The skills-based hiring movement won the argument years ago. CEOs endorse it, governments celebrate it, and the phrase appears in enough annual reports to qualify as furniture. Then researchers at the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School went looking for the movement in the data, and found a rounding error.
Their 2024 study, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice, examined what happened at large firms that publicly removed degree requirements. The headline finding: the change created new opportunities for roughly 97,000 workers out of 77 million hires in a year. Fewer than one in 700 hires. For a revolution, that is a very quiet drum.
Where the promise leaks
The leak is not in one place; it is a cascade. Start with scope: across the 11,300 roles the researchers tracked at large firms, only 3.6 percent of roles actually dropped a degree requirement in the study window. The pronouncements were company-wide; the policy changes were not.
Then follow-through: within the roles that did drop requirements, the share of workers hired without a bachelor's degree rose by about 3.5 percentage points. Real, but modest. Multiply a small change by a small share of roles and the net effect on incremental non-degree hiring comes to 0.14 percentage points.
Most damning is the distribution. The researchers found that 45 percent of companies that removed degree requirements did so 'in name only,' with no meaningful change in whom they hired. Nearly all the genuine movement came from about 37 percent of firms. Same policy on paper, opposite outcomes in practice. Which means the policy was never the active ingredient.
Why the filter survives its own repeal
A degree requirement is not just a line in a job posting. It is embedded in applicant-tracking-system filters, in recruiters' screening habits, in hiring managers' mental image of what a 'safe' candidate looks like, and in the absence of any alternative measure of ability. Delete the line and everything else remains. The recruiter still sorts by university. The manager still feels that hiring a non-graduate requires a justification, while hiring a graduate requires none. Risk asymmetry does the rest: no one is ever asked to defend the conventional hire that failed.
The persistence is doubly strange because employers themselves testify against the filter. In Harvard Business School's earlier Dismissed by Degrees survey of 600 business and HR leaders, two-thirds agreed that requiring a bachelor's degree for a middle-skills job makes the position harder to fill, and three in five admitted rejecting qualified candidates with relevant experience in favor of recent graduates anyway. The organizations know the proxy is costing them candidates. Knowing has not been enough, because the knowledge lives in the executive suite while the filtering lives in the workflow.
There is also a measurement vacuum. Companies dropped the proxy without building the instrument that would replace it. Skills-based hiring is not the removal of a filter; it is the substitution of one evidence regime for another: structured evaluations, work samples, trials, skill assessments. Removing the degree line without installing any of that is not skills-based hiring. It is vibes-based hiring with better marketing.
The firms that did change (the 37 percent driving nearly all the gains) treated the shift as an operational project rather than a communications one. That pattern echoes what organizational research keeps finding elsewhere: announcements alter expectations, not behavior; behavior changes when the daily machinery changes.
What real adoption would look like
The honest test of skills-based hiring is not the job posting but the funnel. Who gets screened in? Who gets interviewed? What evidence does the interview actually collect? A company serious about the shift can audit itself with three numbers: the share of postings without degree requirements, the share of interviews granted to non-degree candidates, and the share of hires. When the second and third numbers refuse to follow the first, the company has a press release, not a practice.
None of this indicts the idea. The idea is sound: most jobs are bundles of learnable skills, and the degree is a coarse, expensive, exclusionary proxy for them. What the Burning Glass findings indict is the belief that proxies die by decree. They die by replacement. Until employers build the machinery that makes ability legible without parchment, the degree will keep doing the sorting, silently, from inside systems and habits that no press release reaches.
The pronouncement was the easy 1 percent. The practice is the other 699 in 700.
Sources
- Burning Glass Institute & Harvard Business School (2024). Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. Dropped degree requirements changed fewer than 1 in 700 U.S. hires in 2023 (~97,000 of 77M); 45% of firms changed 'in name only'. https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/skills-based-hiring-2024
- Harvard Business School, Institute for Business in Global Society (2024). Fewer than 1 in 700 get hired without a college degree (Joseph Fuller). Summary of the joint study's central estimate and firm-level variation. https://www.hbs.edu/bigs/joseph-fuller-college-degree-gap
- Harvard Business School, Accenture & Grads of Life (2017). Dismissed by Degrees (Fuller & Raman). Two-thirds of 600 surveyed employers said degree requirements make middle-skills jobs harder to fill; three in five rejected experienced candidates in favor of graduates. https://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/Pages/degree-inflation-us-competetiveness.aspx