In the 2020s, many employers began shifting away from hiring decisions based on traditional qualifications, such as degrees from recognized post-secondary institutions and experience in the field. Unemployment in tech and engineering has long been low, making it difficult to source qualified candidates. Shifts in immigration policies and an increasing reliance on technology during the pandemic years made it even more difficult to fill open roles. Employers recognized the need to assess candidates differently. Demonstrated skills became a new currency.
This trend has not slackened. Instead, in the face of the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools, focusing on skills became even more important. A degree earned in 2016 – no matter how prestigious – likely did not adequately prepare the recipient for the tech landscape of 2026.
Look at it this way: Candidate A has a degree from a renowned college and ten years of experience at a Big Tech company. Candidate B has a bootcamp certification that’s five years old, a handful of other certifications, and four years of experience with startups you’ve never heard of. Who do you prioritize for an interview?
If you chose Candidate A, it’s worth re-evaluating your hiring criteria.
The Demise Of The Experience Heuristic
Using experience as a tool to assess candidates returned relatively good results for most of the 20th century. Technology advanced slowly, especially in comparison with today’s advancements. If someone spent several years writing COBOL, they developed expertise and a transferable skill set. Hiring managers could expect that experience translated into competence – with years of experience signifying high competence.
Unfortunately, advanced experience no longer signifies expertise. Developers who built their careers in a particular framework may be watching those stacks become legacy. Someone who has worked across a variety of roles in the past five years, while pursuing certifications and contributing to open-source projects, might have a skill set more relevant to the role you need to fill.
Experience doesn’t hold the same value as it used to. While it can tell you a candidate’s history, it can’t tell you their future potential.
What Experience Can Tell You
When we step away from the experience heuristic and apply a new lens, it becomes obvious that experience no longer carries the same relevance.
Job history alone can only reveal a few things. For example, if a candidate has been employed as a software engineer for ten years, we know they’ve held a job in the field for a decade. While it’s tempting to assume that the candidate has developed a certain skill set and a high degree of competence, experience listed on a resume can’t actually demonstrate that.
When it comes down to it, there’s a lot that we can’t tell by looking solely at experience. For example, regardless of how long a candidate has worked in the field, experience alone won’t reveal if they:
- Take initiative to embrace learning opportunities;
- Keep current with technical advances beyond their area of specialization;
- Developed transferable skills that are needed in the current tech and engineering job markets; or
- Strengthened the soft skills that are becoming increasingly important in today’s workplaces.
In the 2020s, it’s becoming increasingly clear that experience is more a measure of tenure rather than an indicator of capability. And – especially in the tech and engineering sectors, where advancements are happening at lightning speed – tenure without learning and development can actually be a liability. If a candidate hasn’t acquired new knowledge or skills, and hasn’t ventured out of the comfort zone of their existing knowledge, they may bring outdated assumptions and legacy habits to a new role.
Ultimately, a candidate who has significant but limited experience may have a harder time adapting to new paradigms.
How To Transition To Skills-Based Hiring
Embracing skills-based hiring doesn’t require completely disregarding a candidate’s educational background or experience. Instead, hiring committees and managers should reconsider how they evaluate those traditional qualifications. Rather than inferring a candidate’s capability based on what they’ve done in the past, skills-based hiring focuses on determining actual capability.
Instead of assuming that experience equals competence, question how that experience can help the candidate excel in the role you are considering them for. This often means restructuring job postings, rewriting interview questions, implementing technical assessments, assessing learning velocity, and building a new rubric.
Restructure Job Postings
Start by looking at your open roles. Consider how those job postings could better focus on skills rather than arbitrary requirements like year thresholds or post-secondary degrees. While most job postings focus on inputs, the real emphasis should be on outcomes.
For example, instead of specifying that candidates should have 5+ years of backend experience, consider what the candidate will need to be able to do in one month, or six months, or twelve months. What skills will they need to succeed in the role? What problems will they need to solve? What technical decisions will they need to make?
Building your job postings around outcomes helps you better define the skills candidates need to succeed in and contribute to your company.
Rewrite Interview Questions
Behavioral interviews – where candidates are asked how they approached and solved issues in past workplaces – are standard in many companies. But to truly understand a candidate’s skills in today’s rapidly evolving workplace, a shift to situational interviews may be required.
Situational interviews pose hypothetical situations, asking candidates how they would respond. Experience may provide context for the candidate’s answer. For example, they may describe a similar situation at a past workplace to explain their approach. However, rather than simply walking the interviewer through their work history, the candidate can actively demonstrate their problem-solving skills, ability to think on their feet, and grasp of current technological expertise.
Implement Structured Technical Assessments
Technical assessments are fairly standard in the tech and engineering hiring sphere. However, if you’ve been bypassing technical screening for any reason, it’s time to bring it back.
Coding challenges, take-home problems, live pair-programming, architecture walk-throughs, CAD/CAE simulations, and troubleshooting tests are just a few of the assessments in which candidates can demonstrate their skills and expertise. Structured technical assessments allow candidates to show up in ways that they can’t on a resume, while also allowing hiring managers to assess skill levels.
Assess Learning Velocity
In today’s tech and engineering workplaces, the ability to quickly acquire new skills and knowledge is often more valuable than what candidates already know. There is no easy way to quantify learning velocity, but asking the right questions can give you an idea of the candidate’s aptitude for learning. Ask about:
- Learning and professional development opportunities that they’ve recently pursued;
- The last time they had to learn something from scratch to solve a problem; or
- A time they got stuck on a problem and how they resolved it.
The ability to quickly pick up and utilize new skills is critical in today’s workplace.
Build A New Rubric
Qualifications such as experience, a degree from a recognized post-secondary institution, and certifications are easily scored on an interview rubric. Skills are harder to evaluate – especially when those evaluations have to be standardized across interviewers.
For skills-based hiring, build a new rubric by deciding on the specific capabilities you need to hire for and defining what “strong” looks like for those capabilities. This way, interviewers will measure the same skills against the same criteria.
The Untapped Advantage Of Skills-Based Hiring
Emphasizing experience and traditional educational achievements as hiring criteria often filters out exceptional candidates from a richly skilled talent pool. Several groups are underrepresented in the tech and engineering sectors, including women, people with disabilities, those from BIPOC communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and those who have been incarcerated.
People from these underrepresented groups may have the right skills and knowledge to excel in your open role(s), but they are more likely to have developed those skills in bootcamps, through self-directed learning, or during mid-career pivots. By focusing on traditional qualifications, hiring managers and ATSs are filtering out highly skilled candidates. In today’s job market, this talent pool shouldn’t be overlooked.
The Bottom Line
Your best hire might not be the one with the most impressive credentials. Instead, it might be the one who built their skills independently, studying coding and working on open-source projects in their spare time, anticipating a mid-career pivot. They might not have a degree or a decade of experience. Instead, they have the capability to learn what they don’t know, solve the problems you need solved, and grow with the role and your company over time.
If you’re focused on hiring for a credential instead of a capability, you’re likely overlooking some incredible candidates.
