Skills-based hiring has created a quagmire for early career professionals.  It was instituted to solve one problem, bu it has had unintended consequences.

For years employers had college-degree requirements for most white-collar jobs.  That limited the talent pool and screened out capable people who lacked the credential. As labor markets tightened and employers struggled to fill roles, dropping unnecessary degree requirements offered an obvious advantage, more people could compete for the work. The idea was simple and appealing. Stop using a degree as a proxy for capability. Ask candidates to show what they could actually do.

For an experienced worker without a degree, skills based hiring can be genuinely democratizing. Someone who has spent ten years analyzing data, managing customers or running projects has evidence of their abilities. Skills-based hiring gives that person a way around the paper ceiling.

Unfortunately, we are applying the same logic to people who have yet to have a professional job. Skills based hiring eliminates a focus on pedegree and replaces it with proof. So, for most new hires skills-based hiring not only makes little sense, it keeps them from getting hired.

With entry level hires, employers formerly made a different kind of bet. A college degree was never proof that a 22-year-old had the skills to immediately operate inside a company. It was a rough proxy for potential. Can this person learn, persist, meet expectations and develop into someone who can do the work. The employer supplied the next part. It hired the beginner, taught the job, gave feedback, increased responsibility and, over time, turned potential into professional capability.

Skills-based hiring changed the bargain. Employers began asking all candidates (including entry level folks) to demonstrate workplace skills before they entered the workplace. Today, 70% of employers say they use skills-based hiring for entry-level positions, and nearly half of graduating seniors report having been asked to demonstrate skills through an assessment during the hiring process.

The rationale for skills based hiring is logical. If the standard is demonstrated skill, previous work experience becomes an excellent way to prove it.  But for folks just starting out It feels like the logic is all turned around. An OECD review reports that roughly 80% of employers expect to prioritize work experience in hiring between 2025 and 2030. That creates an obvious problem for someone trying to enter the workforce. The easiest way to prove that you can perform workplace skills is to have performed them at work. But you cannot get that evidence until somebody gives you the first job.

Of course entry-level candidates should arrive with some skills. A new accountant needs accounting fundamentals. A customer success candidate needs to communicate effectively. Entry level does not mean zero capability. But it also cannot mean someone arrives already able to perform as well as a colleague who has been doing the job for several years. Once that becomes the standard, entry level stops being an available entry point.

Because of the economy and current job market, the experienced worker is increasingly standing in the same applicant pool as the recent college graduate. Indeed found that in May 2026, 30% of applications to entry-level jobs came from people with ten or more years of experience, more than from any other experience group.

If employers define the entry-level job primarily by the skills a candidate can already prove, the hiring decision will more often tip to the person with years of experience. They come with more proof, require less development and appear to present less risk. But follow that logic across an entire labor market and we have a system that keeps selecting finished or nearly finished talent for jobs that were once designed as the first step to mastery.

Going back to pedigree-based hiring would solve nothing. Employers were right to stop assuming that a degree, a particular school or a conventional background was the only evidence of talent. The mistake was treating demonstrated skill as the whole answer in all instances.

For early-career hiring, the standard should be different: enough skill to begin, plus the potential to grow. The best formula for entry level talent is this:

Minimum Viable Skill + Potential + Development.

To leave enough room for a beginner to actually get through the door, employers are going to need to identify the small set of skills a new hire genuinely must possess on day one, not every capability the fully productive employee will eventually need. Then employers have to assess potential, something skills-based hiring has pushed too far into the background. Can this person learn quickly? Can they make sense of unfamiliar information? Do they seek and use feedback? Can they adapt when the answer changes? Do they show judgment, curiosity, resilience and the capacity to take on greater complexity?

Hiring for basic skills + potential creates the obligation to develop employees. Someone’s potential only blossoms when an organization develops it. That requires meaningful assignments, coaching, feedback, exposure and progressively harder work. Hiring someone for potential and then expecting them to figure everything out alone is not a talent strategy.

This matters even more now because the shelf life for skills is getting shorter. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030. AI is already absorbing many of the routine tasks employees perform and changing what remains in many jobs.

So consider the contradiction. We are increasingly hiring young people based on proof that they possess today’s skills at the same time that we acknowledge we do not know exactly which skills their jobs will require even a year from now.

In that environment, past skill is useful, but it is not enough. The more rapidly the work changes, the more valuable learning agility, judgment, adaptability and the capacity to develop become. IBM, for example, now describes learning agility as mattering as much as technical skill in its entry-level hiring as AI changes the work.

The question for an early-career candidate therefore cannot simply be, “Can you already do this job?” It also has to be, “What evidence do we have that you can become good at the job this turns into?”

Entry level was never supposed to mean fully skilled. it was supposed to mean ready to begin.

We were right to challenge a system that confused degrees and pedigree with talent. But in trying to replace pedigree with proof, we have inadvertently started building a system where the only people who can qualify for entry-level work are people who already have experience doing it.

Young people need to arrive with a foundation of skills to be able to work in an organization and getting those is the young person’s responsibility.  They build that foundation through schoolwork, internships and summer jobs.  However, the other side of the bargaib is that employers will identify potential and then grow people. If employers stop helping young talent grow, we lose the mechanism by which beginners become experts, experts become leaders, and organizations build the talent they will need next.

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Sources

Roslansky, R. (2021, June 8). You need a skills-based approach to hiring and developing talent. Harvard Business Review.

Fuller, J. B., Langer, C., Nitschke, J., O’Kane, L., Sigelman, M., & Taska, B. (2022, February). The emerging degree reset: The shift to skills-based hiring. Burning Glass Institute & Harvard Business School.

World Economic Forum. (2025, January). Future of Jobs Report 2025. World Economic Forum.

National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2026, January 12). Employer use of skills-based hiring practices grows.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2026). A skills-first labour market: Promoting skills-first hiring and talent management. OECD Publishing.

McConnon, A. (2026, March 2). The bottom rung returns as AI reshapes entry-level jobs. IBM Think.

McKinsey & Company. (2026, July 14). Building expertise in the age of AI: Who trains the next generation?

Indeed Hiring Lab. (2026, July 23). Entry-level jobs aren’t just for inexperienced workers.

Cohen, N. (2026, August 17). What Clive Davis can teach employers about finding standout talent for the future. Allwork.Space