Skills-Based Hiring Is In: Introducing the SART Scan for Hiring Teams
- 4 days ago
- 11 min read
Eighty five percent of US employers say they use skills-based hiring. Less than half of them actually do.
In 2025, eighty five percent of US employers reported that they use skills-based hiring.
In the same year, Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute looked at the companies that publicly dropped degree requirements and found that forty five percent of them did so “in name only.” The press release went out. The hiring practice did not actually change.
So we have a market where skills-based hiring is the loudest trend in talent acquisition, and also a market where the actual hiring data is still scoring degrees like it is 2014.
If you are running an HR team, leading a department, or owning the company, this is your problem. The talent pool has shifted, the workers have shifted, and the data is loud. If your hiring system is still running on a degree filter from a decade ago, you are not just behind on a trend. You are losing money, losing retention, and shrinking your qualified candidate pool by a factor of nineteen.
Let me walk you through what changed, what the SART Scan looks like on the employer side, and how to put it into practice without tanking your quality of hire.
The Data: What Actually Changed in the Hiring Market
This is not vibes. The market moved.
Degree requirements are coming off the page.
The share of US job postings requiring a four year degree dropped by thirty three percent for mid-skill roles between 2019 and 2025. That figure is from Lightcast, the labor market analytics firm formerly known as Burning Glass, which tracks job postings at national scale. Across the board, fewer employers are listing the degree as a hard requirement.
State governments are leading the policy shift.
More than twenty US state governments have removed degree requirements for many state positions since 2022.
Maryland was first under Governor Hogan. Utah, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Colorado, Virginia, and others followed. When the public sector starts opening tens of thousands of jobs without a degree gate, the private sector takes notice.
Major employers have done the same.
Google, IBM, Apple, Accenture, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines, and Tesla have all publicly removed degree requirements from a meaningful share of their job postings. IBM was an early mover. Their “new collar” program built a full hiring pipeline for technical roles that do not require a bachelor’s degree, and then trained those hires in-house.
Skills-based hiring is now standard practice at entry level.
Sixty five to seventy percent of US employers now use skills-based hiring for entry level roles, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook 2026 report. GPA, once a default screening factor, dropped from seventy three percent in 2019 to forty two percent in 2026. The four year degree is no longer the default key to the front door.
The candidate pool is bigger than your funnel suggests.
Opportunity@Work estimates that more than seventy million US workers are STARs, meaning Skilled Through Alternative Routes. These are workers who built capability through community college, military service, on the job training, or self teaching. They are not unqualified. They are unfiltered for. Until your job description changes and your applicant tracking system changes, those candidates will keep being dropped at the door.
That is the macro picture. Now let me show you the gap inside of it.
The Implementation Gap: Skills-Based Hiring “In Name Only”
Here is the uncomfortable truth most HR reports skip past.
Most companies that say they hire for skills do not actually hire for skills.
The Harvard Business School and Burning Glass Institute study put a number on it. Of the companies that publicly removed degree requirements from their job postings, forty five percent saw essentially no change in their hiring patterns. Same candidates. Same schools. Same channels. Different job description, same outcome.
A few reasons why this gap exists.
Hiring manager discretion is enormous.
Even when the official posting drops the degree, the individual reviewing the resume stack often still favors the candidate with the recognizable school name. Old habits do not disappear because HR sent a memo. The decision moment for most hires is still a human one, and the human has preferences that were built over twenty years.
Applicant tracking systems are quietly still scoring degrees.
Your ATS does not always read your new job description. It reads its rules. If those rules were built three years ago to give weight to “bachelor’s degree,” the candidates without that line are still getting deprioritized inside your funnel without you knowing. The new posting and the old scoring rules are doing two different jobs.
Skills verification is harder than degree verification.
A bachelor’s degree from a state university means roughly the same thing across the country. A “data analytics certificate” could mean a six month rigorous program or a weekend webinar. Without a real assessment in your process, the degree is the only standardized signal left, so the system defaults back to it.
Most organizations measure postings, not behavior.
HR tracks the job description change. HR does not always track what happens inside the funnel after the change. Without downstream data, the gap between policy and practice stays invisible, and the company keeps reporting skills-based hiring numbers that the actual hires do not back up.
This is where the SART Scan stops being a candidate framework and starts being a hiring framework.
