Do Recruiters Place Too Much Emphasis on Degrees When Hiring?
This is a contentious debate, but there is definitely more than a grain of truth in the idea that employers are turning up the heat in terms of education requirements for candidates, when arguably the jobs themselves have not become harder. For example, there is growing evidence that employers are raising the stakes and increasing candidates skill requirements with respect to whether the candidate holds a degree or not. For example, in the past five years, there has been a 175 percent jump in the number of online job ads for dental lab technicians requiring a college degree. There have been similar increases in other areas such as: claims adjusters, photographers, technicians, buying and selling of farm equipment, and cargo and freight agents.
Now, many employers may seek to justify this degree inflation (as it has been termed)—or simply asking for degrees in jobs which people have done for years successfully without degrees—as they suggest that degree graduates are more career focused. It could be that they have found from their own studies that employees need the degree to actually do the job or those with a degree perform better, although I have not seen many studies on this area.
What is interesting, however, is that if you take into account the views of employees, as shown in a Gallup survey, you will find that most of them believe that the job they do doesn’t actually require a degree. Currently, 57 percent don’t believe that their job requires a degree and 4 in 10 working college graduates feel the same way. This suggests to me that degree inflation could be going on and too much emphasis is being placed on whether or not an applicant has a degree when assessing job suitability.
It would appear that many employers are using graduate degrees as an assessment shortcut and they are assuming that graduates have specific qualities, such as career focus, aptitude and general capability, just because they have a degree written on their CV. Those lacking a degree are being overlooked even though they may be just as career focused, smart and able. This is a questionable strategy, as by following this kind of recruiting mantra employers might have overlooked talented individuals. For example, Steve Jobs did not have a college degree (dropped out of Reed College), Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Michael Dell and David Geffen. None of these business success stories completed college degrees.
Add to this a study from the University of Hampshire, based on 15,000 aggregated years of CEO experience and over 2,600 cases of CEO turnover between 1992 and 2007, which found that CEOs with prestigious college degrees were no better at delivering long-term performance than other CEOs. And they suggest that employers should use caution, “in placing too much emphasis on an individual’s education when trying to assess their ability to lead the company and maximize shareholder value.”
So, in conclusion, it is my belief that employers should be placing less emphasis on college degrees in the hiring process (where appropriate) and more emphasis on identifying the key skills and qualities required to do the job and assessing whether or not the candidate actually has these skills, rather than assuming they have them purely based on them having a college degree.