Troi Skills-based hiring has been talked about for years. But in 2026, it seems that, according to some reports, it may finally be moving from recruitment theory into the mainstream.
Michael Page’s 2026 Talent Trends report found that 66% of UK organisations say they have adopted skills-based hiring, while 58% of candidates prefer roles defined by skills rather than qualifications or career history. Totaljobs found a similar pattern: 43% of recruiters named it a top priority for 2026, the most commonly cited priority in its research.
In June, the OECD published A Skills-First Labour Market, examining how economies can move away from formal qualifications and towards what people can do. In the UK, Skills England launched the UK Standard Skills Classification, a common framework for skills, knowledge and tasks across occupations.
However, on closer inspection, perhaps the question is no longer whether skills-based hiring is coming, but what employers mean when they say they’re doing it.
Changing the language of hiring
Skills-based hiring shifts the emphasis away from proxies for ability – qualifications, job titles, previous employers or prescribed experience – and towards the capabilities needed to perform a job. Qualifications and experience remain relevant, but the focus changes.
Instead of asking, “Has this person already done this job?”, we start with: “What does someone need to be able to do to succeed in it?”
That distinction is significant because the relationship between jobs, experience and skills is changing.
Technology is creating capabilities faster than conventional career paths can accommodate. AI is changing existing jobs, while organisations need skills that may not map neatly onto a qualification or previous job title.
The OECD’s 2026 research describes a transition towards a skills-first labour market, where skills become a more important currency across hiring, development and internal mobility.
BUT accepting that principle is very different from rebuilding recruitment around it.
The latest numbers are impressive, but what’s the reality?
Two-thirds of UK organisations telling Michael Page they have adopted skills-based hiring sounds like a major change. But what does “adopted” mean in practice?
Researchers from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute examined this question across more than 11,000 roles at large US companies where employers had removed degree requirements.
Their report, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice, found that the change had an effect: employers increased the proportion of workers without bachelor’s degrees hired into affected roles by around 3.5 percentage points.
Yet relatively few roles had changed. Across overall hiring, the net increase was just 0.14 percentage points – approximately 97,000 additional opportunities among 77 million annual hires, or fewer than one in every 700 hires.
The research is US-based and predates the latest acceleration in skills-first hiring, so it should not be treated as a measure of the UK in 2026.
But the question it raises remains relevant: Changing hiring criteria is not necessarily the same as changing hiring behaviour.
What happens when the CV doesn’t look right?
Imagine two candidates. One has spent six years doing the same job for recognisable competitors; their titles and sector experience match. The other comes from an adjacent industry, with different titles and a less conventional career path.
But when both are assessed against the capabilities required for the job, the second candidate performs better. So who gets hired?
That decision tells us more about whether an organisation is genuinely skills-based than anything in its recruitment strategy, because experience remains a powerful signal.
That is understandable: successfully performing a similar role is reasonable evidence that someone may be able to do it again.
However if the candidate with the most recognisable experience wins regardless of the skills evidence, perhaps we have not moved as far as we think.
Assessing skills is harder than talking about them
This may be where much of the difficulty lies. It is easy to screen for five years’ experience; assessing commercial judgement, problem-solving, stakeholder management, adaptability or leadership is considerably harder.
- What does good look like?
- How do you assess it?
- Which skills are genuinely necessary on day one?
- Which could reasonably be learned?
- How do you ensure different interviewers are measuring the same thing?
- And how do you compare people who developed the same capability through completely different experiences?
Totaljobs’ 2026 research found that 94% of businesses use some form of skills assessment. But including an assessment does not necessarily make the whole process skills-based.
If candidates still need a particular background to reach that stage, or the final decision defaults to experience, the underlying model has changed very little.
Genuine skills-based recruitment requires more than another stage in the selection process.
To make the transition, organisations need to rethink job design, assessment, interview structure, sourcing and hiring-manager capability.Skills-based hiring is not simply a different sourcing strategy; it requires a redesigned hiring process.
And employers still can’t find the skills they need
Skills shortages have not gone away. The Open University’s Business Barometer 2026, based on 1,500 UK business leaders, found that 57% of employers face them. Totaljobs found that 70% of recruiters struggle to find candidates with the right skills.
That creates a clear tension: organisations say they need skills and are increasingly recruiting for them, yet many still struggle to find them.
There are many reasons. Genuine shortages exist, particularly in specialist and fast-developing areas. But some organisations may also be making their available talent pool smaller than it needs to be.
If we want a particular skill but search only among people with a particular job title, industry background and number of years’ experience, are we really searching for the skill?
Or are we still searching for the profile traditionally associated with it?
AI makes that question much more urgent
AI adds another dimension. More than 50% of UK employers say it is already changing how they hire. Skills-based thinking becomes more attractive when businesses need capabilities too new to have established career paths.
Marketing roles may now require AI capabilities that were absent three years ago. Finance professionals may need automation and AI-enabled analysis; recruiters may need technology that did not exist when they entered the profession.
When the skill itself is new, demanding years of directly comparable experience becomes increasingly difficult.
AI creates another problem. Candidates can use generative AI to write CVs and applications and prepare for interviews, making some traditional recruitment signals less useful.
A polished application tells us less about whether someone can perform the job. That should push recruitment towards demonstration: work samples, simulations, structured interviews and technical exercises that let candidates show their capability rather than simply describe it.
Then there’s the entry-level problem
Perhaps the biggest test will come at the start of people’s careers. In June 2026, the UK Government and LinkedIn published A Snapshot of Entry-Level Hiring in the UK. UK hiring was 14% lower year-on-year in April, with declines in 30 of the 38 entry-level occupations examined.
Some of the steepest falls were in knowledge-based roles:
Accountant: -29% Graphic Designer: -28% Software Engineer: -27%
The researchers do not attribute those falls directly to AI. The wider labour market is weak and several factors are involved, but the analysis identifies another significant problem: skills mismatch.
Employers are favouring experienced candidates with the operational skills they need. The Open University’s 2026 Business Barometer found that 19% are reducing entry-level recruitment; among them, 42% said increased AI use was contributing.
This is where the skills-first conversation becomes particularly interesting. Employers increasingly say traditional credentials matter less, yet one of the easiest ways to prove a skill is still to show it has already been used professionally.
That leaves people entering the workforce facing recruitment’s oldest problem: how do you get experience without first being given the opportunity to gain it?
A genuinely skills-based model should help solve this by assessing whether someone has the capabilities to succeed and which remaining skills can realistically be developed. But only if employers are prepared to hire on that basis.
Perhaps that’s why we’re still building the infrastructure
In April 2026, Skills England completed the first UK Standard Skills Classification. The framework standardises how skills, knowledge and tasks are described across UK occupations.
For skills to become recruitment’s currency, employers, candidates, training providers and technology platforms need a common language – one we are still building.
The OECD’s 2026 work makes a similar point: a skills-first labour market requires more than recruitment policy changes. It needs better ways to identify, develop, validate and recognise skills throughout working lives.
We should therefore be careful about declaring the transition complete.
So… are we really hiring for skills yet?
Increasingly, yes – but not as completely as the conversation suggests. Wanting to hire for skills and building a process capable of it are very different things.
Removing a degree requirement or adding an assessment is easy. Identifying and consistently measuring the capabilities that predict success is harder.
Hiring someone unlike the person you would traditionally recruit requires confidence in the process you have built. Perhaps the real test is what happens when two people reach the end of the process.
One has the expected CV; the other has the skills. Who do you hire?
