What Companies Get Wrong About Skills-Based Hiring

And six practical steps they can take to get it right.

May 13, 2024

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In recent years companies have removed college-degree requirements from many of their job postings. They’ve done this for good reason: Talent is scarce, and requiring degrees eliminates almost two-thirds of workers from consideration, a disproportionate number of them Black and Hispanic. But there’s a problem: For every 100 of these new postings, fewer than four additional candidates without degrees are actually hired. The authors of this article argue that it’s time to do more to make skills-based hiring a reality, and they present six ways that companies and hiring managers can do so.

The logic of skills-based hiring is unimpeachable. Talent is scarce, and progress in boosting workforce diversity remains sluggish, so it makes sense to cast as wide a net as possible when hiring. The obvious way for companies to do that is to stop requiring a college degree for many job postings — a practice that, according to a 2023 Census Bureau report, eliminates almost two-thirds of workers from consideration and affects Black and Hispanic workers disproportionately.

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Joseph Fuller is a professor of management practice and a faculty cochair of the Project on Managing the Future of Work at Harvard Business School.

Matt Sigelman is the president of the Burning Glass Institute, which advances data-driven research and practice on the future of work and learning. He is also a senior advisor at the Project on Workforce at Harvard.