Everyone says they hire for skills. The hiring data disagrees.

Employer after employer has announced that a degree is no longer required. A 2025 TestGorilla survey of more than 2,100 hiring decision-makers and job seekers in the US and UK found that 85 percent of employers say they use skills-based hiring.

Then someone checked who got hired.

What the hiring data shows

Researchers at the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School looked at what happened after companies acted on those announcements. From 2014 to 2023, the number of roles shedding degree requirements grew almost fourfold, a real change in how jobs get posted. The researchers then followed 11,300 roles at large firms for at least a year before and after the requirement came off the posting, to see whether hiring changed along with the wording. On average, hiring of people without a bachelor's degree rose by 3.5 percentage points in those roles. Spread across all hires, the change amounted to fewer than one in 700.

The average hides a split. Nearly all of the movement came from 37 percent of the firms studied, which the report calls Skills-Based Hiring Leaders. The rest fell into two groups: firms whose commitment stayed in name only, and backsliders who loosened their requirements and then returned to old habits.

Why the degree stays

The authors point to a plain mechanism. Once the requirement is gone from the posting, hiring managers still need a way to sort several hundred applicants and then to choose between the last two finalists. Without practical guidance on how to evaluate skills, they keep using the degree as the convenient option, whatever the job ad says. Harvard Business Review's summary of the research adds that the shift comes easiest in fields like healthcare and IT, where established certifications give managers a credible alternative to a degree. Where no equivalent exists, the degree fills the gap by default.

The leaders show the shift is worth making. At those firms, workers without degrees who were hired into roles that once required one stayed at a rate 10 percentage points higher than their degree-holding colleagues, according to the report. The finding covers one group at one set of firms, and it still points somewhere useful: when a company gives its managers a better way to judge people, the people it hires differently tend to stay.

The question skills leave open

A skills assessment answers whether someone can do the task in front of them. A work sample, a structured exercise, or a certification all speak to capability, and they make a sound replacement for the degree as a proxy. What they leave open is a second question: how does this person work, and with whom? Two candidates with identical skills can differ in how they take feedback, how they behave when a deadline slips, and how they pair with a particular manager. Hiring teams rarely have a structured way to ask that, so the interview and instinct end up answering it.

A behavior profile is built for that second question and sits alongside a skills assessment.

The takeaway

Dropping a degree requirement removes a filter. Managers still have to choose someone, and they reach for whatever evidence they trust most. The firms that moved the numbers changed what their managers had to work with, beyond the wording of the post, and the companies still stuck in name only may find the missing ingredient is a trusted way to evaluate people, with a bolder announcement doing very little.