Why Competencies, Not College Degrees, Should Define Your Hiring Process

The Hiring Problem No One Wants to Talk About

Hiring practices in today’s job market are working under a common delusion. Nearly every job description requires a degree that is only broadly related to the job, yet few employers consider what that degree actually represents.

• Degrees get carte blanche access, regardless. No one cares how old the degree is, or whether the skills it was meant to validate are still relevant.

• Degrees cause wasted recruiting time. Employers waste time interviewing "degreed professionals" who turn out to be unqualified, simply because a diploma made it past the initial screening.

• Degrees are broken promises. Young people trying to break into a profession are fooled into going deep into debt for a degree they are told will ensure their hire-ability, only to learn after-the-fact that employers want real competencies the university didn't teach.

• AI filters out actual skilled professionals. As instructed, thoughtless, volume-driven AI-powered hiring systems disqualify qualified professionals regardless of competencies and experience because they lack the stated degree.

This is not a talent shortage problem—this is a systems problem regarding our hiring processes.

Degrees Don’t Guarantee Skills — Competencies Do

A college degree is not a competency profile, with a list of skills attributed to the candidate and skill level ratings for each. No, a degree is only a testament to an arbitrary curriculum that might be broadly related to the position. It has no guarantee of individual skills, much less experience.

Competency profiles take a little more work. You have to review the skills in context on the resume. You have look for certifications and ensure they are current. It might take a little more work with the AI, but the results are so much more valuable to your business.

Consider this:

• Two candidates apply for a management role.

• Candidate A has a Computer Science degree from 2015 and was promoted to management due to being a good technician. He has ten years experience, but most of that was not deep in management.

• Candidate B has no degree but has ten years experience managing software teams, and has kept relevant, maintaining a current Scrum certification and a PMP certificate and reading a book on management every month.

Who is the better hire?

The answer is obvious — but the way we are writing job descriptions and configuring AI filters, Candidate B will be eliminated without even a phone screening.

Don't Waste Time Ignoring Skills

Relying on degrees as a screening mechanism has no realistic correlation with whether a candidate can actually do the job. Our tradition of requiring degrees is a system that incentivizes credentials over skills, causing an education market that is rife with waste, unchecked by normal free-market influences and exploiting those who can afford it the least.

~Tom/*