How Employers Can Go Beyond the Press Release To Make Skills-Based Hiring a Reality
A growing number of both private and public employers are recognizing the benefits of removing college degree requirements for jobs and instead focusing on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of candidates. Skills-based hiring opens the aperture to qualified candidates in ways that can improve retention, time-to-hire, and diversity without race-based quotas.
As a Wall Street Journal article noted, however, most of these benefits do not accrue from celebratory press releases, but instead from the hard but necessary work of searching for candidates based on what they know and can do, rather than how many years they sat through—and paid for—college coursework.
While working at the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor, we encouraged private sector employers to enact these policies and build pipelines to good jobs by expanding apprenticeship and skills-based assessments. However, we were sometimes quietly reminded that the federal government is both the nation’s largest employer and a very bad actor when it comes to offering opportunities to those without at least a four-year degree.
In some cases, federal employees were hired regardless of what or where they studied in college (as long as they graduated), only to be placed in mandatory training paid for by taxpayers. If candidates could simply take this training on their own—at a fraction of the time and cost of a bachelor’s degree—shouldn’t they at least be considered, if not preferred, by hiring managers?
And so we worked with colleagues at other federal agencies to enact Executive Order #13932 in June of 2020. The policy removed college degree requirements from federal civilian jobs and was the only executive order relating to the federal civil service to survive the transition from President Trump to President Biden. Progress towards implementation has been steady but—as has been the case in the private sector— federal agencies have yet to demonstrate tangible progress towards hiring significant numbers of those with the skills to do the job but without a degree.
The same is true in both the federal government and state governments. We both now work at the Cicero Institute, where we have partnered with an ideologically diverse coalition of organizations to enact these policies in more than a dozen states. We have seen success stories, such as in Florida where the legislature made this change for state hiring and for procurement and the Secretary of Management has been modifying job descriptions and tracking their progress to actually attract skilled, non-degree holders. However, we have also seen the efforts of both private and public sector employers stall out too quickly. It need not be this way.
First, the federal government should aggressively step up its implementation, Congress should make the policy permanent and expand it to include federal contractors, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should give employers of all stripes cover by ensuring that its policies are not inhibiting diversity in the workplace by making it too difficult to hire based on competency.
States should also codify policies passed via executive order into law and ensure that loopholes are minimized. For example, some states have passed policies that remove most degree requirements but allow them if, say, a certain level of educational attainment is required to get a state license in a certain field. Both types of restrictions should be replaced with a tie to merit.
All employers should build tools that screen for skills rather than mere diplomas and engage experts to drive organizational change to overcome deep-seated bias for degrees rather than skills. Even if few possess alternative credentials, employers must affirmatively signal for them in parallel to more traditional requirements such as education or experience.
Only employer leadership will create a marketplace for skills and cheaper educational options to attain them. It is also the only way to break the eternal loop where only a few possess non-degree credentials because job postings don’t demand them, and employers seldom include non-degree credentials in job postings because so few people possess them.
If governments and large private enterprises embrace this challenge, it will become easier for small and mid-size businesses to implement skills-based hiring because the tools will be developed, good practices proven, and legal risk mitigated. If the press release becomes the finish line for government and corporate leaders, however, we worry that skills-based hiring will fail to live up to its genuine promise and the momentum for change will be gone before it can be realized.
*Jonathan is the Chief Legal Officer & Policy Director and Michael is a Senior Fellow and Education Policy Director at the Cicero Institute. They served at the US Departments of Labor and Education, respectively.