google, and Delta have publicly dropped degree requirements for large numbers of roles, and on paper, this looks like one of the most significant shifts in hiring practice in decades.

Then a separate body of research lands, and the picture gets considerably more complicated. A joint study from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, examining what actually happened at companies after they publicly removed degree requirements, found that at some large firms, fewer than one in seven hundred new hires were people without a college degree. The policy changed. The actual hiring barely moved.

The numbers behind the gap

The scale of the disconnect is worth sitting with. Roughly eighty five percent of employers report using skills based hiring in some form, and a little over half say they have removed degree requirements from at least some job postings. But research tracking real hiring outcomes at companies that made these public commitments found that on average, dropping a degree requirement increased the share of non-degreed hires in that role by only a few percentage points, far short of what the public commitments implied. One detailed analysis described forty five percent of companies that publicly dropped degree requirements as having done so, in its words, in name only, meaning the job posting changed but the screening and selection process behind it did not.

This is not a story about employers lying. It is a more mundane and more fixable problem: removing a line from a job description costs nothing, but replacing it with a genuinely workable alternative way of evaluating candidates takes real operational effort, and a lot of companies stopped at the easy half of the change.

Why the gap persists even when the intent is genuine

Three forces keep this gap stuck in place. Hiring managers, who often retain significant discretion over candidate selection regardless of formal company policy, tend to fall back on familiar signals like a degree when they are not given a clear alternative way to assess competency. Applicant tracking systems, the software many companies use to filter resumes before a human ever sees them, can continue scoring degrees as a positive signal in their underlying configuration even after the job description itself has been updated to say a degree is not required. And in a competitive hiring market, the phrase "we hire for skills" has become as much a recruitment marketing message as an operational commitment, which means it gets said before the workflow behind it has actually changed.

The practical lesson for any hiring manager reading this is uncomfortable but useful: if the only thing in a resume that currently signals competence is the degree, a recruiter under time pressure will keep defaulting to the degree, no matter what the official policy says. Closing the gap requires giving recruiters something concrete to use instead, not just permission to stop requiring something.

What is actually working at the companies closing the gap

The research on this is fairly consistent. Skills assessments, the kind that test a candidate's actual ability to do a specific task, like a writing sample for a content role or a financial modeling exercise for an analyst position, do meaningfully widen who gets considered without compromising the quality of who gets hired. Looking at skills rather than job titles when sourcing candidates has been shown to expand talent pools considerably, and the effect is even larger for technical and AI-related roles, where job titles often lag well behind the actual hybrid skillsets the role now requires.

There is also a slower-moving infrastructure shift happening underneath all of this: verifiable digital credentials, built on emerging standards that allow a skill or certification to be confirmed instantly without contacting the issuing institution, are starting to give recruiters a defensible, quick alternative to a degree line. A handful of stacked credentials in a specific domain can read, to an experienced recruiter, similarly to "this candidate has demonstrated real competency here," which is closer to doing the job a degree used to do, just faster to verify and more current.

What this means if you are the one hiring, or the one job hunting

If you are a small or growing business making hiring decisions, the lesson is not that skills based hiring does not work, the evidence that it widens talent pools and improves retention is genuinely strong. The lesson is that removing a degree requirement from a posting is the easy, visible step, and the meaningful step, building an actual assessment process and training the people doing the hiring to trust it, is the one that determines whether the policy changes anything real.

If you are on the other side of this, applying for roles, the strategic implication is straightforward: read the actual hiring process a company uses, not just the language in the job posting. A posting that says no degree required tells you what the company is willing to say publicly. It does not yet tell you what their applicant tracking system is configured to reward, or what the hiring manager will actually look for when two resumes land side by side. The companies worth paying closest attention to are the ones that pair the policy change with a visible, specific way to demonstrate the skill itself, because that is the version of skills based hiring that the data shows is actually changing who gets hired.