As a business leader, you may have star employees you cherish but are reluctant to promote despite knowing they’d be perfect for open positions—if only they had a bachelor’s degree.
Because of such reluctance, businesses miss out on valuable talent, said LaFawn Davis, chief people and sustainability officer at hiring platform Indeed. A bachelor’s degree is a great way to gain skills, but it is “not the only way to gain skills,” Davis said last week at Coins2Day’s Workplace Innovation Summit.
Employers should be more open, she said, to hiring and advancing candidates who are skilled through alternative routes (STARs). That might include training programs, military experience, community college, partial college completion, or on-the-job experience.
Under-leveraged talent
At Indeed, “we really have to think about the workforce and helping employers find the talent that you need,” Davis said. “We know that your talent pool will expand over two and a half times if you focus on skills versus things like pedigree.”
Companies can gain a major advantage by “hiring for performance, not for pedigree,” agreed Byron Auguste, CEO and cofounder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit focused on catalyzing economic mobility.
“You’re going to get better results—especially if you start early—because the pool of talent that is under-leveraged is really kind of unbelievable right now,” said Auguste, who joined Davis onstage. “There’s a huge talent arbitrage opportunity for those who are ready to get started.”
Tweaking job postings
More than 70 million Americans are STARs, according to Auguste’s organization. It helped launch the “Tear the Paper Ceiling” campaign in 2022 to raise awareness and change behavior among employers, urging them to drop degree requirements in job listings for positions where the right skills suffice.
According to the initiative’s 2025 “State of the Paper Ceiling” report, among employers who had seen the campaign, “83% stated they are more likely to hire people without bachelor’s degrees than they were 2-3 years ago (compared to 68% of employers who had not seen it).”
In addition to hiring STARs, companies would do well to promote them into senior roles, Auguste said. If you don’t, he warned, they might leave your company and end up competing against you—potentially as CEO of their own business.
“They say, ‘if my employer won’t recognize what I bring to the table, let my customers decide,’” he said. “So I think a lot of employers, by taking this approach, are honestly creating their own competition, whereas they could be just really embracing the kind of innovation that people who are coming from a different background really have to bring.”