Everyone says they hire for skills. Almost nobody does.

Few ideas in talent have travelled as fast as skills-based hiring. Roughly 81% of US employers reported using it in 2024, up from 57% two years earlier. More than half say they have removed degree requirements from at least some postings. As a stated position, the argument is close to settled.

Then there is the other set of numbers. Analysis from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute, which examined what employers actually did rather than what they said, found the change in hiring outcomes to be vanishingly small — at some large firms, fewer than one hire in 700 was a candidate without a degree who would previously have been screened out. Policy changed at close to 85%. Behaviour changed at a fraction of a percent.

This is not hypocrisy

The easy reading is that employers announced a policy for reputational benefit and never meant it. That is mostly wrong, and it obscures the more useful explanation.

Removing a degree requirement is a one-line edit to a job posting. It can be done centrally, in an afternoon, by someone with no involvement in hiring. Everything downstream of that line, however, remains calibrated to the old model:

• The screening logic still ranks on proxies — brand-name employers, continuous tenure, institutional pedigree — that correlate heavily with the requirement that was formally removed.
• The hiring manager's mental model of a credible candidate did not change because a posting did. Nobody retrained the judgment being exercised at the point of decision.
• No assessment was introduced to measure the skill that the degree was previously standing in for. Removing a proxy without replacing it with a measurement leaves a vacuum, and the vacuum fills with instinct.
• The sourcing channels stayed the same, so the pool arriving at the top of the funnel barely shifted regardless of the stated criteria.

Deleting a filter is not the same as building a way to assess what the filter was crudely approximating. The first is an announcement; the second is the work.

What the gap implies for leadership hiring

At senior levels the degree question is largely moot — nobody is screening a Business Head on their undergraduate institution. But the structural failure generalises cleanly, and it shows up in a form that costs considerably more.

The senior equivalent of the degree filter is the sector filter: the unstated requirement that a candidate must come from the same industry, ideally a direct competitor. It is rarely written down. It survives because it feels like risk reduction and because it makes the shortlist easy to defend internally. And it is applied with far more consistency than most organisations would admit if asked directly.

The test is the same one Harvard applied. Not what the mandate says, but what the last five shortlists contained. If every candidate came from within the sector, the organisation has a sector filter operating whether or not anyone chose to install one.