Removing degree requirements is the standard advice for widening a hiring funnel. It is good advice. But on its own it does very little.
The research on that is uncomfortable.
If you want to get more applicants who can actually do the job, the posting is only the first half of the work.
What removing degree requirements actually changes
The Burning Glass Institute and the Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work studied what happened at firms that dropped degree requirements. Their report, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice, covered 11,300 roles at large employers.
The result was small. Removing the requirement raised the share of hires without a bachelor’s degree by about 3.5 percentage points. Scaled across the economy, the researchers found the shift benefited fewer than 1 in 700 hires.
Roughly 45% of the firms changed in name only. The line came out of the posting, and hiring behaviour did not move at all.
But the same study found the opposite too. About 37% of firms did change their mechanics, and those employers raised their share of hires without degrees by close to 20%. So the approach works. It just does not work by editing a posting.
Meanwhile the wider trend has reversed. Indeed Hiring Lab reported that about 19.3% of US postings still asked for a degree as of November 2025. That share has been climbing since early 2024.
Why the posting change does not stick
The reason is simple. A degree requirement is not really a requirement, it is a shortcut for screening.
So when you remove it and put nothing in its place, whoever reviews applications falls back on instinct. And instinct matches on the same signals anyway. The school, the polish of the resume, the familiar career path.
You widened the top of the funnel and left the filter untouched. More people apply. The same people get hired. And the extra applications become work rather than opportunity.
What to remove from your posting
The list below still matters if you want to get more applicants worth reviewing. Each item narrows your pool without predicting performance.
- Degree requirements for roles where the work does not need one
- Years of experience stated as a hard minimum rather than a rough guide
- Unpaid experience such as internships, which filters on who could afford to work for free
- Canadian experience requirements, which Ontario now prohibits in publicly advertised postings
- Long qualification lists where most items are nice to have
Splitting requirements into must have and nice to have is worth the 10 minutes. Many strong candidates will not apply unless they meet every line.
What to put in its place
Most employers skip this step. It is also the one that decides whether you get more applicants or better hires.
Decide what the role actually demands before the applications arrive. For a front line position that usually means behaviour. Staying steady under pressure. Taking correction without getting defensive. Asking early instead of guessing.
Then screen everyone against that, the same way. A written standard is what stops a reviewer falling back on the degree you told them to ignore. We covered how to build one in our piece on building a candidate persona.
Why more applicants can make things worse
Widening the funnel raises volume immediately. Your capacity to review does not move at all.
So the queue grows. Response times stretch. And the strongest candidates leave first, because they have the most options. You end up with a bigger pool and fewer good hires.
Usually this shows up as a scheduling problem. That is why interview capacity is the real constraint for teams hiring at volume.
So sequence it properly. Fix what happens after someone applies, then go after more applicants. Doing it the other way round makes the leak bigger.
How Workwolf® handles both halves
Workwolf® runs the hiring process for you, which means opening the funnel does not land on your team as extra work.
We write and post the role. Then we screen every applicant against a benchmark built from your own strong performers. Packfinder, our behavioural assessment, does that profiling. We built it with Self Management Group, who report more than 30 million completions. That volume is what lets it compare someone against real patterns rather than a small sample.
Because our team applies the benchmark, it does not quietly revert to degree matching in a busy month. That is the difference between removing a requirement and changing who you hire.
Where to start
Open your last posting and count the requirements. Then ask one question of each. Would your best current employee in that role have met it when they applied?
Anything they would have failed is a filter you should question. And whatever you remove, decide now what replaces it.
Book a call with our team. We will look at what your postings screen for today and what it costs you.
