2025 Skills-Based Hiring Statistics: Who’s Adopting & Why It Matters

Switching hiring searches from previous job titles to explicit skills increases eligible candidates roughly sixfold, unlocking diverse and often overlooked talent across roles and geographies, according to LinkedIn’s Economic Graph analysis.

For AI positions, LinkedIn finds an even larger effect: skills-based matching expands the talent pipeline about 8.2×, reflecting many self-taught, non-degree practitioners who fall outside traditional job-title pedigrees globally.

LinkedIn finds green-sector roles could see roughly a 3.5× expansion in candidate pools with skills-based matching, exposing latent talent for sustainability and energy-transition positions across many geographies.

Technical and AI roles show the biggest multipliers under skills searches because titles lag rapidly evolving, hybrid skillsets, so these sectors benefit most from skills-focused sourcing and testing.

LinkedIn’s report highlights strong country and sector variation: multiplier gains are highest where job titles poorly reflect capabilities, so outcomes depend heavily on local labour-market structure and occupations.

Opportunity@Work estimates over 70 million U.S. workers are “Skilled Through Alternative Routes” (STARs), a large, addressable pool that degree-centric filters frequently exclude but that can be accessed via targeted assessments.

LinkedIn’s 2025 analysis shows that switching from job titles to skills could increase the share of women in AI talent pools by up to 24% globally. The effect is most pronounced in male-dominated fields like engineering and software, where women’s share of the pool could rise 13% worldwide and 16% in the U.S., opening opportunities that traditional title-based searches often overlook.

Skills-first hiring enables apprenticeships, bootcamps, and veteran hiring pathways; Opportunity@Work documents practical channels for connecting STARs to higher-wage roles and targeted training.

TestGorilla’s 2025 survey reports roughly 85% of employers now use skills-based hiring; that figure spans everything from light pilots to full assessment programs, so interpretation requires looking at how organizations implement it.

About 76% of employers now use pre-hire skills tests or assessments, per TestGorilla and press reporting, assessments have become a mainstream, objective signal in many hiring funnels.

NACE’s Job Outlook shows about 64.8% of employers apply skills-based methods for entry-level or recent-graduate hires, making early-career roles a practical place to pilot skills-first hiring that can scale quickly.

TestGorilla finds 67% of employers still screen resumes, down from 73% the prior year, signalling a measurable shift away from resume-first screening toward skills assessments and practical work tests in hiring funnels

TestGorilla reports that over 53% of employers have removed degree requirements in at least some job postings, a concrete policy step that usually requires sourcing and assessment redesign to change actual hiring outcomes.

Workday’s research finds that about 55% of organizations have begun moving toward a skills-based talent model, while others plan to start soon and invest in taxonomies and internal mobility tools.

Workday’s Global State of Skills reports 86% of leaders are comfortable hiring based on a candidate’s skills profile, though operational execution and measurement often lag that stated comfort.

Roughly 65% of companies report integrating AI into sourcing or screening, using it both to scale outreach and to help spot potentially AI-generated application materials at high volume.

A joint study by the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School found that at some large firms, fewer than 1 in 700 new hires were non-college graduates, even after degree requirements were dropped.

The research highlights a major gap between policy and practice, showing that simply removing degree language from job postings does little to shift actual hiring unless sourcing, assessments, and manager incentives are also restructured.

Research from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School shows that even after announcing degree-removal policies, many employers continue to rely on traditional credentials like resumes and degrees when making final decisions.

This reliance on familiar screening signals means that without deeper changes, such as structured skills assessments or new evaluation frameworks, degree removal alone rarely alters who actually gets hired.

Harvard Business School and Burning Glass show that removing degree requirements usually won’t change hiring outcomes unless accompanied by sourcing, structured assessments, manager incentives, and measurement frameworks.

Business Insider and multiple vendor case studies report that pre-hire assessments can reduce time-to-hire by up to 50%.

By filtering out mismatched applicants early, skills tests help teams avoid unnecessary interviews and move qualified candidates through the pipeline faster, though the impact depends on thoughtful test design and a positive candidate experience.

With application volumes rising and many résumés now polished by AI tools, employers are leaning on objective skills tests to separate genuine ability from surface-level presentation.

These assessments provide a more reliable signal of competence, helping protect hiring integrity and ensuring qualified candidates stand out in crowded applicant pools.

Assessment platforms now offer extensive libraries, often hundreds of role-specific tests, reducing development time and helping ensure consistent scoring, benchmarking, and rapid deployment across hiring pipelines.

Vendors and case studies frequently report improved retention and hire quality from skills hiring; organisations should nonetheless validate claims with their own KPIs and controlled comparisons.

Surveys show that many employers struggle to scale skills-based hiring because of manager skepticism, limited resources, and cultural pushback.

Without deliberate change management, adequate budgets, and training, even well-designed skills initiatives can stall before reaching company-wide adoption.

An increasing number of organizations are developing skills taxonomies and registries to map job roles, track employee capabilities, and connect learning to career progression.

Backed by HRIS platforms and AI-enabled discovery tools, these frameworks are becoming a foundation for internal mobility, reskilling, and skills-based hiring.

Organizations increasingly connect external skills hiring with internal mobility and L&D, measuring impact via internal fill rates and turnover to align hiring with upskilling and retention goals annually.

Employers often begin skills-based hiring at the entry level, where assessments are already common and stakes are lower. Early-career roles provide a low-risk testing ground that delivers measurable outcomes and evidence to win over skeptical hiring managers.

Coalitions such as Opportunity@Work and campaigns like “Tear the Paper Ceiling” promote STAR hiring and encourage employers and governments to adopt skills-based practices and remove unnecessary degree barriers.