基于技能的招聘：从宣言到实践的漫漫长路

Employers are Dropping Degree RequirementsBut Are They Changing How They Actually Hire? Matt Sigelman (The Burning Glass Institute)Joseph Fuller (Harvard Business School)Alex Martin (The Burning Glass Institute) Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road fromPronouncements to Practice Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Burning Glass Institute colleagues Erik Leiden, GadLevanon, and Shrinidhi Rao for their valuable contributions to this report. We would alsolike to thank Lightcast for providing access to the job postings data sets that were used inthis analysis. Suggested Citation Sigelman, M., Fuller, J., Martin, A. (February 2024). Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road fromPronouncements to Practice. Published by Burning Glass Institute Executive Summary4 Are Skills-Based Hiring Commitments Translatingto Meaningful Action?9 Why This Matters Both for Companies & Workers14 Which Roles Are Best Positioned for Skills-Based Hiring?15 Conclusion16 Appendix: Methodological Note17 Executive Summary For many employers in recent decades, adding collegedegree requirements seemed an efficient filter. Moreproxy than direct measure, degrees were perceivedas indicators of persistence, of foundational skill,andof general capability. For hiring managers whothemselves had traveled thatcursus honorem, it seemedonly natural to value the implied endorsement ofcollege admissions officers and the presumed rigor ofthe college experience as an effective way of separatingthe wheat from the chaff. While this is an encouraging trend, there is a bigdifference between changing a job ad and changing thetypes of candidates ultimately hired for a role. That begsthe question: When firms drop degree requirementsfrom their postings do they actually hire morecandidates without degrees? On this measure of real-world results, the data showthat we have a big distance to go. Burning GlassInstitute and Harvard Business School Managingthe Future of Work Project’s researchers studied asample of 11,300 roles at large firms (defined as a givenoccupation at a given employer) for which we couldobserve a meaningful volume of hiring for at least oneyear before and after when a firm removed a degreerequirement, evidenced in the Institute’s database ofthe career histories of 65 million US workers. We findthat on average, firms increased the share of workerswithout a BA hired into these roles by about 3.5percentage points. Shortages have a way of inciting challenges to tiredassumptions. In the tight labor market that emergedleading up to the pandemic and that returned duringthe recovery, hiring has become a key operationalchallenge, causing employers to reevaluate theirrequirements. In the face of these pressures, it hasbecome increasingly difficult to justify a filter thatsummarily disqualifies the roughly two-thirds ofAmericans (62 percent) who lack a degree. At thesametime, a growing focus on equity commitments hascaused employers to question practices that likelycontributed to suppressing broader representation. For all its fanfare, the increasedopportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring was borne out innot even 1 in 700 hires last year. Amidst this backdrop, the Skills-Based Hiringmovement has gained momentum, as more and moreemployers committed to stripping degree requirementsfrom their postings, replacing the proxy of a collegedegree with actual evaluations of candidate skill.An initial flurry of high-profile pronouncements byprivate-sector and government employers alike hasbecome a blizzard. But do these proclamations result ina real increase in access for workers? However, when considering that this 3.5-point shiftapplies only to the 3.6 percent of roles that dropped arequirement during that time, the net effect is a changeof only 0.14 percentage pointsin incremental hiring ofcandidates without degrees. Overall, by our estimates,that hastranslated to new opportunity for onlyapproximately97,000 workers annually, out of 77million yearly hires. Put differently, for all its fanfare,the increased opportunity promised by Skills-BasedHiring has borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires lastyear. Just as importantly, that progress isn’t shareduniformly across all firms that adopted skills-basedpolicies.Rather, we found that nearly all of the The first place to look when tracking progress towardSkills-Based Hiring is in the job advertisements ofemployers. Are employers actually removing degreerequirements from their job ads? On this, the answer isa resounding yes, even if much room for improvementremains. From 2014 to 2023, we observed an almostfourfold increase in the annual number of roles fromwhich employers dropped degree requirements, albeitdown somewhat from a peak in 2022. change inactual hiring was driven by 37 percent of thefirms we studied that removed degree requirements.Our analysis revealed three categories of firms basedon theactual hiring outcomes of these policy changes: firms will need to implement robust and intentional