Skills-based hiring smashes through ‘paper ceiling’

Historically, state and local governments have been prescriptive in their job descriptions, requiring a pre-set level of education, professional experience and even specific skills in various pieces of software.

But that’s changing, as a growing number of governments are dropping degree and years of experience requirements for certain roles, and instead emphasizing skills.

“It doesn’t matter where you go—federal, state or local government—this is what people are talking about,” says Blair Corcoran de Castillo, vice president of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit that advocates for those in the workforce with skills built through alternative routes to a four-year college degree.

Indeed, since Maryland eliminated degree requirements for half of the state’s public sector jobs via an executive order in 2022, 15 other states, like dominos, have followed suit.

For the public sector, this approach to human resources is both a reaction to a high level of state and local government vacancies and the realization that many potential employees who could contribute have found the entryway to good jobs, promotions and higher salaries needlessly blocked by a so-called “paper ceiling.” Prescriptive job requirements not only limited access to good job opportunities, but also meant that otherwise qualified individuals can take as much as 30 years “to make what a bachelor’s degree candidate can make, on average in their first job,” de Castillo says.

Change Is Coming

One significant transformation is envisioned in Washington. Legislation in 2022, launched state HR on a path toward more on-the-job training, including apprenticeships. Gov. Jay Inslee built on that effort in March 2024 by signing legislation that eliminated two and four-year degree requirements that were seen as unnecessary. “HR needs to be something different now. We’re changing our recruitment system. We’re removing our degree requirements and we’re moving towards not relying on often arbitrary years of experience,” says Michaela Doelman, the state’s chief human resources officer. “It doesn’t matter if you learn how to do something on YouTube or at Harvard, as long as you can demonstrate that you can do it and we have a method to evaluate that.”

One aspect of reform for Washington and other states is the development of competency-based hiring and employee systems, which entail complex classification redesign. As with many terms in government, definitions vary a bit. For some, the terms “competency-based” and “skill-based” are relatively synonymous. In Indiana, which currently has one of the most developed competency-based approaches, Matthew Brown, state personnel director, defines competencies as a broader umbrella term made up of skills and abilities that can be thought of as “success factors”—the attributes that lead to an individual performing successfully on the job.

While many states are just getting started on this transformation, Indiana began to change its criteria for hiring, promotion and termination following civil service reforms in 2011 and has continued that process ever since. At the time, the state’s minimum qualifications were altered to emphasize knowledge, skills and abilities with degrees downplayed except where the need was obvious, as with doctors, lawyers and other professional fields. “We’re making sure that if we require a degree, there’s a good reason for it,” Brown says.

For example, a midlevel disability claims adjuster in Indiana no longer needs a bachelor’s degree to get the job. Instead, the qualifications include such elements as “communicating effectively, prioritizing and organizing work, [and] critical thinking.”

While Indiana is continuing to refine requirements for its 836 unique job classifications, it has a job profile for each, with the competencies necessary based on conversations with agencies. The state has a competency library, which also includes interview questions that can help to assess a candidate’s abilities.

Brown says that he’s learned that a critical need in a competency-based system is flexibility and the ability to accept that for individual jobs, the skills and attributes needed can be adjusted. Two other critical points, he says, are that “stakeholder involvement is critical” and “you have to be somewhat adaptive or else it’s just not going to get you the results you want because you aren’t getting the right people for the job.”

Barriers to Change

Even though many elected officials have enthusiastically pushed toward a new approach to hiring, changing HR practices is easier said than done.

“You’re having to train hiring managers to look for skills rather than degrees,” says Leslie Scott, executive director of the National Association of State Personnel Executives. “You need the tools and resources.”

Adds de Castillo, “Most people evaluate others based on the way they were evaluated. So, it is a huge cultural issue.”

Decisions about which jobs genuinely require college degrees are difficult to make and can even spark controversy and pushback from people who believe that the jobs they hold require advanced levels of education. At the end of 2023, for example, the Montana State Library Commission outraged many state library directors when it voted to reduce the requirement for larger Montana city library directors to have master’s degrees. That action was regarded as “subversive,” according to a letter submitted to the commission by a group of unhappy directors.

Executive orders and legislation are only a first step. “It doesn’t change the mindset of the hiring manager,” says Scott.

Concerns about issues of fairness in hiring can also be a challenge. Civil service systems have used point-based systems in the past that are aimed at ensuring equitable treatment of job candidates. There’s a sense of security that this kind of automatic approach can help ensure that the hiring process is devoid of the kind of human evaluations that may introduce biases.

But new hiring and promotion criteria potentially introduce more subjective decision-making based on interviews that determine such attributes as adaptability, curiosity or empathy—qualities that managers often say they most desire. As one state HR director asks, “What steps do I have to take to make sure that I can defend the selection I’ve made if I’ve identified someone as the best person for this agency and they don’t have a degree and someone else does?”

Changing rules, processes and agency culture can be slow, particularly in a state like Washington with decentralized HR administration. “We just started to work on helping agencies figure out how they’re going to implement this,” says Sue Richards, workforce research and performance manager in the state Office of Financial Management. “Change is scary,” she says, “I think employees themselves might be thinking, ‘Does this mean that I’m not going to be qualified for my job.’”

Still, it’s clear that change is coming, and that it can benefit both governments in need of capable workers and individuals who can prove they can do a superior job without having to demonstrate their value with credentials that aren’t necessary.