The SART Scan for Hiring Teams
If you read our companion piece on the candidate side, you have already met the SART Scan. Skills. Articulation. Relevance. Time. The same four letters apply on the employer side, but they shift from a screening question to a design question. You are not just scanning candidates against the SART Scan. You are building a hiring process that runs on it.
S is for Skills
You cannot hire for skills you have not defined.
Build a skills inventory for every open role. Not a wish list. An inventory. What does the person in this seat actually need to do in week one, month three, and year one. Break it down into verbs and outputs. “Manages payroll for an organization of two hundred employees.” “Builds executive dashboards in Excel and Power BI.” “Resolves Tier 2 customer complaints within forty eight hours.”
The skills inventory is the foundation. Every other step of the SART Scan rests on it. If you cannot list the skills, you do not have a job description. You have a job posting.
A is for Articulation
On the candidate side, articulation is about how a candidate communicates what they can do. On the hiring side, articulation is about how your hiring team communicates what you are actually looking for.
Audit your job descriptions. Read them out loud. If they read like every other posting on the internet, they are filtering for the wrong things. If the only differentiator is the degree requirement, you are not articulating the role, you are gatekeeping it.
Then train your hiring managers to ask different questions. “Tell me about your experience with X” is a 2014 question. “Walk me through the last time you solved Y” is a SART question. The answer to the second one tells you whether the candidate can actually do the work.
R is for Relevance
Stop scoring resumes against an idealized profile. Score them against the role.
This is where the talent pool actually opens up. A candidate who managed inventory at a manufacturing plant has logistics skills that may translate cleanly to a healthcare supply chain role. A candidate with eight years of military leadership has people management skills that map to most operations roles in the private sector. A candidate who built a side business has revenue, marketing, and customer service experience that a corporate analyst role might value more than a finance certificate.
Relevance is about translation, not pedigree. Train your hiring team to translate.
T is for Time
Weight recency in the screen.
A candidate who used a skill twelve years ago and has not touched it since does not have that skill. A candidate who built the same capability three years ago in a non-corporate setting does. The dates matter more than the title.
This is where degree based hiring breaks down most clearly. A bachelor’s degree earned in 2008 tells you what someone studied seventeen years ago. It does not tell you what they can do today. A skills inventory paired with a recency weighting gives you a better read than a transcript every time.
The Business Case: What Skills-Based Hiring Actually Returns
Here is what the data says about the financial side, because the C-suite always wants the financial side.
The qualified candidate pool grows by a factor of nineteen.
When degree filters are removed, the qualified candidate pool grows by approximately nineteen times, according to LinkedIn Economic Graph analysis. Not nineteen percent. Nineteen times. That is the difference between fishing in your zip code and fishing in the ocean.
Skills predict performance five times better than education.
Hiring for skills is approximately five times more predictive of job performance than hiring on education alone. That data point comes out of the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School work on predictive validity. The degree, used as a sole filter, is roughly a 0.10 correlation with on the job performance. The skill assessment is several multiples stronger.
Retention improves measurably.
LinkedIn’s Future of Work Report found a fifteen percent retention improvement for companies using skills-based hiring compared to traditional methods. Multiple sources tracking long term retention data have also reported that employees without a four year degree tend to stay with companies roughly thirty four percent longer than those with degrees. Lower turnover is real money.
Cost per hire drops.
Kelly Services estimates seven thousand eight hundred to twenty two thousand five hundred dollars in savings per role when skills-based hiring is implemented properly. Fortune 500 companies using skills-based hiring platforms report an average of one million dollars in annual recruitment savings, according to LinkedIn data.
Bad hires get expensive fast.
The US Department of Labor estimates a bad hire costs roughly thirty percent of first year earnings. Deloitte puts the average turnover replacement cost at thirty three percent of annual salary, and technical roles often run over fifty thousand dollars per replacement. Every degree filter that screens out a qualified non-degree candidate and lets in a less capable degree candidate is a cost the company is paying without seeing.
Diversity outcomes improve as a side effect.
Eighty six percent of employers using skills-based hiring report diversity improvements, per TestGorilla’s 2024 survey. This is not just an equity outcome. It is a candidate pool outcome, an employer brand outcome, and in regulated industries, a compliance position worth understanding.
How to Implement This Without Wrecking Quality of Hire
Dropping the degree requirement and replacing it with nothing is not skills-based hiring. It is a smaller filter. Quality of hire only improves when you replace the degree with something better.
