Should you drop the degree requirement from your job posts?

Over the last decade, a long list of large employers announced they were dropping the bachelor’s degree from job requirements. It was good news for the majority of American workers who do not hold one, including a lot of first-generation professionals I work with who learned the job by doing it. Then researchers checked what actually happened.

What happened when employers dropped degree requirements?

Much less than the announcements promised. Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute studied 11,300 roles at large firms before and after the requirement came off. The increase in actual opportunity added up to fewer than 1 in 700 hires in a year.

The firms split into three groups. About 45% made a change in name only: the posting changed, the hiring did not. About one in five made short-term gains and then slid back. The remaining 37%, which the researchers call Skills-Based Hiring Leaders, increased their share of hires without a bachelor’s degree by nearly 20%, and those hires had retention rates 10 percentage points higher than their degree-holding colleagues (HRD summary).

Why didn’t deleting the line work?

Because the degree was never only in the job post. It was in the resume screen, in the applicant tracking system’s filters, in which candidates a recruiter called back, and in what interviewers treated as a signal of competence. Remove it from one place and the other four keep doing its job. If you want to see how much of that happens before a person reads anything, how applicant tracking systems screen candidates walks through it.

What does skills-based hiring actually take?

Changing what you evaluate, not just what you post. For a small business, that means four moves:

• Define the role by outcomes in an intake meeting, then list the skills those outcomes require.
• Screen for evidence of those skills: past results, portfolios, certifications, work samples.
• Interview with structured questions and a scorecard, so every candidate is judged on the same skills. Structured interviews predict job performance far better than unstructured ones, as the data in how to vet candidates shows.
• Check results at 90 days, and compare hires with and without degrees. If the skills-based hires perform, you have your answer.

The full process, from intake to offer, is in how to build a recruiting process that gets offers accepted.

When should you keep the degree?

When the work legally or practically requires a credential: licensed professions, roles that need a specific body of knowledge you cannot test in an interview, or positions where a client contract demands it. Everywhere else, ask the hiring manager which skill the degree is standing in for, then hire for that skill directly.

For employers, the payoff is a bigger pool and, if the Burning Glass numbers hold, people who stay. For candidates without degrees, the takeaway is to apply on evidence: lead your resume with results, not education, and let the work make the case. If you are building either side of that, my structured interview scorecards give employers the evaluation tool, and the career coaching work helps candidates present the proof.

McKinley holds a J.D. but is not a licensed attorney. Articles here are general information, not legal advice. For your specific situation, talk with an employment attorney.