Why Skills-Based Hiring Stalled at the Resume Screen

A large employer drops its degree requirement, and a self-taught programmer who has spent four years doing good work at a company nobody has heard of decides to apply. What happens to her application? At most companies it goes into the same queue as everyone else's, and a recruiter with 200 applications to get through looks at her resume for a few seconds. The job ad changed. The way her resume gets read mostly didn't.

That, I think, is most of why skills-based hiring has been a disappointment. It became the dominant way talent acquisition talked about hiring around 2023, and by one estimate roughly 73% of employers had formally adopted it in some form by 2025. The results have been underwhelming. I don't believe that's because the idea was wrong. Most companies applied a new philosophy to an old process.

The idea itself was sound. If you stop filtering for credentials and start looking at what people can demonstrably do, you should find more good candidates and judge them more fairly. IBM, LinkedIn and dozens of state governments announced they were removing degree requirements. The early case studies, mostly from tech, looked promising: more diverse shortlists, new hires getting up to speed faster, and better retention at twelve months.

What got lost as the idea spread was what those early employers had actually done. They hadn't only rewritten job descriptions. They had redesigned how they screened, so that a candidate's skills were surfaced and evaluated before anyone formed a judgment about them.

Most of the organizations that followed did something smaller. They took the degree off the posting, rewrote the must-have bullets in the language of capability, and sent applicants into the resume-first queue they'd always had. A recruiter reading resumes still anchors, usually without meaning to, on school names, employer brands and tenure. Those are exactly the proxies skills-based hiring was meant to replace. One 2025 analysis of large enterprises that had formally adopted skills-based frameworks found that degree-holders were still 68% more likely to get past the initial screen, even where the degree requirement had been removed.

Companies that did try to test skills directly often hit a different problem. They added work samples and take-home tests, but they added them on top of the resume screen rather than in place of it. Now a candidate faced a resume screen, then an assessment, then a recruiter call. Every step you add loses people, and unpaid work samples lose a lot of them; one estimate puts drop-off at that stage between 40 and 60 percent. The ones who leave tend to be good people who are busy, which is to say the people you most wanted.

So there are two common ways to get this wrong. You can keep the resume as the real filter, and nothing changes. Or you can pile an expensive test on top of it, and candidates walk away. Both are problems of timing. Skills get judged either too early, through a proxy, or too late, after the proxies have already done their work.

Between the resume, which takes seconds to process, and the work sample, which takes hours to complete and days to review, there's a step most hiring processes skip or postpone: talking to the person. Ask someone what they've actually done and how they'd approach the first 90 days, and ten minutes of conversation will usually tell you more than their resume and cover letter together. A conversation like that has no way to favor a famous previous employer, and it doesn't care whether there's a degree. What it does require is that the candidate engage with the substance of the job.

The reason companies don't start there is obvious. There are too many applicants, and once you remove credential filters there are more of them. A recruiter can't phone 200 people on the day they apply.

That constraint is the one we started Asendia to remove, and it's why we built it to talk rather than to send another form. A spoken conversation is hard to prepare a polished script for. When someone says they led a project, the natural next question is what went wrong, and the answer to that tells you more than any line on a resume. So Asendia calls candidates within hours of their applying, including outside office hours, and has that kind of conversation with each of them. It's structured around what the role actually requires, it adapts its follow-up questions to the answers, and it holds every candidate to the same criteria, whether they went to a well-known university or none. The team gets back a qualification summary in the ATS, built from what the candidate said. If the applicant pool grows because you stopped filtering on degrees, the calls grow with it, and nobody has to be hired to make them.

It also helps to know why the resume lost its value so quickly. Many are now written with AI tools, a problem we went into in why AI-written resumes have made resume screening obsolete.

My guess is that skills-based hiring will keep producing modest results for as long as companies treat it as a job description project. The ones seeing real improvement moved the skills evaluation to the very start of the process and found a way to run it on every applicant. That was an operational change more than a philosophical one. Which is good news, since operational changes are the kind you can go and make.

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