If you ask an MBA graduate student, a high school counselor, or on the Internet how to get hired at global consulting firm McKinsey, you will likely find a list of prestigious “target schools” to which they have consistently directed their recruiting efforts. You know which ones: Harvard, Yale, Stanford.
But today, McKinsey would prefer a different answer. “Exceptional can come from anywhere,” the careers website says of him. And then, in case that wasn’t clear enough, “We hire people, not titles,” and also, “We believe in your potential, regardless of your pedigree.”
Katy George, Mckinsey’s chief people officer, told Fortune last year that the company had increased the number of schools its new hires came from from 700 to 1,500, as part of its process of “moving from pedigree to potential.”
Many companies are working toward a similar makeover.
“Elite” has never sat well with many American institutions, but the word has taken a particular hit in recent years. In the 2016 election campaign, Donald J. Trump used the label practically as an insult; the Black Lives Matter movement brought attention to racial disparities in people’s path to wealth and power; and debates over free speech and safe spaces on college campuses became hot topics, spawning opinion essays with headlines like “Elite Colleges Are Out of Touch” and “Why I Stopped Hiring.” Ivy League graduates.”
The legitimacy of traditional indicators of brilliance, such as an Ivy League diploma, is being questioned. And because of that, companies have had to come up with other ways to convey to their employees, investors and customers that they are not simply checking boxes that may be obsolete: their talent is really the most talented. Broadening your recruiting net is a good option, but it may have some of the same shortcomings as previous strategies.
One way companies have tried to highlight the fairness of their hiring practices began in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when they doubled down on emphasizing a commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Companies hired DEI officers en masse and published accountability reports.
That approach has since become a political minefield and, in some cases, a legal liability. Today, executives talk less about diversity (although some surveys suggest they remain committed to efforts to increase it). Some have begun to emphasize “inclusion” or “belonging.” But many were already moving towards something broader.
“Skills-based hiring,” “skills-first hiring,” and efforts to break the “paper ceiling” (the bias against those without college degrees) are increasingly common buzzwords. (“It’s kind of a contribution to the ‘paper ceiling’ movement,” George told Fortune of McKinsey’s expanded recruiting outlook.)
The idea, as described by consulting firm BCG, is to put “competence before credentials,” meaning that companies should stop searching for the right degree and focus on who has the right skills, regardless of how they acquired them.
The discourse is basically meritocracy. And it is everywhere. McKinsey has developed a video game to assess candidates’ cognitive skills, which it says gives them “insight beyond the resume or conventional interview.” And it has published an interview preparation website that a spokesperson said was necessary “so that exceptional candidates from any source can succeed in our interviews, regardless of whether they have access to resources such as a consulting club, active career services support or an alumni network that is well connected within the consulting industry.” Bank of America has partnerships with 34 community colleges and says it has hired and trained thousands of employees from these schools. Goldman Sachs went on to interview for positions. of entry-level jobs virtually, rather than just at a few high-ranking schools. “We are now finding talent from places we have not reached before,” its global head of human capital wrote in 2019.
A handful of companies, including Walmart last year, said they would completely eliminate degree requirements for corporate jobs, and more than a dozen states announced they would stop requiring degrees for some government jobs. In 2020, a coalition of large companies, including Accenture, JPMorgan Chase and Deloitte, set out to place more Black workers in well-paying jobs. Recently, the group changed its mission to promote “hiring for skills, not just degrees.”
Economists generally agree that avoiding unnecessary degree requirements (or prestigious degree requirements, in the case of McKinsey) is a good idea, particularly in an era of degree inflation and a tight labor market. Reducing reliance on credentials is also more likely to increase diversity, even when it is not a stated goal.
It is also easier to set it as a goal. “I think it’s hard to oppose it, frankly,” said Anthony Carnevale, who recently retired as founding director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce and worked on employment policy during three White House administrations.
“Someone who is more qualified for the job and deserves it should get it,” he said. “I don’t know how you can argue with that.”
It’s no surprise that making a promise is easier than keeping it.
Some companies have made real progress, such as Accenture, which is considered a pioneer in the strategy and has said that nearly 50 percent of its jobs in North America no longer require a college degree. But a Harvard study that looked at job postings at large companies between 2014 and 2023 found that while there was a big increase in positions that reduced degree requirements, not much had changed in actual hiring practices.
In the period after companies eliminated degree requirements for some jobs, about 3.5 percent of those positions were filled by candidates without a degree. That means fewer than 1 in 700 workers hired last year benefited from the policy change.
Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the study, said the lack of follow-up was not because companies were “washing their virtues” but because “there is a big difference between announcing a policy change and have it.” a kind of reification for the company.”
He said that, for a first-line manager, choosing the candidate with a college degree might feel like “when you’re indifferent between two main courses at a Chinese restaurant and one comes with free egg rolls.”
Georgetown University’s Carnevale pointed out another challenge: It’s difficult to articulate exactly what qualities someone needs to do a particular job well, much less how to evaluate those qualities without being sued. “Imagine trying to figure out all of that, with lawyers in the room, what the actual knowledge, skills, abilities, personality traits, work values, and work interests are; It’s risky business,” she said.
Like evaluating credentials, evaluating a candidate based on experience can be prone to bias, said Anthony Abraham Jack, an associate professor at Boston University and author of the forthcoming book “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are.” Failing Disadvantaged Students”. For example, he said, “traditional markers of assessment especially ignore the work that low-income students do on behalf of their families.”
In other words, skills-based hiring may not be all that different from other corporate efforts that have struggled to move hiring practices closer to meritocracy. “It’s not a quick fix; most things that really work tend to fit that profile,” said Joelle Emerson, CEO of DEI consulting firm Paradigm. “Things that sound too good to be true (like, oh, we’re just going to do skills-based hiring) are usually too good to be true.”