Skills-based hiring has, in some ways, become a victim of its own success. The approach was touted as a solution to what employers perceived as endemic talent shortages, expanding the aperture for businesses that were hungry for talent but struggling to fill the most in-demand roles. Unsurprisingly, it led to pronouncements by CEOs, governors, and U.S. federal agencies that called for the removal of degree requirements for many roles. But only a few short years after the governors of Colorado and Maryland led the way in embracing skills-based hiring, the inevitable happened: Initial research findings indicated that skills-based hiring initiatives were failing to live up to proponents’ lofty expectations.
But skills-based practices — which start with skills-based hiring and include practices related to promotion and retention — won’t yield positive impacts overnight. Rather than representing the workforce version of a health fad, skills-based practices are more akin to making long-term healthy lifestyle changes: interventions requiring consistent, concerted effort, with outcomes that are hard to observe in the very short term.
It’s no secret that poor habits can be hard to break. And, as with efforts to build muscle, progress isn’t always immediate, particularly when dealing with complex systems like the labor market. Employers and the nonprofits, intermediaries, and workforce organizations that are trying to implement new approaches need to do more hard work before anyone can draw meaningful conclusions on the efficacy of skills-based approaches.
Making good on the promise of a skills-based approach to hiring hinges on longer-term shifts in the mindsets, culture, practices, and procedures that underpin the day-to-day activities of employers. Developing healthy hiring habits will be neither fast nor easy. Breaking existing habits starts with understanding how they emerged in the first place.
Outgrowing Traditional Hiring Habits
Our overreliance on resumes and college degrees began almost a century ago. That’s a long time for habits and biases to calcify — making the difficulty in broadly implementing skills-based hiring, and therefore the longer timeline in seeing widespread results, entirely predictable.
Supporters of skills-based practices, including my team at Jobs for the Future (JFF), have always understood that this hiring transition wouldn’t be as straightforward as “just remove degree requirements from job descriptions.” At JFF, we have experienced the challenges firsthand in our own efforts to embrace the practice.
From reconsidering how skills or competencies are measured, documented, and shared to rebuilding talent pipelines to make them more accessible to individuals from a wide range of educational and economic backgrounds, there are many changes that need to be made. But none, perhaps, is as tricky as changing culture. After all, buying a new tool or platform to support skills-sharing is simple compared with changing hearts and minds. The challenge in changing company culture is also apparent when it comes to adopting skills-based practices: The people who will be most affected by this approach are also the most likely to be somewhat skeptical of it. In a 2022 survey JFF commissioned, 48% of C-suite-level respondents strongly agreed that organizations should hire based on skills rather than degrees; the percentage fell to 40% for executive-level respondents and 35% for director-level and HR respondents.
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To show results, skills-based talent practices require organizational culture shifts and a long-term commitment.