What does a candidate’s education tell you?

When a candidate has a college degree, what you’re actually seeing is evidence of a few things: industry-specific foundational knowledge, demonstrated persistence through a multi-year program and exposure to the kinds of communication, analysis and problem-solving that academic environments tend to develop.

Those are real signals. For some roles, particularly licensed professions like medicine, law or architecture, formal credentials are non-negotiable. For others, they’re a useful proxy for capabilities that are harder to measure quickly.

But for many roles, education is a proxy, not a guarantee. A degree tells you someone completed a program. It doesn’t tell you whether they can apply what they learned, whether they can adapt when the work doesn’t match the textbook or whether they bring the judgment that turns knowledge into outcomes.

This is where a skills-first hiring approach provides more clarity. Instead of asking, “Does this candidate have the right degree?” you ask, “Does this candidate have the specific skills the role requires, and how can I verify them?” Sometimes the answer is yes, and the degree is part of how they got there. Sometimes the answer is yes, and the skills came from somewhere else entirely.

What does a candidate’s experience tell you?

Experience is often treated as education’s practical counterpart: years on the job, similar roles, exposure to relevant tools and contexts. A candidate with five years in a comparable role can typically start contributing more quickly, has lived through the realities of the work and often brings pattern recognition that schooling alone doesn’t produce.

That’s valuable. But experience is also a proxy, and like any proxy, it can mislead.

Five years in a role doesn’t automatically mean five years of growth. It might mean one year of learning repeated five times. Meanwhile, a candidate with two years of experience in a fast-moving environment may have developed skills that exceed those of someone with a decade of stable, repetitive work.

A skills-first approach can help provide a more direct way to evaluate candidates than years of experience. Rather than asking “How many years has this candidate done something similar?” consider asking, “What specific capabilities has this candidate built, and how do they map to what the role requires?” Years of experience are a rough estimate. Skills provide a more direct measure of a candidate’s ability to perform the work.

Where candidates develop job skills beyond traditional work experience and education

Here’s where it gets interesting. Once you start asking what skills a candidate brings rather than which boxes they check, the pool of qualified candidates often looks different than you’d expect.

The strongest candidate for a role may not look like the last person you hired into that role. They may not have the credential pattern you’ve come to associate with success. And in some cases, the skills they bring were built outside the contexts most resumes capture.

A few examples include:

• Military experience often develops leadership under pressure, logistics planning, cross-functional coordination and operational discipline at a scale that takes civilian careers decades to match.
• Caregiving experience often develops project management, advocacy, complex scheduling, financial decision-making and the kind of communication that translates directly to high-performing teams.
• Lived experience with the systems your business serves, whether that’s healthcare, financial access, navigating disability accommodations or anything in between, often produces insight and emotional intelligence that no amount of formal training can replicate.
• Self-directed learning, volunteer work and side projects are increasingly where modern professionals build capabilities, especially in fast-moving fields where formal curricula may not evolve as quickly as industry needs.

None of these are groups you should recruit exclusively from. They’re examples of the broader truth that skills are learned in many ways. A skills-first hiring process surfaces qualified candidates from all these paths, including the more traditional ones.

The hiring managers seeing the strongest results are typically the ones who’ve stopped using credentials and years of experience as filtering shortcuts and started designing their evaluation around what the work actually requires.

How to evaluate education, experience and skills

Education and experience aren’t going away as inputs, and they shouldn’t. They’re useful pieces of information, but they work better as supporting data than as gatekeepers.

A few principles for hiring managers to think through how to weigh them:

Lead with the skills the role requires, not the credentials it traditionally attracts. Define what the candidate actually needs to do in the role, then ask which capabilities support that and how those capabilities can be demonstrated. Education and experience become inputs to that evaluation, not the evaluation itself.

Use skills assessments and behavioral interviews to verify what the resume implies. If the role requires analytical judgment, design a way to see that judgment in action. If it requires communication under pressure, create a moment where you can observe it. The strongest hiring managers don’t rely solely on credentials for verification.

Consider equivalencies thoughtfully. Many roles can list “bachelor’s degree or four years of relevant experience” as alternatives. That’s a start, but it still emphasizes educational credentials and years of experience. A more skills-first version might say “demonstrated proficiency in [specific capability], whether built through formal education, work experience or other contexts.”

Be specific about what’s actually required versus what’s traditionally preferred. Many job descriptions include requirements that have remained in place for years without being reassessed. The result is filtered candidate pools that exclude people who could do the work well, often without the hiring manager realizing it. Regularly reviewing job requirements to determine whether they’re truly necessary can help employers identify a broader range of candidates.

Key takeaways for evaluating education, experience and skills

The education versus experience question is, in most cases, the wrong frame. The better question is: What specific skills does this role require, and how do I evaluate them in the candidates in front of me?

When you center the work and the skills the work demands, education and experience become useful inputs rather than filtering mechanisms. You get a clearer view of who can actually do the job. You access candidates whose resumes don’t look like what you expected, but whose capabilities match what you need. And you build teams that perform, regardless of whether their paths to capability looked traditional or not.

Hiring well isn’t about deciding which matters more: education or experience. It’s about asking better questions and evaluating whether candidates have the skills required to succeed in the role.