Skills-First Hiring: What if Employers Can Get It Right?

Key Takeaways

• Skills over pedigree unlocks opportunity. When employers look beyond degrees in the hiring process, they tap into overlooked talent and drive innovation.
• Mindset shift is essential. A skills-first approach succeeds only when hiring leaders change how they define, assess and support talent.
• Systems make change stick. Building shared skills taxonomies, apprenticeships and change-management strategies helps organizations scale skills-first hiring.

Imagine a future where jobs find people, not the other way around. Job seekers carry a universal skills passport: a dynamic portfolio that highlights their abilities, is verified for accuracy and evolves constantly. Hiring managers no longer rely on resumes, job titles or degrees. Instead, they see what people can actually do.

In this future state, hiring for skills opens up opportunities that people may have been denied in the past. A carpenter with an eye for precision partners with aerospace engineers. A musician uses pattern recognition skills to train AI models. A chef with an intuitive grasp of chemistry helps design eco-friendly food packaging.

These aren’t far-fetched scenarios, according to Aidan McLaughlin, Indeed’s Director of Strategic Thought Leadership. In a skills-first world, opportunity expands, innovation accelerates and organizations thrive by tapping into talent that traditional systems overlook. 

“When skills, not degrees or pedigree, are the currency of hiring, you have ownership of the map that charts every organization’s future,” McLaughlin said recently at Indeed FutureWorks 2025 in New Orleans. He shared details on both the promise and practice of skills-first hiring before welcoming panelists Justin Hutchinson (ThreeSixtyEight), Ebony D. Thomas (Grads of Life) and Beca Driscoll (Accenture) to share real-world examples of the shift already underway.

The Human Case for Skills-First Hiring

For Hutchinson, the shift is personal. A first-generation American, he once dreamed of a football career. But after his father’s cancer diagnosis, he left behind college football (and his dream of the NFL) to care for his family. He took a job at Smoothie King, quickly rising to manage three stores.

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“Everybody who came in, I memorized their name, their orders, their cars, their kids’ names — and by the time they even walk into my store, the smoothie’s ready,” Hutchinson recalled. That people-first approach caught the attention of a regular customer — the CEO of creative agency ThreeSixtyEight, who offered him an internship. Within a year, Hutchinson said, he was leading business development, taking the company from $800K in revenue to just under $6M. Today, he’s the company’s Vice President of Growth.

“I’m proud to represent the more than 70 million workers who are skilled through alternative routes, or STARs,” Hutchinson said. “There are STARs all around.”

His journey underscores the power of looking beyond degrees to see potential — and the competitive advantage employers gain when they do.

To Shift Hiring Practices, Shift Mindsets

Thomas, Managing Partner at Grads of Life, helped lead Indeed’s skills-first employer cohort, a group of about 20 companies exploring how to implement these practices. 

One of the biggest “aha” moments, she said, came when employers were asked to consider this statement: “Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.” At the start of the program, only about half of the participants agreed with the statement. By the end, everyone did. “That just showed us that there really is a mindset shift that is so integral to having skills-first organizations be successful,” Thomas said.

She also emphasized that a skills-first approach to hiring is not one-dimensional, but holistic.

In addition to removing a four-year degree requirement, she said, “it’s also looking at the job description and identifying the skills that are truly necessary to perform that job well. Then it’s the interview process — making sure that it’s standardized and that everyone is being asked the same question and being judged against the same rubric. But even after that, it’s the onboarding of the individual. Are you making sure that they feel they belong in the organization? And then, do they have opportunities to advance?”

Her takeaway: Success starts with changing mindsets, not just policies.

Build Systems for Skills — and Change That Sticks

At Accenture, that mindset shift has been underway for more than a decade.

“As a global consulting company, people are at our core,” said Driscoll, Apprenticeship Director, Future Talent Lead, at Accenture. “The ideas, the innovation, the expertise that our people bring to our clients — that’s what we’re all about. And we realize that translates to skills.”

Realizing there are many ways to build skills, Accenture set out to determine how to connect people’s skills to the work that needs to be done — not only today, but in the future of work. So the company built a taxonomy of 8,000 skills to create a common language across roles and geographies. 

McLaughin (far right) was joined by panelists (from left to right) Justin Hutchinson from ThreeSixtyEight, Beca Driscoll from Accenture, and Ebony B. Thomas from Grads of Life to discuss how to shift mindsets toward skills-first hiring.

“It applies to every single person at our company around the world — it does not matter your career level or how you came into the company. And for us, that has become one source of truth,” Driscoll explained, which helps the company connect people to projects, identify adjacent skills and map potential career paths.

Accenture also launched a professional apprenticeship program in 2016, which was designed for candidates without four-year degrees. More than 2,500 apprentices have since joined, with high completion and retention rates in fields including software development, data and AI.

“We’ve really come to realize that someone’s educational background is not the only indicator of success,” Driscoll said.

A Skills-First Future: From Vision to Reality

Participants offered practical advice for organizations beginning or advancing their skills-first journey:

• Make the business case. Thomas reminded leaders that skills-first isn’t just an HR strategy. “You are going to decrease time to hire, you’re going to increase your retention rates and you’re going to increase diversity of thought,” she said. “That’s a business strategy.”
  
• Begin small, then build momentum. Driscoll recommended taking an incremental approach. “We started with a cohort of five,” she said, “and every time we bring the program or a new initiative into a new part of our business…we still start small — and you grow and you can stay more agile.”
  
• Manage the change with intention. “Treat your skills-first journey like a change-management journey,” Thomas said. “It is a huge change for organizations and, specifically, it’s a culture change.” Build an intentional plan, communicate often and hold leadership accountable.
  
• Elevate human voices in hiring. “Don’t underestimate the power of human connection,” Driscoll said. “We all heard [Hutchinson’s] story. Who does not want a [Hutchinson] at their company or on their team, right? Make space for people to share their stories.”
  
• Don’t just open the door — pull up a seat. “It is simply not enough to give a STAR or a non-degree candidate an opportunity. You must truly invest in them and pull up a seat for them at the table, and then let them kind of do what they’re going to do,” Hutchinson said. “They’re going to shine regardless, I promise.”

As McLaughlin reminded the audience, clinging to so-called “best practices” and how things have always been done can stifle progress. “The greatest enemy of innovation is certainty,” he said. For organizations willing to rethink hiring, build systems around skills and invest in people beyond credentials, the payoff is clear: stronger pipelines, more inclusive workplaces and a workforce ready for what comes next.

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