When Ford CEO Jim Farley told CNN this summer that the idea that every kid needs a four-year degree is “total bologna,” it got a lot of attention. It also struck a nerve, because plenty of business leaders quietly agree with him. They just haven’t changed how their own companies hire.
That gap, between what CEOs say about skills and what their hiring teams actually do, is one of the most expensive blind spots in American business right now.
The shortage is real, and it isn’t going away
Start with the numbers. According to the State of America’s Skilled Trades report, covered by Fortune in September, US employers need to fill about 1.7 million skilled-trades openings every year through 2035. Formal training routes are preparing roughly 55 workers for every 100 the country needs. And nearly a quarter of today’s trades workers are 55 or older, compared with just 11% under 25.
Farley has put his own figure on it, saying there are around 400,000 openings for automotive technicians alone, with pay ranging from about $50,000 at entry level to $150,000. Those aren’t fallback jobs. They’re solid, well-paid careers that many companies struggle to fill.
Dropping the degree isn’t the same as hiring differently
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Over the past few years, many big employers have announced that they’re removing degree requirements from job ads. It made for good headlines. But a 2024 study by Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute found that, in practice, the change made a real difference to fewer than 1 in 700 hires.
The researchers sorted companies into groups. About 45% of the firms that dropped degree requirements were hiring “in name only.” They changed the wording of the ad, but they kept hiring the same kind of people. Another fifth briefly opened up, then slid back.
Why? Because the old habits sit further down the process. A recruiter still filters résumés by college. A hiring manager still asks, “Where did you study?” The interview is still built around credentials rather than ability.
The companies doing it properly are seeing results
The same study found something every CEO should pay attention to. At the firms that genuinely hired for skills, workers without degrees stayed longer. Their retention rate was 10 percentage points higher than their degree-holding colleagues. Those workers also saw an average salary jump of 25% when they moved into roles that used to require a degree.
Lower turnover and a wider talent pool aren’t HR wins. They’re business wins.
What actually moves the needle
If you lead a company and want skills-based hiring to be more than a press release, a few changes matter most:
- Rewrite the job, not just the ad. Describe the work someone will actually do, then decide what skills that needs. A useful exercise is to read your postings next to others. Browse engineering jobs on GetUSAJob and, for each requirement you see, ask whether it describes the work or just the résumé people expect.
- Retrain the people who hire. Hiring managers need to be shown how to assess ability through work samples, practical tests and structured interviews.
- Build your own pipeline. Apprenticeships and in-house training, like the training centers Ford runs, create talent instead of fighting over it.
- Look beyond the trades. The same thinking applies to office roles. Many bookkeeping, analyst and operations jobs can be learned on the job, and comparing your postings with finance and accounting openings across the US can show where your requirements are tighter than the market’s.
- Measure who you actually hire. If the share of non-degree hires hasn’t changed, your policy hasn’t either.
Why the gap costs companies talent
The talent shortage won’t be solved by better slogans. It will be solved by companies that are willing to judge people on what they can do, and then build hiring processes that reflect it. The CEOs who get this right won’t just fill more roles. They’ll keep their people longer and build workforces their competitors can’t easily copy.
