What is the Paper Ceiling and Why Hiring Teams Should Care

In the 2021 census, 33.8% of adults held a Higher National Certificate, Higher National Diploma, Bachelor’s degree, or post-graduate qualifications. But for the rest of the adult population, there are often barriers in their career due to their lack of a university level qualification – it’s so common it has been labelled ‘the paper ceiling’.

Research by Grads of Life, Accenture, and the Harvard Business School found that more than 60% of employers rejected otherwise qualified candidates simply because they did not have a bachelor’s degree. This isn’t just a cause for frustration among these otherwise talented candidates who come up against such obstacles in their career but is also a significant loss for the hiring organisations.

Not only do they immediately exclude applicants who may possess more practical work experience than their university educated peers, but the decision to only consider degree holders will also disproportionally impact candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds who may have lacked access to traditional higher education.

The STAR Acronym

The STAR acronym stands for Skilled Through Alternative Routes – referring to routes individuals may have taken to gain valuable skills and experience that were alternatives to the traditional bachelor’s degree. A STAR candidate may have gained experience and skills through apprenticeships, internships, the navy or military, or certificate programs.

Skills Based Hiring Will Tear Down the Paper Ceiling

Skills-based hiring refers to the practice of evaluating candidates based on the skills they present on their CV and during the interview process, rather than focusing on the level of their higher education. A 2023 BCG study found three stages of skills-based hiring were key to its success: clarifying target roles, learning to embrace new talent, and embedding the process.

Identifying roles where skills-based hiring would be a good fit was the first foundational step.

For example, by mapping out the necessary transferable skills, BMO, a leading North American bank, found they were confident that branch managers could teach the responsibilities of an associate banker role if new hires came in with strong interpersonal competencies, which may have been built from previous customer service experience. Ensuring the soft skills and alternative experience that would stand in place of a degree was agreed internally was crucial to getting everyone onboard and having a formal list to include in job descriptions so that the candidate understood as well as the employer what was needed from them.

When getting an organisation’s culture to shift its attitude to new talent, it’s leadership and management who lead the charge – but at many organisations, those in these positions were hired through more traditional processes which included degree requirements. This means leadership buy in is crucial. BCG found that getting these groups to speak with STARs as well as presenting them with the data that proves STARs are just as capable – and in some areas more capable – than their degree educated counterparts was imperative to the success of skills-based hiring strategies.

Embedding the processes successfully was rooted in the right partnerships and robust technology. Working with a university to codevelop the training curriculum for apprentices was a key to success for one of BGO’s clients. Recruitment technology that provided everything needed to support skills-based hiring – from talent pool management and talent search to a careers site and social integrations.

How to Attract STARs

Promote your updated approach

Ensure you are loud and proud about your skills-based approach to hiring when devising your employer brand strategy. Being explicit about the fact you are seeking STARs via your social media activities, organisational newsletters, referral scheme, and job adverts will be critical in getting any potential candidates in-the-know.

Be consistent within your culture

Getting leadership and management onboard with your skills-based hiring strategy is the first foundational step we’ve already covered, but it can’t stop there. Leadership needs to get onboard with other policies and practices that are designed to create a fairer workplace. HR and recruitment will need to collaborate to bring together compelling research which evidences the link between inclusivity and improved innovation, culture, and business success.

Engage with STARs directly

Reaching out to individuals on networks such as LinkedIn could serve to attract STARs into your talent pool. Directly contacting potential candidates in a friendly, professional manner will also feed into an employer brand which is welcoming and enthusiastic about bringing STAR talent onboard.

Overall, it’s become clear that despite the workplace taking gradual steps towards becoming a fairer, inclusive setting, there is still a significant way to go. While recruitment teams cannot shoulder responsibility for inclusivity practices across the entire business, they do lead the way in sourcing an organisation’s most valuable asset – it’s people. Therefore, coordinating with HR, leadership and the wider organisation to ensure a skills-based hiring strategy is well implemented in order to dissemble to paper ceiling will not only lead to positive results in terms of strong, previously overlooked talent, but also long-term enrichment to the business’ culture.