Picture Maya…she’s been an HR Director for a mid-sized company, developing a robust people strategy, leading complex investigations, rolling out a new performance review process, and coaching leaders through difficult conversations. She’s built trust across the organization and delivered measurable results. But because she doesn’t have a business degree, she’s been rejected by applicant tracking systems that filtered her out because of the requirement for a B.Comm.
Now picture Amir…he’s a newcomer to Canada with ten years of hands-on operations management experience. He’s managed a team of 40, improved safety compliance, and cut downtime by redesigning shift schedules. Here, he’s offered an entry-level coordinator role at half his previous salary because his degree isn’t from “the right” school.
These aren’t rare stories. In Canada, the education–occupation mismatch is common among workers, as new immigrants are far more likely to be “over-educated” for their jobs than Canadian-born peers. Roughly two-thirds of recent immigrants hold foreign degrees, yet they face much higher rates of mismatch. The result is wasted talent and depressed income.
When organizations default to degrees, they screen out people who can already do the work.
Why Skills-First Is Picking Up Speed (and Why It’s Hard)
The world of work is changing faster than schools can keep up. Entire careers that are in demand today (like AI operations, product analytics, or climate reporting) either didn’t exist five years ago or look completely different now.
Employers are starting to catch on. Across countries, more organizations are talking about “skills-first” hiring, where what you can do matters more than the letters after your name. The push is fueled by two big factors; shifting demographics and the green/digital economy that’s reshaping jobs everywhere.
But here’s the catch…while many companies say they’ve dropped degree requirements; their actual hiring practices might not have changed much. Research from Harvard Business School found that simply removing “Bachelor’s degree required” from job ads didn’t move the dial if companies didn’t also change how they screened, interviewed, and assessed candidates.
Why the stall? Because it’s easy to delete a line in a posting. It’s much harder to rework the systems behind it, like how you filter resumes, how you train interviewers, and how you decide who’s ready to be hired. The payoff, though, is worth it. Skills-first hiring means you can draw from a much larger pool of people, move employees into new roles faster, and adapt your workforce as priorities shift. And for Canada, our labour force growth now relies heavily on immigration. That makes a skills-first approach not just a fairness issue, but an economic one too.
The Business Case – Retention, Mobility, and Pipelines That Don’t Run Dry
When you hire for capability rather than pedigree, three good things tend to happen:
You keep people longer. Evidence from large-firm samples shows that when organizations implement skills-based hiring, non-degreed hires remain longer and progress faster than expected, a signal that you’re finally matching talent to work rather than to credentials.
You expand the pool. Using skills signals (projects, assessments, tasks) can magnify viable talent pools. The talent pool will expand when we search by competencies instead of titles or alma mater.
You future-proof. Deloitte’s work on skills-based organizations argues that moving beyond rigid job boundaries gives companies agility in volatile markets, precisely what leaders have been asking HR to deliver since 2020.
Here’s one more uncomfortable truth: unfilled roles cost real money. In manufacturing and other sectors, forecasts point to millions of positions at risk of remaining vacant if skills gaps persist. While the specific estimate below is U.S.-focused, it shows that demand is outpacing degree-centric supply, and skills pathways are the lever.
What Changes When You Drop the Default Degree?
We worked with a mid-sized company that had a vacancy for a Marketing & Graphic Design Specialist. The original posting required a bachelor’s degree in marketing or design, 5+ years of experience, and “agency background preferred.”
We rewrote the posting with a skills-first approach:
- Outcomes: “Within 90 days, launch three social campaigns with original graphics; within 180 days, redesign our sales deck and refresh the website’s visual branding.”
- Must-have skills: Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite (or Canva for fast-turn projects), strong visual storytelling, social media content creation, and ability to collaborate with non-marketing teams.
- “Nice to have”: Marketing degree, formal design credential, or prior agency experience, explicitly marked as optional.
- Work sample: A short design challenge: create a mock social graphic and a one-page event flyer using supplied brand assets.
The result? The applicant pool widened immediately. Instead of mostly degree-holders from big agencies, applications came from self-taught designers with strong portfolios, recent grads with fresh ideas, and career-changers who had built real campaigns in volunteer roles or freelance projects.
The eventual hire was someone who had been working in customer service but built a portfolio of freelance design work on the side. With the right skills and creativity, they were producing high-quality graphics and campaigns within weeks, something that never would have been visible under the old “Bachelor’s degree required” filter.
Education Bias: What It Is and How It Sneaks In
Education bias is the tendency to favour (or not) candidates based on formal academic credentials (school name, degree type, GPA) over demonstrated ability, adjacent skills, or lived experience. It shows up in three subtle ways.
Proxy bias. “Bachelor’s degree required” becomes a shorthand for persistence, communication, or critical thinking, capabilities that can be validated directly through assessment, without using a four-year proxy.
Pedigree bias. Over-weighting school brand as a performance predictor. (If you’ve ever caught yourself saying “we like candidates from X,” this is it.)
Process bias. Using ATS filters keyed to degrees or keywords, which quietly exclude international credentials or non-linear career paths.
