That awesome job doesn’t require a college degree. The person hiring you still might

It’s been almost two years since Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute revealed in a research report how companies have been dropping college degree requirements for more and more jobs, a finding that underscored a broader shift toward skills-based hiring practices. The hope was that such shifts would lead to more opportunities for workers without a bachelor’s degree or higher, aka the majority of people in the United States.

And yet survey data continues to reveal significant barriers for job candidates without a college-level education—and underrepresented workers as a whole—in part due to underlying biases and frictions within the recruitment process itself.

The latest example is a new study from ZipRecruiter, which asked 2,000 employers about their hiring philosophies earlier this year. On the one hand, it found that a significant percentage of companies have now dropped college degree requirements for some roles: 35% of big companies and 47% of small and midsized firms, according to the survey. And almost three-quarters of employers said they practiced a skills-based approach, meaning they prioritized “skills over certificates.”

At the same, when survey respondents were asked a separate question about the major impediments to hiring more workers from underrepresented groups, more than half of them cited hiring managers who insist that candidates have qualifications that aren’t necessary for the job.

In other words, while the roles they’re looking to fill may not require a college degree on paper, the person doing the actual hiring might still insist that candidates have one.

“Even when an organization adopts skills-based hiring and takes a more inclusive approach, individual hiring managers may sometimes resist,” Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, said in a statement to Fast Company. “When asked about barriers to increasing company diversity, respondents ranked hiring manager inflexibility regarding candidates’ credentials as the second-most important, with 53% describing it as a significant factor.”

Of course, companies were never dropping degree requirements out of the kindness of their hearts. As Harvard and Burning Glass noted in their 2022 study, employers have been facing shortages of skilled workers for years, even before the pandemic made things worse. Skills-focused hiring not only helps companies open up their talent pools to more workers, it lets people in hiring positions be more intentional about the types of workers they’re actually looking for.

“When employers drop degrees, they become more specific about skills in job postings,” the report noted.

But as ZipRecruiter’s survey reveals, making a few edits to job ads may not always be enough, particularly at companies where high-level managers are used to doing things a certain way. A recent survey from the tech startup Multiverse came to a similar conclusion, finding that job candidates with college-level education still have an edge for entry-level jobs, even when those jobs don’t require a degree. This was true for workers in the United States and the UK.

The good news is, companies are a lot more open to alternative pathways than they used to be, with ZipRecruiter’s respondents citing a willingness among employers to invest in training programs, tuition assistance, and even help their employees pay off student loans.

Overall, the report says, the share of jobs that listed a bachelor’s degree requirement fell by 10% in 2023.