Skills-based Hiring: Why DACH Is Still Hesitant – and When the Shift Will Arrive
At the start of the year, you could barely attend a recruiting conference without "Skills over Degrees" showing up on a slide somewhere. SHRM26 in the US, a speech from the Department of Labor explicitly calling for a break from degree requirements, plus Salesforce announcing it would hire a thousand "AI-native" graduates with zero classic degree filter. It felt like the beginning of something big. And now, half a year later? Pretty quiet. Barely any keynotes, barely any LinkedIn waves, barely any heated panel discussions.
So the interesting question is no longer "Is change coming?" but: is this fizzling out again, the way it has several times over the past decade? And put concretely: are grade averages, cover letters, and application photos still firmly in the saddle?
America is getting serious – at least on paper
The trigger for the spring euphoria was concrete. Henry Mack, a senior Department of Labor official, bluntly urged companies at SHRM26 to move away from degree requirements and instead build their own skills pipelines – developing talent themselves instead of just filtering it through a diploma. Shortly after, Salesforce followed up and announced its "Builder Program": a thousand new positions for graduates in engineering, product, and sales, with a single real entry ticket – fluency with AI tools, not a specific degree. For many TA leaders, that was proof the big players meant it this time.
Except: a single flagship program is not an industry trend; it's a headline. And that's exactly where the more interesting story begins – one that has gotten far less attention in recent months than the announcement itself.
The reality check: between announcement and hire
While the big names collected headlines, sobering numbers piled up in the background. Only 46 percent of employers plan to expand skills-based hiring at all in 2026, according to a recent survey. And even though "credential-free" recruiting has been the talk for years, 68 percent of employers still consider a degree important.
The odd part: only 37 percent believe universities actually equip graduates with the skills they need. So people no longer quite trust the degree – but they haven't found anything better to replace it with, either.
The gap between announcement and practice becomes even clearer with a number that should really be much better known: in 2025, 53 percent of employers had publicly stated they'd dropped degree requirements from job postings – a sharp jump from 30 percent the year before. Yet an analysis by Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute of exactly these companies came to a startling conclusion: only 0.14 percent of actual new hires reflected that newfound openness. Almost everyone still went with degree-holding candidates – the job posting had changed, the decision hadn't.
The reason is less stubbornness than a plain lack of tooling. 53 percent of employers openly admit they lack the means to verify skills claims on a résumé at all. For decades, a degree delivered three signals at once: that someone finished something, that some level of expertise exists, and that a recognized institution checked it.
A LinkedIn skill tag or a self-reported competency delivers exactly none of that. As long as this trust problem stays unsolved, the résumé with a degree remains the more convenient fallback – even if nobody would put that in a press release.
And in DACH? More snail's pace than breakthrough
Search for solid numbers specific to Germany, Switzerland, or Austria, and the well runs dry. A striking number of German-language articles on the topic claim sweeping shifts without a single statistic, case study, or source – which is itself telling. If a trend were really taking hold at scale, there would be numbers on it by now.
What does exist is data on the bigger picture, and it paints an interesting one: according to the World Economic Forum, re- and upskilling ranks as the top strategic HR priority for 85 percent of organizations, with skills-oriented talent acquisition in third place at 70 percent. At the same time, 63 percent of organizations name skills gaps as the biggest obstacle to transformation – a figure that has actually risen. And in second place among the roadblocks, at 46 percent, sits simply: resistance to change within the organization's own culture. Translated: people know they need skills-based thinking. They still struggle to let go of old habits.
Two structural quirks add to this in the DACH region.
The tight coupling of education paths and job titles in the dual system
A degree is culturally more deeply anchored here than in many Anglo-Saxon labor markets, where a career switch is more of a given.
The widespread risk aversion in HR departments
Whoever risks a bad hire is more likely to be asked "Why didn't you take the applicant with the top degree?" than "Why didn't you take the more unusual but skills-strong person?" In the end, that fuels the very same numbers you see in the US – just at a slower pace and with far less PR noise around it.
Certificate, grade, cover letter, application photo: what actually remains?
Now for the million-dollar question that decides every application in practice: do the classic selection criteria still count, or are they already history?
For the application photo, the answer is: surprisingly alive. Legally, it's long since not required in Germany, and the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) even prohibits discrimination based on appearance. Yet according to current surveys, 53 percent of HR managers still value a photo, and 19 percent reject applications without one outright. Especially in more conservative industries like banking, insurance, or traditional law firms, the rule is: no photo, fewer chances. Tech companies and international scale-ups take it more casually.
For the cover letter, at least a direction is emerging: away from mandatory, toward "it depends." Large corporations still frequently ask for one; smaller companies and technical roles increasingly skip it or explicitly mark it optional. Where a cover letter is explicitly required, you should still provide it – an automatic filter that screens out applications without one is still active in plenty of systems.
And school grades and references? Here you see the most honest picture in the whole debate: large, visible employers like IKEA and Deutsche Bahn have publicly moved away from grade averages as a selection criterion and put motivation and values front and center. At the same time, more than 60 percent of HR managers admit in surveys that personal details in a classic application at least partly influence their decision.
So the big, loud announcements are real – but they're exceptions, not the norm. The pattern is remarkably consistent with the American numbers: language changes first, then the job posting, and only right at the end, with a noticeable delay, the actual selection decision.
Where it actually gets stuck
The cause is rarely ill will, it's missing infrastructure. Validly checking skills costs time, money, and a system landscape that many recruiting teams simply don't have. Self-reported résumé claims or a LinkedIn badge are no substitute for a verified competency.
That's exactly why verifiable, digitally signed proof of competency – issued by recognized bodies rather than self-entered – is coming into focus as a possible missing puzzle piece. Until that infrastructure exists at scale, the grade average stays the convenient default, even if nobody loudly advocates for it anymore.
Where things are moving anyway
Amid the sobering numbers, there are genuine bright spots. IKEA and Deutsche Bahn show that training employers can deliberately push school grades into the background without the world ending. Some tech companies and scale-ups are piloting structured skills assessments for individual role families instead of overhauling all of recruiting at once. And with the first verifiable competency certificates, exactly the infrastructure whose absence was long seen as the biggest brake is slowly starting to emerge.
Is the topic fizzling out? More like: it's growing up
The honest answer to the opening question is: no, the topic isn't disappearing – it's just losing its hype character, because real change in selection processes never happens overnight, but through a thousand small decisions in a thousand recruiting conversations.
For talent acquisition teams in DACH, that means very practically: don't wait for the perfect, company-wide skills system – start with a structured assessment in one manageable role family and learn from it.
And, almost as an aside: if you receive an application without a photo or cover letter, you don't have to screen it out automatically – maybe that's already the first small step away from the old selection reflex.
Sources
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