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Skills-Based Hiring: Focus on Abilities, Not Degrees

Employers should address key hiring and recruiting challenges by resetting expectations.

By Michael Popke | August 26, 2022 at 11:00 AM
Stock illustration: diverse job candidates. (Credit: Franzi/Shutterstock.com)

More and more employers are making efforts to remove hiring barriers and retain workers by recognizing and valuing skills regardless of how they were acquired—whether through a formal academic degree, on the job, or through the employee’s prior experience. Recognizing that trend, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently hosted an online discussion emphasizing the benefits of skills-based hiring to promote equal employment opportunity in the workplace.

The roundtable, titled “Skills Based Hiring: Removing Barriers and Paving Pathways to an Inclusive Workforce,” was the third in a continuing series of Hiring Initiative to Reimagine Equity (HIRE) roundtables. The discussion engaged a broad variety of stakeholders in pursuit of the common goal of addressing key hiring and recruiting challenges that prevent under-represented communities from accessing good jobs.

“Many employers—the federal government included—are re-examining degree and hiring requirements to focus on an applicant’s abilities rather than where they learned them,” OFCCP director Jenny R. Yang said during the roundtable. “In many cases, eliminating unnecessary educational requirements or narrow prior-experience requirements for positions allows employers to select skilled workers from a diverse range of backgrounds. In many industries, business leaders are resetting their assumptions and expanding the pool of available talent.”

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