The Rise Of Skills Based Hiring

For decades a degree was the default filter for a huge range of roles, often for no better reason than habit. That is changing. A growing number of UK employers are removing degree requirements from job descriptions and asking a simpler, sharper question instead. Can this person actually do the work we need doing?

This is not a soft, feel good trend. It is a response to a hard commercial problem. Talent is scarce, good people are expensive, and screening candidates out on the basis of a qualification that may bear little relation to the job throws away perfectly capable applicants at exactly the moment employers can least afford to.

The scale of the shift is now visible in the data. LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team has reported that the share of UK job adverts on its platform that omit a formal degree requirement has risen steadily, and that globally the number of roles advertised without a degree grew by around a third in the space of two years. The recruitment analytics firm Lightcast has tracked the same pattern across millions of UK postings, describing a measurable reset in the qualifications employers ask for, particularly in technology, operations and customer facing roles.

Part of what is driving this is a growing recognition that the degree filter was never as good a predictor as it appeared. The influential Harvard Business School study Dismissed by Degrees, produced with Accenture and Grads of Life, coined the term degree inflation to describe the habit of adding a degree requirement to roles that had previously been done well by people without one. It found that inflated requirements made roles harder and slower to fill, pushed up salaries without improving performance, and shut out large numbers of capable workers, a group later described as STARs, meaning people Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

The UK has its own version of this mismatch. Office for National Statistics analysis has repeatedly found that a substantial share of graduates are working in roles that do not require a degree, while the CIPD has warned for years about over qualification and the poor fit between qualifications gained and skills actually used at work. When a third of graduates are in non graduate jobs and employers still insist on degrees for those same jobs, the filter is clearly measuring something other than capability.

There is a fairness dimension too. Requiring a degree disproportionately screens out people from lower income backgrounds, older workers, career changers and some ethnic minority groups who are underrepresented in higher education. That is not only an equity concern, it is a commercial one, because it narrows the pool at the very moment employers say they cannot find enough good people.

Hiring for skills widens the pool dramatically. It opens roles to people who have built their ability through experience, apprenticeships, career changes or self teaching rather than a traditional route, and those people are often highly motivated and loyal precisely because they have been overlooked before. Analysis by Opportunity@Work and McKinsey has suggested that workers who reached their skills through alternative routes, when hired into roles that match their ability, perform comparably to graduate peers while staying significantly longer.

Retention is where the effect shows up most clearly. TestGorilla’s annual State of Skills Based Hiring survey, which polls thousands of employers and employees internationally including in the UK, has consistently reported that a large majority of organisations using skills based approaches say it has reduced their mis hires and improved retention, with many also reporting a more diverse workforce as a direct result. LinkedIn’s own research points the same way, estimating that assessing for skills can expand the candidate pool for a typical role many times over.

The logic is simple once stated. When someone is hired because their genuine strengths match the demands of the role, they are more likely to succeed, feel valued and stay. Mis hires, by contrast, are expensive and demoralising, and a surprising number of them trace back to selecting on the wrong criteria in the first place. The CIPD has put the cost of recruitment mistakes in the thousands of pounds per hire once lost productivity, re advertising and management time are counted, which makes better selection one of the highest return improvements a business can make.

Removing a degree requirement from an advert changes very little on its own. The hard part is redesigning the rest of the process to actually assess skills, which most organisations have never had to do. If the interview still rewards confident talkers and familiar backgrounds, the old bias simply reappears in a new form, and the business ends up hiring the same people while telling itself it has changed.

Doing this properly means defining the handful of skills that truly predict success in a role, then building practical ways to assess them. The research on selection methods is unusually clear here. Work by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, whose meta analysis of a century of selection studies remains one of the most cited in the field, found that work sample tests, structured interviews and tests of general ability predict job performance far better than unstructured interviews or years of experience alone. In other words, the methods that assess what someone can actually do outperform the proxies employers have traditionally relied on.

In practice that means using work samples, structured exercises and consistent, evidence based interview questions asked of every candidate in the same way and scored against the same criteria. It takes more effort to set up than a quick scan of a CV, but it pays back many times over in the quality and fairness of the people you hire, and it gives you a defensible record of why each decision was made.

The best place to begin is with a single role where you struggle to hire or retain the right people. Strip the requirements back to what genuinely matters, decide the three or four skills that actually predict success, design a fair way to test for each of them, and compare the results against your usual approach over the next few hires. The evidence is usually persuasive enough to build from there, and starting small keeps the risk low while your managers learn the method.

It helps to bring hiring managers with you rather than imposing the change. Many are attached to the degree requirement precisely because it feels safe, so showing them the evidence, and letting them see a strong hire come through a skills based route, does more to shift behaviour than any policy. Employers such as the Civil Service, which has run large scale success profile and skills based recruitment, and a growing list of major private firms that have publicly dropped degree requirements, provide a useful reference point when making the case internally.

Done well, skills based hiring is not a lowering of standards. It is a raising of them, because it forces an employer to be clear about what good actually looks like and to select for it deliberately rather than by proxy. That clarity benefits every hire that follows, and in a labour market where the right people are genuinely hard to find, it turns a wider, fairer pool into a real competitive advantage.