Thousands of companies removed degree requirements from their job postings. Researchers then went to look at who actually got hired.
The net effect was 0.14 percentage points. About one hire in 700.
That number comes from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, who traced large firms' postings and hires through 2023. Only 37% of firms changed who they hired. About 45% changed in name only. About 18% went backwards.
The intent was real. The hiring didn't move.
Why does the change stop at the job description?
Because rewriting a posting costs an afternoon and changing how you evaluate people costs a process. The Burning Glass authors put the mechanism plainly: a hiring manager under vacancy pressure has a subtle but real incentive to fall back on proxies rather than do the hard work of assessing an individual candidate's strengths and skills.
Take the degree line out of the posting and the manager still has to decide between two candidates on Thursday afternoon. If nothing replaced the degree as a way of judging, the degree is still what gets used. It just stopped being written down.
That is the whole implementation gap. Not a lack of intent, and not a lack of tooling. A missing standard at the moment of judgment.
What do the requirements actually cost you?
A large share of the people who could do the job. In Harvard Business School and Accenture's Hidden Workers research, 88% of employers said qualified high-skill candidates are screened out because they do not match the exact criteria in the job description. For middle-skill roles the figure rose to 94%.
The earlier Dismissed by Degrees study found the same pattern with credentials specifically: two-thirds of employers acknowledged that requiring a four-year degree excluded qualified candidates, and degree inflation made roles harder to fill without delivering the productivity gains that were supposed to justify it. Turnover and engagement were worse among degree-holders in those middle-skill roles, not better.
The market has started moving on its own. Indeed Hiring Lab found that by April 2024, fewer than one-third of US postings specified a years-of-experience requirement, down from around 40% two years earlier, and by January 2024 fewer than one in five required a four-year degree.
Postings are loosening. The Burning Glass numbers say the decisions mostly aren't.
Does the wording of the posting matter at all?
It does, and less than the interview does. LinkedIn's analysis of its own job posts found that qualification sections focused on hard skills lifted apply rates by 56%, while pedigree-focused sections lowered them. Posts listing skills in the requirements section had an 11% higher view-to-apply rate. Shorter posts did better: 1 to 300 words generated 8.4% more applies per view than average.
Framing changes who applies, too. The folklore version, that women apply only at 100% of requirements and men at 60%, is overstated. The UK Behavioural Insights Team tested it with 10,468 participants and found thresholds of about 52.1% for men and 55.7% for women: a real gap, and a much smaller one. LinkedIn's platform data show women applying to 20% fewer jobs than men while being 16% more likely to be hired once they do, and 18% more likely for stretch roles.
So the posting decides who shows up. It does not decide who gets picked. That happens later, and that is the part most skills-based hiring programmes never reach.
What has to change for it to work?
The evaluation. Four moves, in order.
Name the skills the job actually needs. Not "Senior Marketing Manager with 5+ years experience" but content strategy development, campaign performance analysis, cross-functional team leadership. Weight them by how much they decide the role.
Write one question per skill. Targeted, drawn from the real work, the same for every candidate.
Write down what a strong answer sounds like, before the interview. This is the step that replaces the degree. Without it there is nothing to judge against and the proxy comes back.
Score each answer before anyone discusses the candidate. Then combine the scores the same way every time.
This is not a preference. Structured interviews are the #1 predictor of job performance, more than twice as predictive as unstructured ones, in the 2022 Sackett meta-analysis: 0.42 against 0.19. The 80% credibility interval runs from 0.18 to 0.66, so how well a team builds the process decides most of what it gets.
Where should a team start?
One role. Pick something you hire for often, build the full evaluation around it, and run it twice before touching anything else.
Most companies try to change everything at once and stall. The ones that get somewhere fix one hiring loop end to end, see the difference in the debrief, and scale from there.
The lesson in the Burning Glass data is not that skills-based hiring failed. It is that most companies only did the first half of it, and the first half on its own moves one hire in 700.
How Ratio fits
Ratio was built for the half that stalls. Working from whatever you have on the job, whether that is a job description, intake notes, or a hiring-manager conversation, it extracts and weights the skills the role needs for success, then builds a complete interview kit around them: one question per skill, planned follow-ups, and a written scoring guide for every answer. Interviewers run the conversation and score the candidate. Ratio never auto-scores candidates. The standard that replaces the proxy is the part you no longer have to build by hand.
References
- Fuller, J., Sigelman, M., & Martin, A. (2024). Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School. https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/skills-based-hiring-2024
- Fuller, J., Raman, M., et al. (2021). Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent. Harvard Business School and Accenture.
- Fuller, J., Raman, M., et al. (2017). Dismissed by Degrees. Harvard Business School, Accenture, and Grads of Life.
- Behavioural Insights Team (2022). Gender Differences in Response to Requirements in Job Adverts. Randomized online experiment, n = 10,468.
- LinkedIn Gender Insights Report (2019); LinkedIn qualifications-section and job-post-length analyses.
- Indeed Hiring Lab. US job-posting requirement trends, 2022-2024.
- Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040-2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
Frequently asked questions
Does removing degree requirements actually change who gets hired?
Barely, on the evidence so far. The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School analysed large firms that dropped degree requirements and found a net change of 0.14 percentage points, roughly one hire in 700. Only 37% of firms genuinely changed who they hired; about 45% changed in name only and about 18% backslid. Rewriting the posting is not the same as changing the decision.
Why does skills-based hiring stall after the job description?
Because the screening and the interview stay the same. A hiring manager under pressure to fill a seat falls back on proxies like degrees, years, and titles unless there is something better to judge against. The Burning Glass report names this directly: without a change to assessment, there is a real incentive to revert to proxies rather than do the harder work of assessing an individual candidate's skills.
How many qualified candidates get screened out by exact-match requirements?
Most employers say it happens. In Harvard Business School and Accenture's Hidden Workers research, 88% of employers said qualified high-skill candidates are screened out because they do not match the exact criteria in the job description, rising to 94% for middle-skill roles. Two-thirds of employers in the earlier Dismissed by Degrees study acknowledged that requiring a four-year degree excluded qualified candidates.
What actually makes skills-based hiring work?
Changing how candidates are evaluated, not just how the role is advertised. That means naming the skills the job needs, writing one question per skill, writing down what a strong answer sounds like before the interview, and scoring each answer against that standard before anyone discusses the candidate. Structured interviews are the #1 predictor of job performance, more than twice as predictive as unstructured ones (Sackett et al., 2022).
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