Skills-Based Hiring 2026: Companies Dropped Degree Requirements But Their ATS Didn't

# Skills-Based Hiring 2026: Companies Dropped Degree Requirements But Their ATS Didn't

> **Quick answer:** In 2026, 85% of employers say they practice skills-based hiring and have removed degree requirements from job postings. But a Harvard Business School and Burning Glass Institute study found that only 37% of these companies actually increased non-degree hires. The hidden culprit: applicant tracking systems (ATS) were never updated to match the new policy, so candidates without degrees are still screened out automatically before any human sees their application. Knowing which company archetype you're facing — and how to bypass the ATS — is now a core job-search skill.

The skills-based hiring revolution was supposed to change everything. Major corporations made headlines by announcing they no longer require four-year college degrees. The federal government followed with an executive order removing degree requirements from hundreds of job classifications. Hiring thought leaders declared the credential era was over. But if you've applied to those same companies without a degree and heard nothing back, there is a structural reason for that silence — and it has almost nothing to do with your skills.

## The Policy Versus the Pipeline: What Harvard Actually Found

The most cited data on this topic comes from a joint study by Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller and the Burning Glass Institute, which analyzed 11,300 roles at large firms before and after those companies publicly removed degree requirements.

The headline finding is striking: on average, removing degree requirements produced only a 3.5 percentage point increase in non-degree hires. Across the entire U.S. labor market, this translated to new opportunities for roughly 97,000 workers out of 77 million yearly hires — fewer than 1 in 700 new positions.