Skills-based hiring is mostly an announcement

If you have been told to apply anyway because employers have dropped their degree requirements, here is what happened when researchers checked.

The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School's Project on Managing the Future of Work examined more than eleven thousand US job postings across the decade to 2023, tracking companies that publicly removed degree requirements and then looking at who those companies actually hired.

Thirty-seven percent had genuinely changed their hiring. Forty-five percent had made the announcement and changed nothing measurable. Eighteen percent had gone backwards, hiring fewer workers without degrees after the announcement than before.

The aggregate effect was roughly 97,000 workers, against about 77 million hires a year. Fewer than one in seven hundred.

We publish this because the alternative is worse. The advice built on the announcements — apply widely, ignore the stated requirements, the market has changed — is advice to spend a job search on a change that did not occur at the scale it was reported. That is not optimism. It is a misallocation of somebody's twelve weeks.

What the study also shows is where the change is real. Thirty-seven percent is not nothing; it is thousands of employers who did follow through, and the report names some of them. At the firms that actually shifted, workers hired without degrees stayed longer than their degreed colleagues and moved into meaningfully better-paying work. The opportunity exists. It is concentrated in a minority of employers rather than distributed across a market.

That changes the method rather than the goal. A search strategy premised on a general loosening of credential requirements should be replaced by one premised on identifying the specific employers where the loosening is real — a research task, not a volume task, and a much shorter list than the coverage implies.

There is a second reading, aimed at the other side. If you are an employer who made this announcement, the study has effectively published a way to check whether you are in the 37 or the 45. It is not a difficult check. Pull the postings that dropped the requirement, pull who you hired into them, and compare against the prior three years. Most organisations we have asked have never run it.

The gap between a hiring policy and a hiring outcome is not usually dishonesty. It is that nobody measured.