Skills Over Degrees: How Blind Hiring is Building Stronger Teams

As college enrollment declines, skills-based hiring is becoming crucial for employers to adapt to evolving workforce demands. With fewer candidates holding traditional degrees, businesses must prioritize skills over credentials. This approach helps navigate market uncertainty, particularly as AI and other emerging skills reshape the job landscape. Blind evaluations can reduce hiring biases by focusing on abilities rather than personal identifiers, promoting diversity and inclusion. However, these methods don’t completely eliminate bias or guarantee diverse pools.

Companies should identify suitable roles for skills-based hiring, develop blind evaluation criteria, and implement targeted assessments to assess both current skills and potential for growth. Embracing these practices will help build adaptable, future-ready teams.

Skills Over Degrees: How Blind Hiring is Building Stronger Teams

As of October 2023, only 61.4% of recent high school graduates aged 16-24 were enrolled in college, marking a 4.5 percentage-point decline from 2013, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This shift indicates a growing preference for alternative education paths, such as trade programs and on-the-job learning. With fewer candidates obtaining traditional degrees, employers need to adapt their hiring strategies to prioritize skills over formal credentials. As the workforce increasingly moves away from college degrees, companies are realizing that academic qualifications often don’t align with industry needs.

SHRM President Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. has stressed the importance of reevaluating talent assessments, suggesting that businesses should embrace skills-based hiring practices, including blind evaluations and assessments, to effectively match candidates with open roles.

In an unpredictable labor market, where 2.2 million jobs were added in 2024 but unemployment rose to 4.2%, skills-based hiring helps companies adjust to market uncertainties. Emerging competencies, like artificial intelligence (AI), may not always be visible on resumes but are essential for workforce development. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, 39% of core job skills will evolve over the next five years. Although AI is driving change, uniquely human traits such as creativity, leadership, and social influence are becoming more valuable, and employers must focus on both identifying skilled candidates and upskilling their workforce to meet evolving demands.

Combining skills-based hiring with blind evaluations and assessments helps reduce bias in the hiring process, making it more objective and focused on abilities. This approach expands the talent pool and supports diversity and inclusion efforts, but it does not entirely eliminate bias or guarantee a diverse candidate pool. Blind evaluations, which involve removing identifying details like names and demographic information from resumes, help reduce implicit bias, ensuring qualified candidates are fairly considered. Targeted assessments also allow employers to identify the necessary skills for specific roles and gauge candidates’ ability to learn and adapt to new challenges, ensuring long-term growth within the organization.

To implement skills-based hiring effectively, companies should begin by identifying roles that are suitable for such practices, understanding that some jobs, like mechanical engineering, still require formal degrees. Blind evaluation criteria should be developed to remove irrelevant identifying information, and tailored assessments should be designed to evaluate both current skills and the potential for future growth. As businesses rethink traditional hiring models in response to declining college enrollment and shifting workforce demands, adopting a skills-based approach supported by blind evaluations and targeted assessments will enable companies to navigate market uncertainties, embrace emerging technologies like AI, and build adaptable, future-ready teams.

This approach not only helps in identifying talent with the right skills but also fosters a more inclusive and equitable hiring process. By focusing on potential and capabilities, companies can ensure a more diverse workforce that is equipped to tackle future challenges and contribute to long-term success in an ever-changing job market.