The False Hope of Skills-Based Hiring

Skills-based hiring is often floated as the big answer to the shortage of talent for open job postings and the on-ramp into meaningful careers for those without degrees.

It’s a noble goal. But there’s one problem. As an economy-wide solution, hiring based on skills is unlikely to happen.

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To be clear up-front, I sympathize strongly with the goals of those pushing for skills-based hiring. In particular, I agree with organizations like Opportunity@Work that current practices unfairly discriminate against talented potential employees “skilled through alternative routes”—so-called STARs.

Changing the ways that companies hire and reducing the reliance on college degrees as a sorting mechanism would be a good thing. Degrees are not a great signal of the ability to do a job well and the practice of sorting by them can be discriminatory. I’ve long argued for such a change (see this piece from 2018, for example—an article titled “Why States Should Break the College-Degree Stranglehold and Make Jobs Available to All Qualified Applicants”).

But, with the possible exception of postings for largely technical roles, it’s unlikely to come about through skills-based hiring.