The irony is that these shortcuts make us less predictive in fast-changing work. A skills-first approach creates fairer access and a more accurate read on who can do the job. Cross-country policy and labour-market analysis backs this up.
Six Practical Shifts to Make Skills-First, Starting This Quarter
Outcomes over credentials
Ditch “degree required” unless the credential is legally mandated. Spell out 3–5 outcomes you expect in the first 90/180 days and list the competencies that enable them. Offer “degree or equivalent experience.” This single change can surface excellent adjacent candidates, including career shifters and newcomers with international schooling.
Search by skills, not schools
Recalibrate your ATS and Boolean strings, include core tools, frameworks, and verbs tied to the work (“designed,” “deployed,” “recovered,” “negotiated”). Invite portfolios or GitHub/Notion work logs. You’ll widen the pool and reduce false negatives.
Make competencies comparable
Adopt structured, skills-based interviews. Ask for recent, specific examples (“Tell me about a time in the last 12 months when you…”), score answers against behavioural anchors, and train interviewers to probe for scope, complexity, and outcomes.
Keep assessments real, and short
Use a 45–60 minute case aligned with the role, a small dataset to clean and summarize, a mock client email to draft, or a scenario call to role-play. Respect candidates’ time. You’re validating capability, not extracting free labour.
Foreign Degrees: Accept, assess, and support
If the role isn’t regulated, accept recognized international degrees and evaluate skills directly. When licensing is required, provide a simple guide to steps and timelines. This is both inclusive and pragmatic given Canada’s workforce reality.
Build 30–60–90 skill plans
Pair new hires with micro-training tied to the outcomes in your posting. It beats waiting six months for a “perfect” resume, and it compounds internal mobility.
The Action Plan
Step 1 – The degree is removed from postings; interview guide includes 6–8 competency questions; single practical exercise.
Step 2 –Skills library mapped to roles; hiring managers trained; ATS reconfigured for skills keywords; structured debriefs with scoring rubrics.
Step 3 – Work is organized beyond job titles (projects, tasks, skills); internal marketplaces for gigs; validated, bias-aware assessments; ongoing reskilling programs aligned to business strategy.
A Small Challenge with Big Impact
If your posting still says “Bachelor’s degree required” by default, try this: swap it for three must-have skills and one short work sample. Run that experiment for a quarter. Track pipeline quality, time-to-shortlist, and 90-day performance. Our bet? You’ll discover talent you’ve been missing and you’ll never go back.
Because if someone can do the job, the letters after their name shouldn’t be the gate.
References
Burning Glass Institute & Harvard Business School. (2023). Skills-based hiring: The long road from pronouncements to practice (Research report). https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/skills-based-hiring-2024
Canada. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. (2024). 2024 annual report to Parliament on immigration. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publications-manuals/annual-report-parliament-immigration-2024.html
Deloitte Insights. (2023). A skills-based model for work: The end of jobs? https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2023/skills-based-model-end-of-jobs.html
LinkedIn Economic Graph. (2024). Skills-first: Reimagining the labor market and breaking down barriers. https://economicgraph.linkedin.com/research/skills-first-report
OECD. (2024). Empowering the workforce in the context of a skills-first approach: Concepts, trends and implications for the labour market. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/empowering-the-workforce-in-the-context-of-a-skills-first-approach_345b6528-en/full-report/skills-first-in-oecd-countries-concepts-trends-and-implications-for-the-labour-market_0d6ba66f.html
Opportunity@Work. (2025). State of the Paper Ceiling. https://www.opportunityatwork.org/impact/sopc
Statistics Canada. (2024). Trends in education–occupation mismatch among recent immigrants with a degree (2001–2021). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024005/article/00002-eng.htm
Toronto Metropolitan University, CERC Migration. (2025). Canadian immigrants are overqualified and underemployed—reforms must follow. https://www.torontomu.ca/cerc-migration/news/2025/02/conversation-canadian-overqualified/
The Manufacturing Institute & Deloitte. (2024). The manufacturing talent imperative (As summarized by Investopedia). https://www.investopedia.com/why-half-of-the-new-us-manufacturing-jobs-in-the-next-decade-could-go-unfilled-8627559
About the Author
Jori Chykerda, CPHR
Jori Chykerda is an experienced HR and operations leader with over a decade of hands-on and strategic experience supporting organizations across sectors, including First Nations, non-profits, health care, oil and gas, automotive, transportation, finance, and tech start-ups.
In her role as Director of Operations at Impact HR, Jori oversees internal strategy and delivery, while also leading key client engagements in HR consulting, workplace investigations, policy development, performance frameworks, and leadership training. She is the creator of Impact HR’s 3-day Respectful Workplace Workshop, now delivered to organizations across Western Canada. Jori is known for her thoughtful, values-driven approach and her ability to deliver programs that are both practical and impactful. She excels at building trusted relationships with executives and front-line teams alike. Jori is especially passionate about helping to create cultures rooted in respect, equity, and accountability, bringing clarity, warmth, and momentum to every engagement. She holds a Human Resources Management Diploma from NAIT, a certificate in Strategic Leadership from Norquest College, and is certified in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion through NAIT. She is currently a Chartered Professional in Human Resources (CPHR) in Alberta.