Here is the practical roadmap.
1. Audit Every Job Description
Go role by role. Ask three questions for every line.
Is this requirement actually required, or is it copied from a template.
Does this requirement test for the skill, or for a proxy of the skill.
What would you accept in its place if you found a candidate who could clearly do the job.
Most job descriptions shrink by twenty to thirty percent when this audit is done honestly. That is fine. Shorter is better.
2. Audit Your ATS Scoring Rules
Pull your applicant tracking system settings. Find every rule that scores or filters on a degree, a school, or a GPA. Decide which ones actually predict performance and which ones are decorative. Then turn off the decorative ones.
Most companies have not touched their ATS scoring rules in years. The rules are running. The rules are filtering. The rules are not aligned with the new job descriptions. Fix that gap before you do anything else.
3. Design Real Skills Assessments
Replace the degree filter with something that actually tests the skill.
For technical roles, a work sample or skills test. For analytical roles, a case study or data exercise. For client facing roles, a role play or written communication sample. For leadership roles, structured behavioral interviews built around the verbs in your job description.
The assessment does not have to be expensive. It does have to be consistent and scored on a rubric. Inconsistent assessments are how bias creeps back into a process that was supposed to remove it.
4. Train the Hiring Managers
The hiring manager is where most skills-based hiring programs go to die. The HR team can drop the degree from the posting, the ATS can score the resume neutrally, the assessment can be designed well, and then the hiring manager will still pick the candidate with the recognizable school.
Train them. Show them the data on predictive validity. Walk them through structured interview design. Hold them accountable for hiring outcomes, not hiring preferences.
5. Measure Downstream
Most organizations measure what they hire. They do not measure how they hire.
Build a dashboard that tracks the share of non-degree candidates entering your pipeline, the share advancing through each stage, the share hired, and the retention and performance scores of those hires after one year. If the pipeline numbers are dropping at one stage and not another, you know exactly where the filter is still firing.
What gets measured gets managed. Skills-based hiring is no exception.
The College vs. Skills Conversation, Settled
This is not a war. It is a recalibration.
College degrees still matter for plenty of roles. Medicine, law, accounting, engineering, education, and most regulated fields are not waving anyone in without credentials. A bachelor’s degree is still a valuable asset and worth pursuing for many career paths. For some technical and professional positions, a degree is a reasonable signal that the candidate has the baseline knowledge for the work.
The shift is not “college does not matter.” The shift is “college is no longer the default screen for every role.”
The default question used to be: does this candidate have a degree, yes or no.
The default question now should be: does this candidate have the skills the role requires, and if so, where did they get them.
Sometimes the answer is a four year degree program. That is fine. Sometimes the answer is eight years of military service. That is also fine. Sometimes the answer is a community college program plus three years of on the job experience. Also fine.
Your job as a hiring team is to figure out which signals predict performance for your roles, weight those signals correctly, and stop weighting the ones that do not.
What This Means for Your Hiring Strategy
If you are responsible for hiring in your organization, here is what to do this quarter.
Pick three to five open roles. Run the SART Scan on the job descriptions and rewrite them. Audit your ATS settings on those roles. Design a real skills assessment for each one. Train the hiring managers involved. Measure the outcomes for one full hiring cycle and compare them to your historical baseline.
That is not a transformation initiative. That is a pilot. And it will tell you within ninety days whether your hiring process has been working as advertised, or whether you have been running a press release without the workflow behind it.
The market changed. The data is on the table. The companies that move now are going to be hiring from a candidate pool nineteen times larger than the companies that do not, at a cost per hire that is several thousand dollars lower, with a retention profile fifteen percent better. That is a competitive advantage measured in millions of dollars per year for any company operating at scale.
Mama was right about a lot of things. She was wrong about the diploma being the answer. The market figured that out. It is time for the hiring side of the desk to figure it out too.
Ready to Put the Workflow Behind the Press Release?
If your hiring process needs the SART Scan, the audit, or the implementation roadmap, this is what we do for a living. Career Bloom Solutions works with companies on HR consulting engagements that include job description audits, ATS configuration reviews, hiring manager training, and skills assessment design. We build the workflow behind the press release.
Start a conversation about your hiring system at careerbloomsolutions.com/contact.
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