Skills-based hiring, sometimes called “skills-first” hiring, can help employers increase the size of their talent pools to find quality applicants for hard-to-fill roles. It also levels the playing field for the 50% of workers who are STARs - Skilled Through Alternative Routes rather than a bachelor’s degree.

Hiring practices that rely on bachelor’s degree screens, narrow recruiting sources, or personal referrals helped create the paper ceiling. Today these practices, and others like them, perpetuate the paper ceiling, leading companies to exclude a massive pool of quality candidates for roles that pay at least $40,000 per year in growing fields like healthcare, information technology, customer service and more. They also disproportionately affect STARs, keeping millions of workers with in-demand skills from climbing the economic ladder.

In contrast, skills-based hiring focuses on a candidate's demonstrated skills and competencies. A skills-first approach starts with rewriting a job description to focus on on the skills required for a job instead of focusing on unrelated educational requirements. Companies then use a variety of skills assessments to identify the ideal candidate, from hard-skill evaluations like coding tests, to “job auditions,” like case studies. By leveling the playing field for STARs, who include the majority of Black (61%), Hispanic (55%) and rural (66%) workers, skills-based hiring practices also enable companies to embrace the richness of our nation’s racial and cultural diversity.