Credential Fluency: The Hiring Advantage in the Race for Skills
In today’s constrained labor market, winning companies are those that can identify and develop talent wherever it exists. With an aging workforce and accelerating skill turnover, the traditional playbook—hiring through degree based requirements—no longer delivers competitive advantage.
Forward-thinking firms are turning to non-degree credentials as a solution. These validated skill signals help companies identify qualified talent they would otherwise overlook, while giving workers—particularly those without four-year degrees—a way to prove their capabilities. According to the U.S. Labor Department, workers without degrees make up 58% of the prime-age U.S. workforce—yet they’re systematically screened out of needed roles they could perform.
The Burning Glass Institute and OneTen analyzed over 1,000 major U.S. employers, revealing stark differences in how companies approach credentials:
Leading firms are making credentials work. Firms like LinkedIn, Nordic Global, and Procore Technologies consistently request credentials in job postings and hire based on them. These companies link specific credentials to business-critical skills (HubSpot requires Inbound Marketing certification; Infosys prioritizes AWS Architect credentials), enabling them to more effectively hire the right talent.
Many companies struggle to translate intent into action. Even when looking at companies hiring for the exact same types of jobs, a sharp divide in their approach to hiring emerges. Leading firms - those in the top 10% of hiring for non-degree credentials - are 11 percentage points more likely to do so than firms in the bottom decile of credential fluency. This wide gap shows that the practice is far from standard: while some organizations have fully embraced these credentials, many are still just beginning to figure out how to incorporate them into their hiring process. For example, our analysis showed that companies that remove degree requirements see only a 2-percentage-point increase in the share of hires with non-degree credentials. This evidence suggests that shifting hiring practices requires more than policy changes; it demands operational infrastructure.
Credentials offer substantial benefits for workers, particularly those from historically disadvantaged groups. Through credentialing, women see annual wage gains of $1,600, while men see gains of $916. Furthermore, Black and Hispanic workers experience even larger premiums, with wage gains nearly double those of White peers. For companies committed to advancing opportunity for all, credential-based hiring offers a data-driven path forward.
The bottom line: In an era where technical skills increasingly have a half-life measured in months, not years, companies need dynamic ways to assess capability. Firms that build “credential fluency”—the ability to identify, validate, and hire based on quality credentials—will access talent their competitors miss.
Who should read this: This report is designed for hiring leaders evaluating credential strategies, workers considering skill investments, and workforce development professionals seeking evidence on which credentials deliver real returns. It shows how leading companies access overlooked talent, which credentials predict performance, and how to operationalize credential recognition in your hiring systems. This report focuses on the use of non-degree credentials as hiring signals. For clarity and readability, the terms “credentials” and “non-degree credentials” are used interchangeably throughout to refer to this subset, unless otherwise specified.