Putting skills above degrees or years of industry experience is not only good for business, it’s good for people.
Key Takeaways
- Skills-first hiring helps companies hire better, but it can also have a life-changing impact on job seekers and employees alike.
- Prioritizing skills and removing proxy requirements, like degrees or years of experience, are key strategies in skills-first hiring.
- Other strategies include giving candidates with unconventional backgrounds a fair shot at gainful employment and providing learning and development opportunities for current employees.
Steeve Auguste began his professional career as an English-language interpreter in 2010 after an earthquake devastated his home country of Haiti. He’s now employed as a service desk analyst for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
While incarcerated, Royal Ramey joined a California-run corrections and rehabilitation program and realized his calling: to become a professional firefighter.
Erica Sowder worked as a paralegal in immigration law before coming to Indeed as a senior legal operations analyst. Then she transitioned into Indeed’s BOOST apprenticeship program and is now a technical apprentice engineer.
What do Auguste, Ramey and Sowder have in common? Each of their stories demonstrates how skills-first hiring can open doors for underrepresented job seekers by focusing on their abilities rather than traditional credentials.
“We need to be practical,” Ramey says. “We need to figure out if a person can actually do the work without bias — by using real facts.” In doing so, companies can fill roles with skilled talent while giving people the chance to reach their full potential.
Learn how to stop screening out qualified candidates and screen in more skilled talent by shifting to a skills-first hiring approach.
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Sign Up NowPrioritizing Skills Over Specific Degrees
Steeve Auguste, Service Desk Analyst for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
After a 2010 earthquake devastated his home country of Haiti, Auguste, a self-taught English speaker, jumped into action as an interpreter. His skills proved valuable and eventually brought him to the U.S., where he worked as a medical interpreter at Boston Children’s Hospital, and later as a translator and family liaison for a public school system.
Auguste enjoyed helping nurses and families better understand technology by teaching skills like how to use a computer or send emails.
“I like troubleshooting; I like brainstorming,” he says. He wondered if he could do that work full time.
Auguste enrolled in a three-month certificate program for end-user desktop support and information technology (IT) through Per Scholas. He worked the night shift the entire way through. “It was a lot, but I wanted to do it,” he says. Afterward, Auguste applied to IT jobs but, despite his bachelor’s degree in business administration — a degree he earned while still in Haiti — he found that many employers demanded a bachelor’s in computer science and several years of experience.
Auguste persevered and eventually secured his first role as an IT analyst, doing desktop support for a biotech company that was willing to trust his technical certification. Because of that opportunity, he then landed a cybersecurity internship at an electronics manufacturing company.
Today, Auguste is a service desk analyst for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, providing IT solutions to the Medical Examiner’s Office, the Department of Revenue and other state agencies. He blends the technical skills he acquired through the certificate program with the soft skills he developed as an interpreter and translator — like strong active listening, which is the basis of good customer service, and short-term memory recall, which allows him to remember exact phrases a customer tells him while chatting about a problem.
Perhaps most important are his patience and ability to empathize — skills he picked up from working with groups of people who did not speak the same language. “They may have had a very bad day,” Auguste says of the customers who need his support. “So I always do my best to maintain my professionalism and let them know I understand what they need from me.”
Auguste is now enrolled in a community college to learn SQL, Power BI, Tableau and other languages and platforms to become a data analyst. Eventually, he says, his dream is to be a data scientist.
What he wants employers to know: “If you have soft skills, people skills and are coachable, you can do any type of job as long as you’re given the opportunity.”
Letting STARs Shine
Royal Ramey, CEO and Co-Founder of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program
Royal Ramey was incarcerated in 2010. In 2012, he joined the California fire camps, a state-run corrections and rehabilitation program where inmates train to respond to emergencies such as fires, floods and other natural disasters. There, he realized his calling to become a professional firefighter.
Ramey and his classmates wore bright orange uniforms at the camp, a clear contrast to the blue of professional firefighters’ uniforms. Even after he completed the program, Ramey felt the stigma associated with the color orange. He struggled to find work despite having the necessary skills and real-world experience. “You’re applying for a job that would make you a public servant — a hero — but before that, you’re seen as a person who was in prison — a zero,” he says.
After almost two years of arduous searching, and with the help of a fire chief in navigating the hiring landscape, Ramey and his friend from fire camp, Brandon Smith, finally found work as professional wildland firefighters in San Bernardino County. During their first assignment in Big Bear, Ramey heard a voice call out his name and saw the familiar flash of orange uniforms. It was his fire camp friends, proudly saying hello.
