Employers Are Looking for Job Candidates in the Wrong Places

But adults who participated in apprenticeship programs instead of college, for instance, can do certain jobs, such as billing and customer service, just as effectively as graduates with bachelor’s degrees, according to a separate 2017 report by the Harvard Business School, this one co-authored with the labor-market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies. Sometimes apprentices can do those jobs even more effectively than college graduates. Only 42 percent of employers feel that graduates are adequately prepared for the job market, according to a 2013 report by the McKinsey Center for Government.

This suggests that, in focusing their hiring efforts only on college graduates, many employers are overlooking pools of qualified applicants—a habit that’s mutually detrimental in that it can both undermine the company’s economic health and deprive promising Americans of opportunities in which they’d otherwise thrive. After all, the vast majority of high-achieving, low-income students don’t apply to any selective college or university, according to analyses by Stanford University researchers. And just 14 percent of low-income students receive a bachelor’s degree within eight years of completing high school, which is roughly half the rate of their middle-income peers.

These discrepancies aren’t the result of an imbalance in ability but rather an imbalance in access. And that ought to call into question companies’ ever-growing reliance on a bachelor’s degree as a barometer of one’s eligibility for a given job. Instead of considering whether a candidate has a four-year degree, the employer should be asking, “who can do this job today and continue learning to become a productive member of the team?” said Beth Cobert, the CEO of Skillful. Skillful, a recently launched Colorado-based organization, aims to change the way companies hire by working with employers, job seekers, educators, coaches, and the government, among others, to shift their focus during the job-screening process from degrees to skills. The goal is to have employers look at applicants’ competencies—say, their ability to communicate effectively with customers and compile an Excel spreadsheet—rather than just their degrees when screening candidates.

Many companies could benefit from deflating college degrees and in turn giving more weight to skills-based training like apprenticeships or coding bootcamps. This training, at least in theory, ensures the applicant in question has the abilities that the job requires. In the long run, skills-based job screening could reduce the number of failed hires a company experiences. A candidate who was hired simply because she has a four-year degree could easily end up a dud whether it’s because she doesn’t actually have the skills, isn’t driven to learn and improve, or is simply overqualified and decides to leave. And again, this hiring approach helps those from non-traditional educational backgrounds, many of whom didn’t pursue or complete a bachelor’s degree because of financial reasons, find fulfilling employment.

Skillful seeks to facilitate a shift toward skills-based screening by mining extensive data on jobs, education experience, and job-seekers gathered by LinkedIn and identifying the needed skills for a given position. It then encourages employers to explicitly ask for those skills in job descriptions—as Leah Johnson, who formerly oversaw public relations at Skillful, explained, job descriptions play a huge role in determining which candidates make it through the hiring process. Skillful, which has been endorsed by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, has become quite popular among employers and educators. Since its launch in 2016, 375 employers have engaged with Skillful’s network, and 20 employers are working to move toward skills-based hiring practices.