At a time when many employers are struggling to fill vacancies and retain their current workforce, a gatekeeping mechanism with no proven benefit creates a competitive disadvantage. They’re also overlooking workers they desperately need, particularly in growing fields such as tech, where the demand for people with specialized skills far outstrips the supply. In fact, when a team from Harvard Business School and Accenture recently analyzed “middle-skill” jobs (which require some education or training beyond high school but not a four-year degree), they found no boosts in productivity when those jobs were done by college graduates.Ĭompanies that use the bachelor’s degree as a filter when filling positions that don’t require it are hiring inefficiently. Hiring managers may think that a bachelor’s degree serves as a good proxy for things like collaboration skills, a sense of initiative, and the ability to think critically, but there’s virtually no evidence to support that notion.
They also deprive companies of talent while yielding little to no benefit.
Unnecessary degree requirements don’t just hurt workers. That number dropped somewhat as the economy recovered, but scores of jobs remain inaccessible to people who have the skills and aptitude to succeed at them-but not a college diploma. The trend began decades ago but spiked during the Great Recession: Research by Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance shows that from 2007 to 2010, job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree increased by 10%. Millions of people are locked out of promising job opportunities because too many companies default to hiring workers with four-year degrees, even for positions that don’t require that level of education. Yet for those who don’t complete four years of college, the lack of a BA or BS looms as a barrier. IBM, Aon, Cleveland Clinic, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, and Merck are among the companies taking this approach-and demonstrating its benefits for firms, workers, and society as a whole.Įarning a bachelor’s degree can expand one’s mind, widen horizons, and provide a pathway to a well-paying, satisfying career. It involves writing job descriptions that emphasize capabilities, not credentials creating apprenticeships, internships, and training programs for people without college degrees collaborating with educational institutions and other outside partners to expand the talent pool helping hiring managers embrace skills-first thinking bringing on board a critical mass of nondegreed workers and building a supportive organizational culture. All these problems could be alleviated, the authors say, if employers focused on job candidates’ skills instead of their degree status.ĭrawing on their interviews with corporate leaders, along with their own experience in academia and the business world, the authors outline a “skills-first” approach to hiring and managing talent. At the same time, many companies are desperate for workers and not meeting the diversity goals that could help them perform better while also reducing social and economic inequality. Many workers today are stuck in low-paying jobs, unable to advance simply because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree.
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