The gesture inspired Ramey to shift the narrative around STARs — workers skilled through alternative routes. He didn't want his classmates, or those like them, to struggle to find work like he did. In 2018, Ramey and Smith founded the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP) to help formerly incarcerated people transition into firefighting careers.
The program provides participants with certifications and field experience, preparing them for positions at agencies like the Forest Service and Cal Fire. FFRP also provides financial literacy training and reentry assistance to help individuals achieve long-term career success and financial stability.
(Update: In January 2025, Ramey appeared on The Daily Show, where he spoke with Jon Stewart about his experience at fire camp, his work with the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, and the importance of helping formerly incarcerated people build careers in public service.)
What he wants employers to know: “In a country where higher education is unattainable for many, and where there are more incarcerated people than anywhere else, we have to reevaluate how we think about expertise — and lived experience is a pretty valuable asset.”
Reskilling Existing Employees for New Roles
Erica Sowder, Technical Apprentice Engineer at Indeed
By 2023, Erica Sowder had two decades of legal experience. After completing a degree in political science, she worked as a paralegal in immigration law before joining Indeed as a senior legal operations analyst.
What Sowder really wanted to do, however, was code. When she was in college she landed an internship at Sun Microsystems, an information technology company later acquired by Oracle, but she had to turn it down due to financial constraints. Years later, a coding bootcamp caught her eye but she was a busy new mother and couldn’t commit. At that point in her life, she says, “I thought the ship had sailed for me.”
In 2023, Sowder learned about BOOST, Indeed’s yearlong apprenticeship program that prepares employees without coding experience to move into entry-level engineering roles. “The stars finally aligned,” she remembers thinking. “I get to keep my job, I get to take care of my family and I get to follow my dreams.”
Sowder explains that participants devote a rigorous 70 hours per week to learning subject after subject at a rapid pace and testing their knowledge along the way. After the three-month immersive coding boot camp, participants do an onboarding project to familiarize themselves with Indeed’s R&D landscape and tooling. Then, they do a six-month internal internship to gain real experience.
Since early 2024, Sowder has learned Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Spring Boot, React and SQL. And the skills she gained from her legal career, like speaking with confidence, have helped her significantly. “Knowing the right questions to ask — and not being afraid to ask them — is really important when you’re on an engineering team,” she says. So is “being detail-oriented, analytical and keeping inclusivity top of mind.”
If Sowder hadn’t been given the chance to reskill, she would likely still wonder, “What if?” Instead, at the end of her apprenticeship, she will begin her new role as an entry-level software engineer.
Career development opportunities like BOOST play a critical role in skills-first hiring by ensuring that anyone with ambition and transferable skills can pivot to a new path. They also enable organizations to retain talented and motivated employees, like Sowder, who want to make a change.
What she wants employers to know: “Sometimes we can get a narrow vision for a particular task at hand. It’s helpful to have different mindsets, different areas of focus on each team. I think that’s an extreme value add.”
Skills Employers Should Look for in Skills-First Hires:
For the first cohort of Indeed’s BOOST Program, 170 employees applied to 10 available spots. How did the team determine who they would take on? Dominique DeGuzman, Indeed’s Senior Manager for Apprenticeships, shares three winning skills:
1. Drive and grit, which shows “how a person got through problems when they faced specific roadblocks,” DeGuzman says.
2. Problem solving. “We asked questions like, ‘Can you talk to me about your proudest problem-solving moment, when you had to find a creative or unconventional solution?’”
3. Alignment with the company’s commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB), particularly because this was a joint effort with Indeed’s DEIB+ team. “We wanted to make sure their values were aligned. We wanted to hear things like, ‘Share a time when you acted as an ally for a team member, and a time when you encountered someone with a different perspective than your own. How did you actively listen?’”
DeGuzman stresses how much seasoned employees bring to the table in terms of experience and professional maturity. “A lot of employers get hung up on needing this very specific type of background,” she says.
However, employers shouldn’t overlook the broader professional background and institutional knowledge people bring with them. “Employees in this program often have direct customer experience, bringing these voices and concerns with them as they begin working on products.” Something as small as knowing how to act in a meeting is valuable too.
“That’s something you learn over the course of your career. Then you add in the hard skills — learning how to do specific operational things — and those don’t take 10 years to learn."
Disclaimer:
Indeed provides this information as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your recruiting or legal advisor, we are not responsible for the content of your job descriptions, and none of the information provided herein guarantees performance.
Learn more:
A Beginner’s Guide to Skills-First Hiring
AI Has the Power to Unlock Skills-First Hiring
Indeed FutureWorks 2024 Attendees on Ghosting, Skills-First Hiring, AI
Indeed FutureWorks 2024: Trevor Noah on Skills-First Hiring and Politics at Work
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