Somewhere in the United States right now, a person without a college degree is reading a job posting that no longer says "bachelor's required," and taking it at its word. By LinkedIn's count, as Allwork.Space rendered it in June, 30 percent of paid job postings no longer require a professional degree, up from 19 percent in 2019. TestGorilla's 2025 survey of about 1,100 hiring-side respondents in the US and UK found 85 percent of employers saying they practice skills-based hiring, though a company that sells skills tests has its own reasons to find enthusiasm for them. The announcements pile up, the LinkedIn posts glow, and "skills-based hiring" has settled comfortably into the vocabulary of every chief people officer in the country. So we should ask the only question that matters. Did anyone actually get hired?
Harvard Business School's Managing the Future of Work project and the Burning Glass Institute went looking, and their February 2024 report is the closest thing we have to an audit. They tracked 11,300 roles at large employers that dropped a degree requirement, matched against a database of 65 million American career histories, hires before and hires after. On average, the share of workers hired without a bachelor's rose by 3.5 percentage points. But requirements were dropped in only 3.6 percent of roles in that window, a real shift on a thin sliver of the market, so the net effect across all hiring came to 0.14 percentage points: roughly 97,000 workers a year, out of 77 million hires. The report's own words: "For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring was borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year." Last year, in the report's counting, is 2023, and I could find no follow-up audit from these researchers since. The ads changed. The hires, for the most part, did not.
A third of the movement is real
The interesting part is who did change, because the average hides a clean three-way split. Thirty-seven percent of the firms studied, the group the researchers call Skills-Based Hiring Leaders, drove nearly all of the real movement, hiring 18 percent more non-degreed workers into the roles they opened up. The list is not who you might guess: Walmart, Apple, General Motors, Target, Cigna, Tyson Foods, the State of Minnesota, and the City of Denver among them. Another 45 percent adopted skills-based hiring "in name only," editing the posting while the share of degreed hires stayed put, and at many firms actually rose; the report names Bank of America, Amazon, Oracle, and Lockheed Martin here, market leaders who, in its own gloss, "struggled to follow through on sincere public pronouncements." The final 18 percent are the Backsliders, Nike, Uber, and Delta Air Lines among them, who improved briefly and then relapsed, in the long run hiring a smaller share of workers without degrees than before. The rest is stationery.
Follow the risk
Why? The report's answer is the hiring manager, and it is worth quoting: "Even when a degree is no longer required, it is still a heuristic hiring managers are likely to use to weigh a candidate's strengths and to assess the risk inherent in choosing one candidate over another." Follow the risk. The manager who bets on the non-degreed candidate carries that bet personally, in their own performance review. Joseph Fuller, the Harvard Business School professor behind the study, put it plainly to HBS's Institute for Business in Global Society: "Hiring managers want to hire somebody who will move into the job and do well right away because that affects their own performance and credibility. They're not interested in social experiments. And in fairness, we don't pay them to be." The leaders did not have braver managers. What separates them, Fuller argues, is process: change how candidates are assessed, train managers to read work experience instead of a diploma, support the hire after day one. The rest issued a press release. "Changing your hiring policy is, at best, the end of the beginning," Fuller said. "Or maybe it's just a plain old beginning if you are aiming to accomplish, frankly, something more than virtue washing."
What makes this maddening rather than merely disappointing is that the real thing works. At the leader firms, non-degreed hires stayed: their two-year retention rate ran 10 percentage points higher than their college-educated coworkers', 58 percent against 48. And workers hired without a degree into roles that used to demand one saw their own pay rise 25 percent on average over their previous job. Almost two-thirds of Americans hold no four-year degree; the researchers count at least another 250,000 jobs a year, from construction managers to web developers, where they say skills-based hiring could readily be put in place now. The evidence says everyone wins. The practice says the paperwork was the point.
So here is the practical takeaway, whether you are the student deciding what a degree is worth or the founder writing your first job ad. Do not judge an employer by its postings; that costs them nothing. Ask what they changed about the interview, and who gets one. And if you run the hiring, know that dropping a line from the ad while keeping the old reflexes just moves the filter out of sight, where nobody can appeal it. Judge the movement by its hires. On that measure, it has barely started.
