Skills-based hiring
73% of employers say they hire for skills.Fewer than 1 in 700 hires changed.
The gap isn't intent. It's infrastructure. Here's how verified skill credentials close it — and why the window to get ahead is now.
The paradox
Everyone claims skills-first hiring. Almost no one does it.
The evidence is more sobering than most hiring commentary lets on. TestGorilla's 2023 survey found that 73% of companies said they used skills-based hiring, up from 56% a year earlier. Yet a Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School study (2024) found that dropped degree requirements produced fewer than 1 in 700 hires in 2023. Of the firms that announced the change, 45% made it “in name only”.
The degree signal has weakened: about 18% of US job postings required a bachelor's degree in early 2024, down from 20.4% five years earlier (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2024), and the share of US employers screening graduates by GPA fell from 73.3% in 2019 to 39% for the class of 2023 (NACE). The old signal is fading. The new signal hasn't arrived.
73%
of companies said they used skills-based hiring in 2023
TestGorilla, The State of Skills-Based Hiring 2023 (vendor survey)
1 in 700
hires in 2023 came from dropped degree requirements: about 97,000 of 77 million
Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, 2024
45%
of firms that announced the change made it in name only
Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, 2024
37%
followed through, raising their share of hires without a degree by nearly 20%
Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, 2024
Why the gap persists
Removing a degree requirement costs nothing. Replacing it with a defensible alternative costs work.
The infrastructure for verified skill signals is young. The W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model became a Recommendation in 2019, with version 2.0 in 2025. Open Badges 3.0, built on it, was finalised in 2024. Before these standards, there was no shared, machine-readable format a recruiter could check in seconds.
Without verifiable evidence, recruiters screening at speed fall back to degrees and CVs — not because they prefer them, but because they are the only inputs they can actually rely on. The problem isn't mindset. It's that skill claims on a CV are impossible to check at scale.
“The missing layer is verifiable credentials. A verified skill is one that was assessed, issued as a signed credential, and can be checked by anyone in seconds — with the conditions of the assessment stated on it.”
What changes
Verification doesn't just help workers. It makes skills-first hiring actually possible.
6.1×
Larger talent pools
Searching by skills instead of job titles grows the pool of people who could fill a role about six-fold worldwide, by LinkedIn's measure. But only if employers can trust the skill claims.
LinkedIn Economic Graph, Skills-Based Hiring, March 2025
1 in 4
Candidate profiles could be fake by 2028
Gartner predicts that by 2028 one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake. Claims an employer can check become worth more as invented ones get easier to make.
Gartner, 2025, as widely reported
39 days
Median time to fill a role
Each hire takes weeks, and screening has to be fast. Degrees and CVs win because they are quick to read, not because they predict the work. Evidence that checks in seconds removes that excuse.
SHRM Recruiting Benchmarking, 2026 (non-executive roles)
The logic closes here: skills-first hiring works when skills are verified. Intent without infrastructure is just a policy statement.
The infrastructure layer
How TalentPath Verify closes the gap.
Every TalentPath credential is assessed, signed, and verifiable — the three properties that make skills-based hiring real, not aspirational.
Assessed under exam conditions
5 DigComp 3.0 competence areas, 21 competences. 60 scored questions drawn fresh from a 208-item bank, taken online without supervision. An overall score and a floor in every area — a weak area cannot be carried by a strong one.
ESCO-mapped
Each credential links its competences to ESCO, the EU's skills taxonomy, so software that reads ESCO can read the credential.
Cryptographically signed
W3C Verifiable Credentials with Ed25519 signatures. Any tampering or forgery is cryptographically detectable, and authenticity can be verified independently.
Verified in seconds
Any employer can check any credential at talentpath.eu/verify — free, no account, no phone call. The check confirms TalentPath issued it and that it has not been changed or withdrawn.
Try verification now
Enter the demo code below — or paste any real TalentPath certificate code.
Demo code TP-DEMO-EXAMPLE0-0A · Real verifications are instant and free
For batch verification and ATS integration: talentpath.eu/verify or contact us about API access →
The bottom line
Stop guessing. Start verifying.
Skills-based hiring is the right direction. Verified credentials are what make it defensible. Free for every worker. Instant for every employer.
Free for workers. Grounded in DigComp 3.0 · ESCO · W3C Verifiable Credentials. Read the methodology →