Is Your Hiring Strategy Incomplete?
Download our guide for 3 key reasons to switch to skills-based hiring and expand your talent pool with STARs.
STARs—workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes—are a vast, overlooked talent pool.
These 70+ million workers have the skills to perform higher-wage work by leveraging 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 business case for including STARs in your hiring strategy:
Low wage doesn't mean low skill. On-the-job training is a key alternative route for workers looking to grow and hiring managers recruiting for new roles.
This diverse, largely untapped talent pool has varied skills to fill in-demand jobs if employers could better recognize their potential and transferable skills.
STARs follow different trajectories to increased wages. Each segment needs specific types of investment and support, such as credentialed training or apprenticeships.
The myth of the labor shortage
Employers often blame a lack of qualified candidates for the inability to fill certain roles. 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, it isn’t an accessible pathway for many workers. 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.
The impact of overlooked skills
The assumption that lower-wage jobs require fewer or lower-level skills is untrue. Our research found many rising 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.
