Skills-based hiring has become the thing every employer says they do. In an April 2025 survey of people involved in hiring decisions in the United States and United Kingdom by TestGorilla, a skills-testing vendor, 85 percent said they use skills-based hiring and 53 percent said they have eliminated degree requirements, up from 30 percent the year before (TestGorilla, State of Skills-Based Hiring 2025). Because TestGorilla sells skills tests, treat that survey as a vendor source. Indeed Hiring Lab reported that 17.8 percent of United States job postings on Indeed required a four-year degree or more in January 2024, and that educational requirements had loosened in 41 of the 47 occupational sectors it analyzed (Indeed Hiring Lab, February 27, 2024). By November 2025 the share of postings requiring a bachelor's degree or higher had risen to 19.3 percent, up from 16.6 percent in November 2023 (Indeed Hiring Lab, January 28, 2026). On paper, the degree filter has loosened.
The reality is more uncomfortable. In February 2024, the Burning Glass Institute and the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work project studied hiring in 11,300 roles at large firms that had removed a degree requirement. They found that firms increased the share of workers without a bachelor's degree hired into those roles by about 3.5 percentage points on average, and that "the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring has borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year." The announcements changed far more than the hiring did.
That gap between stated policy and actual outcomes is the whole problem. Removing a line from a job posting is easy. Building a process that can evaluate a candidate on capability instead of credential is the hard part, and most employers skip it. They drop the requirement, keep screening exactly as before, and end up exactly where they started, except now their posting promises something their funnel cannot deliver.
Why the degree filter is so hard to give up
A degree requirement is a shortcut. It lets a recruiter cut a stack of 400 applicants down to 120 in one filter, without reading a single resume closely. It feels like a quality control. The trouble is that it screens on a proxy, not on the work. A bachelor's degree tells you someone finished a program years ago. It does not tell you whether they can do the job in front of them today.
When you remove that filter without replacing it, two things happen. The applicant pool gets larger, and the recruiter, now overwhelmed, reaches for the next available proxy. That is usually keyword matching, which is the same mistake in a different costume. You have not moved to skills-based hiring. You have moved to a noisier version of credential screening.
What dropping the requirement really requires
Skills-based hiring works when you replace the credential filter with a capability signal that is just as fast to apply but far more predictive. Three changes make that possible.
First, define the skills the role truly needs, separately from the ones that are nice to have. Most job descriptions are wish lists assembled from the last person who held the role. Strip them down to the capabilities that determine success in the first 90 days. If you cannot describe how you would test for a requirement, it does not belong on the list.
Second, evaluate transferable skills, not just matching titles. A logistics coordinator from the military, a career changer from a different industry, and a self-taught candidate without a degree can all carry the exact capability a role needs, written in language your screening does not recognize. The candidate who looks unqualified on a keyword pass is often the strongest hire once you read for what the experience proves rather than what it is labeled.
Third, measure recency and real potential, not the presence of a phrase. The question is not whether a resume contains the right word. The question is whether the person demonstrated the skill, how recently, and whether the rest of their record predicts they can grow into the role. That is a judgment a keyword filter cannot make and a degree requirement never made in the first place.
This is where screening technology either helps or hurts
Most resume screening tools were built to do the old job faster. They match keywords, rank by surface similarity, and quietly reproduce the same credential bias you were trying to escape. Adopting one of those does not move you to skills-based hiring. It automates the problem.
TrueScan HR was built for the other approach. It evaluates transferable skills and real potential rather than keyword density, and its Veteran Translation Mode maps military experience and clearances to their civilian equivalents so a hiring manager can read a service record for the capability it proves. The goal is not to lower the bar. The goal is to stop measuring the wrong thing, so that a candidate without the expected credential gets evaluated on whether they can do the work.
The bar does not move. The measurement does.
Dropping a degree requirement is not about being lenient. The strongest version of skills-based hiring raises the bar, because it forces you to define what success in the role truly demands and then test for it directly. The same study found that about 45 percent of the firms it examined adopted skills-based hiring in name only, removing degree requirements from postings with no meaningful change in who they hired. Those are the employers who removed the filter and changed nothing else. The ones who win the talent the rest of the market is filtering out are the ones who replaced the proxy with a real signal.
If your job postings have already dropped the degree requirement, the next question is whether your screening can keep the promise. Visit truescanhr.com to see how skills-first screening works in practice.
Already dropped the degree requirement?
TrueScan HR evaluates transferable skills and real potential instead of keyword density, with a Veteran Translation Mode that maps military experience and clearances to civilian equivalents. The bar stays high. The measurement gets honest.
Visit truescanhr.com to see skills-first screening in practice.
How TrueScan HR Helps
Dropping a degree requirement only works if the screen can read skills directly. TrueScan HR scores each resume against the job description and lists the matched and missing skills, so the bar stays the same while the measurement moves from credentials to capability. Run a free scan to see it on one of your own openings.
Related guide: See what the research says about removing the degree screen in The Degree Requirement Your ATS Enforces Without Asking.
Sources:
- State of Skills-Based Hiring 2025, TestGorilla (vendor survey), 2025
- Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice, Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller, and Alex Martin, Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work, February 2024
- Educational Requirements Are Gradually Disappearing From Job Postings, Indeed Hiring Lab, February 27, 2024
- Where Do College Degrees Still Matter in a Skills-First Job Market?, Sneha Puri, Indeed Hiring Lab, January 28, 2026