Employers Eager to Hire Try a New Policy: ‘No Experience Necessary’ & College Degrees not Required
Employers Eager to Hire Try a New Policy: ‘No Experience
Necessary’
Inexperienced job applicants face better odds in the
labor market as more companies drop work-history and degree requirements
By Kelsey Gee Updated July 29, 2018 1:14 p.m. ET
Americans looking to land a first job or break into a
dream career face their best odds of success in years.
Employers say they are abandoning preferences for college
degrees and specific skill sets to speed up hiring and broaden the pool of job
candidates. Many companies added requirements to job postings after the
recession, when millions were out of work and human-resources departments were
stacked with résumés.
Across incomes and industries, the lower bar to getting
hired is helping self-taught programmers attain software engineering roles at
Intel Corp. and GitHub Inc., the coding platform, and improving the odds for
high-school graduates who aspire to be branch managers at Bank of America Corp.
and Terminix pest control.
“Candidates have so many options today,” said Amy Glaser,
senior vice president of Adecco Group, a staffing agency with about 10,000 company
clients in search of employees. “If a company requires a degree, two rounds of
interviews and a test for hard skills, candidates can go down the street to
another employer who will make them an offer that day.”
Ms. Glaser estimates one in four of the agency’s employer
clients have made drastic changes to their recruiting process since the start
of the year, such as skipping drug tests or criminal background checks, or
removing preferences for a higher degree or high-school diploma.
Cutting job-credential requirements is more common in
cities such as Dallas and Louisville, where unemployment is lowest, Ms. Glaser
said, as well as in recruiting for roles at call centers and warehouses within
logistics operations of retailers such as Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
In the first half of 2018, the share of job postings
requesting a college degree fell to 30% from 32% in 2017, according to an
analysis by labor-market research firm Burning Glass Technologies of 15 million
ads on websites such as Indeed and Craigslist. Minimum qualifications have been
drifting lower since 2012, when companies sought college graduates for 34% of
those positions.
Long work-history requirements have also relaxed: Only
23% of entry-level jobs now ask applicants for three or more years of
experience, compared with 29% back in 2012, putting an additional 1.2 million
jobs in closer reach of more applicants, Burning Glass data show. Through the
end of last year, a further one million new jobs were opened up to candidates
with “no experience necessary,” making occupations such as e-commerce analyst,
purchasing assistant and preschool teacher available to novices and those
without a degree.
It all marks a sharp reversal from the immediate
aftermath of the financial crisis, when employers could be pickier. Economists
say job requirements were harder to track then, because many companies didn’t
post positions publicly and many résumés weren’t delivered electronically.
Now, recruiters say, the tightest job market in decades
has left employers looking to tamp down hiring costs with three options: Offer
more money upfront, lower their standards or retrain current staff in coding,
procurement or other necessary skills.
Rodney Apple, president of SCM Talent Group LLC in Asheville,
N.C., said if companies won’t budge on compensation, experience or education
requirements, he walks away.
“We tell them, ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t help you fish for
the few underpaid or unaware applicants left out there,’ ” he said. SCM finds
workers for dozens of small and midsize companies seeking supply-chain managers
and logistics and warehouse operators across the U.S. Mr. Apple said talent
shortages are more extreme than he has seen in nearly 20 years of recruiting.
Average wages have climbed steadily in the past year, but
rising prices of household goods have made those pay raises less valuable to
workers, keeping pressure on employers to increase salaries or re-evaluate
their target hire.
To attract more entry-level employees, toy maker Hasbro
Inc. divided four marketing jobs, which it previously designed for
business-school graduates with M.B.A.s, into eight lower-level positions. The
new full-time roles included a marketing coordinator, retail-planning analyst
and trade merchandiser, all involving more routine activities supporting
higher-level staff in the division.
Hasbro hiring managers originally sought candidates with
a two-year degree for the jobs but ultimately dropped any college requirement,
a spokeswoman said. The Pawtucket, R.I. company received more than 100
applications and hired nine people.
The new shift, called “down skilling,” bolsters a theory
articulated by Alicia Modestino, a Northeastern University economist: When more
people are looking for work, companies can afford to inflate job requirements
to find the best fit—and did so as unemployment spiked in 2008.
As college graduates and midcareer professionals raised
their hands for jobs as hotel managers and bookkeepers after the recession,
hires with more qualifications took a larger share of positions normally filled
by the 75 million U.S. workers who lack a college degree.
After the recession, Terminix raised the bar for over
1,000 pest-control branch- and service-manager positions to require a two-year
degree or a bachelor’s degree. In January, it reversed course and made degrees
“preferred” but not mandatory, said Betsy Vincent, senior director of talent
acquisition.
Anthony Whitehead worked for five years as a Terminix
branch manager in Florida before he was promoted to regional director in early
July. That position now accepts candidates with college degrees or equivalent
experience, helping Mr. Whitehead clinch the role despite his earlier decision
to enter the military instead of college.
Mr. Whitehead, 35 years old, said his approach to jobs
requiring a degree has been “apply anyways if I have the right experience, and
then have the education conversation if I need to,” he said, acknowledging his
luck in working for companies like Terminix with flexible requirements.
A lot of employers are loosening college requirements
even as the proportion of Americans with a bachelor’s degree continues to rise.
Bank of America Corp. currently has 7,500 job openings world-wide and fewer
than 10% require a degree, said spokesman Andy Aldridge. Mr. Aldridge said a
surprising number of jobs could be filled by nongraduates, including most of
the bank’s tellers and employees handling customer-service and fraud-protection
calls from cardholders.
In June, the bank unveiled plans to hire 10,000 more
retail workers from low-income neighborhoods over the next five years, with or
without degrees, said Chris Payton, head of talent acquisition.
Not every company is relaxing requirements: Economists
say positions that require high levels of technical expertise, such as
information security, still need advanced knowledge.
The tech industry has been quick to dismiss credentials
like a bachelor of arts degree as irrelevant, especially in emerging fields
such as data analytics, where demand for talent has risen faster than
universities can churn out new graduates.
GitHub, recently acquired by Microsoft Corp., said it
hasn’t required college degrees for most positions in years. Degrees are optional
for many “experienced hire” positions at chip maker Intel, which also has a
“tech grad” job category the company describes as fitting candidates with
relevant classroom or work experience from technical programs, such as coding
boot camps.
Intel’s career website advertises roles, including a lab
employee testing experimental devices in Santa Clara, Calif., and a components
researcher improving the semiconductor process in Hillsboro, Ore., as available
to candidates with a two-year degree, military training or other nondegree
certifications.
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