New research by global HR and payroll experts, Remote, has revealed that skills-based hiring is up 63 per cent in the past year as more employees are valuing experience over academic qualifications. Alongside giving employers a competitive edge by opening up the talent pool, ditching the emphasis on academic qualifications is helping to remove career and salary barriers for over half of the UK who do not have a Bachelor’s degree.
To investigate how necessary a degree is for achieving the highest potential earnings in today’s job market, Remote analysed over 178,900 job adverts for 29 high-paying careers in the UK. The ‘degree wage gap’ for each career was then calculated by analysing the average salary job adverts that stated they required a degree vs those that did not.
Google Trends data was analysed by Remote which revealed interest in skills-based hiring has increased by 63 per cent in the past year. Companies have been found to be adapting their hiring practices due to industry skills gaps and the pandemics’ impact on the job market. At the end of 2020, almost one million graduate-level jobs were not filled according to the education body, Universities UK.
While some careers require specific degrees such as medical and law professions, for those that don’t, skills-based hiring can allow employers to be more flexible with their recruitment while reducing hiring costs and increasing inclusivity.
Last week, General Motors became the latest company to join the likes of Google, Penguin Books Limited, and the UK Police Force who have rethought their hiring practices in recent years by removing college degree requirements from some of their job roles.
Job van der Voort, CEO and Co-Founder of Remote outlined the benefits of removing degree requirements from job listings: “Rather than using a candidate’s level of formal education as the sole indicator of how they will perform in a position, we instead suggest removing degree requirements wherever possible and taking a more holistic approach to recruitment; which involves considering their potential, life experiences, teachability, adaptability and resilience.
“Removing unnecessary, outdated degree requirements prevents employers from missing out on a huge section of the talent pool and people without degrees have skills learned through on-the-job training,” he added. “This creates greater diversity and engenders a more creative culture, leading to improved problem solving and idea generation, as well as facilitating skills and knowledge sharing.”
