Is Your Hiring Strategy Incomplete?
Download our guide on building a stronger workforce through skills-based hiring and expanding your talent pool with STARs.
STARs—workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes—are a vast, overlooked talent pool.
These 70+ million workers have earned the skills to perform higher-wage work through on-the-job training, associate’s degrees, certifications or bootcamps, military service, and other pathways instead of a bachelor’s degree.
Our 3 key findings make a case for including STARs in your hiring strategy:
Low wage doesn't mean low skill. Millions of STARs have the skills today to perform higher-wage work.
STARs have a diverse set of transferrable skills that qualify them for in-demand jobs.
Innovative sourcing strategies that tap into alternative routes or internal pathways can help you build a more inclusive, resilient workforce.
The myth of the labor shortage
Employers struggle to find qualified candidates for certain roles, but they might be unnecessarily limiting their pool of applicants. Our analysis shows that over 70 million STARs–approximately half of the U.S. workforce—are blocked from accessing higher-paying jobs and economic mobility due to unnecessary degree screens during the application process.
While a bachelor’s degree is the most commonly recognized pathway to high-wage work, STARs build valuable and critical skills through work experience, credentialed training, apprenticeships, and other routes.
Developing a skills-first STARs hiring strategy connects businesses to better quality hires and higher retention rates.
Makeup of the US workforce:
The impact of overlooked skills
Our research found many STARs currently possess the required skills to take on higher-wage work.
The illustration showcases the similar skills used by a Sales Representative and an Advertising Sales Agent, though the roles have a wage gap of up to $40,000 per year.
We found at least one possible skills-based transition from a current to a higher-wage job for every one of the 70+ million STARs. As employers shifted to a degree-based screening process over the last 20 years, however, STARs have been displaced from over 7.4 million upwardly mobile jobs.
