“Skills-based hiring,” “skills-first hiring” and efforts to break the “paper ceiling” – the bias against those without university degrees – are all rising buzz phrases. (“It’s kind of our contribution to the ‘paper ceiling’ movement,” George told Fortune of McKinsey’s expanded recruiting lens.)

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The idea, as the consulting firm BCG described it, is putting “competence over credentials”, meaning that companies should stop looking for the right degree and instead focus on who has the right skills, regardless of how they acquired them.

The pitch is basically meritocracy. And it’s everywhere. McKinsey has developed a video game to assess candidates’ cognitive skills, which it says gives it “insight beyond the resume or conventional interview”.

And it has published an interview prep website that a spokesperson said was necessary “so exceptional candidates from any source can succeed in our interviews, regardless of whether they have access to resources like a consulting club, active career services support, or an alumni network that’s well-connected within the consulting industry”.

Bank of America has partnerships with 34 community colleges, and says it has hired and trained thousands of employees from these schools. Goldman Sachs switched to doing interviews for entry-level jobs virtually instead of only at a few top-level schools. “We now encounter talent from places we previously didn’t get to,” its global head of human capital wrote in 2019.

A handful of companies, including Walmart last year, said they were removing degree requirements for corporate jobs altogether, and more than a dozen US states announced they would stop requiring degrees for some government jobs.

In 2020, a coalition of big companies including Accenture, JPMorgan Chase and Deloitte set out to put more black workers into well-paying jobs. The group recently shifted its mission to promoting “hiring for skills, not just degrees”.

Economists generally agree that eschewing unnecessary degree requirements (or prestigious degree requirements, in McKinsey’s case) is a good idea – particularly in an era of degree inflation and a tight labor market. Reducing reliance on credentials is also more likely to increase diversity, even when it’s not a stated objective.

It also happens to be easier to state as an objective. “I think it’s hard to be opposed to it, frankly,” said Anthony Carnevale, who recently retired as the founding director of the Georgetown University Centre on Education and the Workforce, and worked on employment policy under three White House administrations.

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“Somebody who is most skilled for the job and deserves the job, they ought to get the job,” he said. “I don’t know how you argue with that.”

Not surprisingly, making the promise is simpler than delivering it.

Some companies have made real progress, like Accenture, which is considered a pioneer of the strategy and has said nearly 50 per cent of its jobs in North America no longer require a degree.

But a Harvard study that looked at job postings at large firms from 2014 to 2023 found that although there was a huge uptick in roles that dropped degree requirements, not much had changed in actual hiring practices.

In the period after companies removed degree requirements from some jobs, about 3.5 per cent of those jobs were filled by candidates without a degree. That means fewer than one in 700 workers hired last year benefited from the shift in policy.

Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the study, said the lack of follow-through was not because companies were “virtue washing”, but because “there’s a big difference between announcing a policy change and having that kind of reify to the company”.

He said that, to a front-line manager, choosing the candidate with a college degree could feel like “when you’re indifferent between two main dishes at a Chinese restaurant and one comes with free egg rolls”.

Carnevale pointed to another challenge: it’s difficult to articulate exactly what qualities someone needs to do a particular job well, let alone how to assess those qualities without being sued.

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“Imagine trying to figure all that out, with lawyers in the room, what the actual knowledge, skills, abilities, personality traits, work values, work interests are – it’s dicey business,” he said.

Just like screening for credentials, evaluating a candidate based on experience can be prone to bias, said Boston University associate professor Anthony Abraham Jack, who is the author of the upcoming book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students.

For example, he said, “traditional markers of evaluation ignore especially the work that lower-income students do on behalf of their families”.

In other words, skills-based hiring may not be so different from other corporate efforts that have struggled to bring hiring practices closer to meritocracy.

“It’s not like a quick fix; most things that actually work tend to sort of fit that bill,” said DEI consultancy Paradigm’s chief executive, Joelle Emerson. “Things that sound too good to be true – like, oh, we’re just going to do skills-based hiring – they usually are too good to be true.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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