Hiring for Skills: Why Titles and Degrees Don’t Tell the Full Story

Let’s start with a little reality check: resumes don’t always tell the full story, and neither do the traditional ways we evaluate them. The hiring world is finally waking up to the idea that what someone can do matters a whole lot more than where they’ve done it, what their title was, or where they went to school. That’s the heart of skills-based hiring. It’s about hiring for capability, not pedigree.

When you focus on skills, you start asking better questions: Can they do this job effectively? Will they simply meet the requirements, or will they elevate the role? Can they grow into the next one? Have they shown resourcefulness, adaptability, and actual problem-solving ability? These are the traits that drive performance, yet they’re often hidden behind outdated filters and arbitrary requirements. And by shifting to skills-based hiring, you're not just improving how you evaluate talent, you’re expanding who gets the opportunity to be seen. But to truly embrace skills-based hiring, you have to challenge some of the most common filters we rely on: job titles and degrees.

Let’s talk about job titles for a second. They are one of the biggest culprits in hiding great talent.

The problem? Titles can be misleading, especially in tech, where one company’s Lead Software Engineer is another’s Junior Dev with a fancy title. Job titles in tech, especially, are basically the wild west. You might have a Lead Software Engineer at one company who writes code all day and never talks to a soul, and the same title somewhere else means they’re managing a team of eight, building out roadmaps, and mentoring interns. The inflation is real. And inconsistency is everywhere. I’ve seen Directors who manage no one and Managers who are basically running the entire product roadmap. I’ve worked at a company where the org chart skipped the VP level altogether, but had layer after layer of Directors, but it was common in their industry. So if you’re screening resumes with a hard filter on titles, you’re probably rejecting candidates who’ve done exactly what you need; they just didn’t wear the “right” name tag while doing it. And if you’ve listed those titles as job requirements, you’re doing yourself (and your hiring) a disservice.

Titles don’t always tell the story. Skills do.

Now, while I’ve got you reevaluating titles, let’s go one step further: Do you really need that degree requirement? Look, I’m not saying education isn’t valuable — it absolutely is. I believe in learning and make it a point to learn regularly. But I also believe in not gatekeeping opportunity based on a path that isn’t accessible or necessary for everyone.

Unless you’re hiring for a highly regulated profession like medicine, law, or aviation, the degree isn’t always the deal-breaker we make it out to be. Especially in tech, where so many incredible developers, product managers, and analysts have built their skills through bootcamps, online courses, or just through getting their hands dirty on real-world projects. If someone can write beautiful, clean, functional code and debug it with one eye closed, do you care if they learned that in a CS classroom or a late-night bootcamp?

Some of the best engineers I’ve worked with were self-taught. And I’ve seen interns, literal college sophomores, come in and blow their managers away to the point where I’d get a Slack message asking, “Can we just hire them now?” These students hadn't even finished their second year, and yet they were already outperforming full-time employees. No degree in hand, just skills, hunger, and real-world ability. If I had a dollar for every time that happened, I’d be writing this blog post from a lovely beach somewhere.

College is expensive. It’s not always an option. And the second you remove the degree requirement from your posting, you expand your talent pool and your diversity. Because access to education is not always equitable, but access to opportunity can be.

To truly shift to skills-based hiring, you can’t stop at your screening. You also need to re-evaluate your job descriptions. Be brutal. Cut the unnecessary. Ask yourself, “What does someone actually need to be successful in this role?” Not what would be nice. Not what you saw on a competitor’s job post. Just the core, non-negotiable skills.

Why? Because every bullet point you include is a potential reason someone will opt out, especially women and candidates from underrepresented groups. Research shows women are significantly less likely to apply if they don’t meet every single listed requirement. So when you overload the posting with a wish list, you’re not being thorough, you’re being exclusionary. Every extra bullet point you add might be one more amazing candidate who scrolls on by.

Focus on capabilities. Be clear about what someone will do in the role, and what they’ll learn. Don’t scare off great people with long lists of niche software tools or overly specific experience.

Now, with all this talk of nuance and context, let me just say this: this is exactly why AI isn’t coming for recruiting jobs anytime soon. Yes, AI can help streamline the process. It can scan resumes, sort applications, and even help draft job descriptions (pro tip: AI is very good at writing job descriptions). But what it can’t do, yet anyway, is understand the messy, layered reality of human experience. People are people.

AI doesn’t know that the “Coordinator” title on that resume actually meant building an entire function from scratch. It won’t ask the probing follow-up question in an interview that reveals someone’s grit, or spot the quiet high performer who’s undersold by their title on paper. It doesn’t see potential. It sees patterns.

Recruiting is still, at its core, a human process, and skills-based hiring requires human judgment. The kind that understands context, leans into curiosity, and challenges assumptions. Until a chatbot can read between the lines and advocate for a candidate no one else saw coming, recruiters aren’t going anywhere.

And that’s where the real magic of recruiting comes in: the human part. It’s not just about checking boxes or matching keywords. It’s about looking deeper, asking better questions, and seeing the potential others might miss. When we move beyond automated assumptions and really lean into what makes someone capable, we stop just filling roles and start building teams. That’s what skills-based hiring is all about.

When you prioritize skills, you’re not lowering the bar; you’re widening the door. You’re creating space for people who’ve done the work, even if they haven’t had the traditional title or degree. And the payoff is big: stronger teams, more innovation, better retention, and a whole lot more diversity. You open the door to people who have been doing the work, but may not have the traditional credentials. And you’ll be surprised at how much more innovative, nimble, and engaged your team becomes when it’s made up of people who were hired because they can do the job, not because their resume fit a cookie-cutter mold.

So let’s stop obsessing over what's on paper and start digging into what people can actually do. Because in the end, it’s not the title that gets the job done, it’s the skills behind it.

And spoiler alert: the best people for the job? They might not look like what you expected. But that’s kind of the point.

More to come…