Removing Degree Requirements Does Not Create Skills-Based Hiring

Employers have removed college-degree requirements from thousands of job postings. The change looks significant on paper, but paper is exactly where much of it has stopped.

Skills-based hiring only becomes real when demonstrated ability changes who is screened, interviewed, selected, and supported after hiring. If recruiters still filter for familiar schools, managers still favor conventional career paths, and interviews still reward polished self-presentation, deleting one line from a posting leaves the underlying decision largely intact.

Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller made that problem unusually concrete during The Hiring Shift at Indeed FutureWorks 2026. His research found that the visible move toward degree-free hiring changed fewer than one in 700 hires.

The lesson is not that degree requirements should remain. It is that access does not change until the mechanism of selection changes with it.

A posting can invite people the process still rejects

A degree requirement is an obvious barrier. Removing it allows more people to see themselves as eligible and may expand the applicant pool. But the posting is only the front door.

Behind it sit résumé-screening rules, recruiter habits, interview formats, manager incentives, and assumptions about what a “safe” candidate looks like. Any one of those can quietly recreate the same barrier. A recruiter may prioritize candidates whose prior employers imply status. A hiring manager may equate an unfamiliar career path with risk. A panel may ask abstract questions that reward interview coaching more than job performance.

The HBS study behind the one-in-700 finding examined changes in postings and actual hiring outcomes. It found a large gap between employers announcing a skills-first policy and candidates without degrees benefiting from it. The researchers’ recommendations went beyond job-description edits to manager training, redesigned processes, changed incentives, and structured support for new hires.

Practical ability needs practical evidence

Traditional hiring relies heavily on proxies because they are easy to compare. A degree, job title, GPA, or recognizable employer compresses years of experience into a simple signal. The trouble is that a convenient signal is not necessarily a relevant one.

A candidate may have learned persistence, judgment, collaboration, and customer awareness through work that does not resemble the vacant role on paper. Another may possess the preferred credential but have little evidence of applying knowledge in the conditions the job creates.

Experiential assessment makes more of that difference visible. A work sample can show how someone approaches an ambiguous problem. A simulation can reveal whether they ask for context before acting. A structured group task can surface listening, adaptability, and the way a person responds when their first idea does not work.

These methods are not automatically fair. An unpaid project that takes a weekend simply shifts the burden to candidates. A vague “culture fit” exercise invites bias. Useful assessment is brief, job-relevant, scored against defined criteria, and applied consistently.

Skills-based hiring changes the manager’s job too

Hiring for demonstrated potential creates an obligation after the offer. When an employer selects someone whose capability is strong but whose background is unconventional, the organization must know which gaps can be learned and provide a credible path for learning them.

That may mean a structured first 90 days, access to a knowledgeable peer, clear standards for early performance, and regular feedback. Without that support, a new hire can be judged for not knowing the unwritten rules that a conventional candidate happened to acquire elsewhere.

Managers also need permission to make a less familiar choice. If a poor hire is punished but a narrow pipeline is not, managers will continue choosing the résumé that looks easiest to defend. Skills-based hiring therefore depends on incentives as much as assessment design.

So what should employers change?

Start with the work rather than the credential. Identify the few outcomes the person must produce, the decisions they will make, and the conditions that make the job difficult. Then decide what evidence would demonstrate each capability.

That evidence can come from many places: a work sample, a structured interview example, a portfolio, a simulation, community work, military experience, caregiving, or a different occupation with comparable demands. The standard should remain high. The acceptable routes to meeting it should become wider.

Recruiters need screening criteria that reflect those routes. Interviewers need shared questions and scoring guides. Hiring managers need training in how to evaluate evidence without falling back on pedigree. New hires need onboarding that distinguishes learnable knowledge from genuine performance problems.

Candidates can make the same shift in how they present themselves. Rather than asking an employer to infer capability from a title, they can describe the problem, the action they took, the constraints they faced, and the result. A career path that looks unconventional at the headline level can look highly relevant when the work is made visible.

Removing a degree requirement is a worthwhile invitation. It is not yet a hiring strategy. Skills-based hiring begins when practical ability becomes the basis of the decision and the organization is prepared to help a capable person succeed once selected.