Un-breaking hiring, with Opportunity@Work's Papia Debroy.
What hiring inequalities does this generation face that others do not?
I think skills-first hiring is in an interesting space as we enter 2026.
For the uninitiated, “skills-first hiring” is when an employer focuses their hiring process on finding workers with provable skills to do the job, regardless of how they got them. It allows employers to avoid missing talent that gets screened-out by systems looking for the right pieces of paper, not actual skills. It seems to be a solid fix for some of the developing issues in the labor market, including the need for more talent in industries with aging talent, such as manufacturing, and the necessity of finding job fits for people who lose jobs due to AI bullishness by big companies.
Yet, employers have struggled to move beyond stripping off degree requirements into actually hiring people. Current hiring practices aren’t really finding the talent employers need, but employers seem reluctant to change. I have talked with a few employers this year—including in sectors noisy about talent shortages—who remain resistant to the idea that any worker who’s not a “perfect” fit isn’t able to do the job and isn’t worth the investment. At the same time, though, I have heard incredibly encouraging assessments and results in the public sector, which has probably done the most dedicated work in adopting skills-first practices despite a mess of complicated hiring requirements to meet.
To better understand what’s next, I talked with my friend Papia Debroy, chief impact officer of Opportunity@Work, an early leader and advocate for skills-first hiring. Even if you don’t know O@W, you probably know their work, such as the ubiquitous “Tear the Paper Ceiling” campaign with the Ad Council, which urges employers to remove unneeded degree requirements that prevent the hiring of workers O@W tags as “STARs” (Skilled Through Alternative Routes).
Below, we talk about the strategies Papia sees as helping employers transition to more skills-first approaches, successes in the public sector, and the inequality this generation of workers is experiencing that others did not.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nick Beadle: I feel like I have spent most of this year on this idea that hiring is broken in a lot of places. Obviously, Opportunity@Work has been in the trenches on these issues for a while. From your perspective, what does it take to get employers to re-evaluate how they hire and catch that talent?
Papia Debroy: To me, as I think about why hiring is broken in the United States, if you look at the 140 million or so of us that are active in the labor force over the age of 25, about 60 million or so have a bachelor’s degree or a higher level of educational attainment. But there are more than 70 million workers today who are skilled through alternative routes to the bachelor’s degree. That means most of the American workforce does not have a bachelor’s degree—yet most middle-wage jobs still screen as if they do.
These workers are gaining incredibly valuable skills through community college, through pathways like military service [and] volunteer service. Part of what I think is so critical to understand is if we were to give credit to everyone for the skills that they’re bringing into their jobs every day, we actually find that more than 30 million workers in the United States have skills to make transitions into jobs that pay significantly more. So to me, that’s the crux of the problem statement: there’s so much untapped potential that employers aren’t seeing.
Nick: Where are the breakdowns happening in terms of why employers aren’t catching talent? Obviously, skills-first hiring has been associated a lot with getting rid of degree requirements, but I definitely know from talking to you in the past that it’s not just about degree requirements.
Papia: We tried to capture the concept you’re getting at there with this idea of the Paper Ceiling, right? It’s degree screens like you named, but it’s also biased algorithms and stereotypes and exclusive professional networking and barriers. [These] block an opportunity for a worker to actually experience upward mobility. And I think the impact of that Paper Ceiling is so dire today.
If you go back 30 years and track the STAR who entered the workforce and the bachelor’s degree candidate who entered the workforce [at the same time], the bachelor’s degree candidate was earning more and that has historically been the case.
But if you track the STAR for the next 30 years of their career, what you find is 30 years into work, the STAR is still not earning what the bachelor’s degree candidate was earning on day one.
That inequality is new. It’s new to this generation. For the first time, a generation of workers can work an entire career and still not catch up to where degree-holders started. We find that to be a stunning outcome for workers who are bringing valuable skills to work every day and aren’t being able to translate their learnings and their skills into earnings.
Nick: What do we do about closing that gap?
Papia: I think there are interventions on both the demand side and the supply side that are necessary. I think what’s interesting to look at from a data perspective is if you understand the trajectory of opportunity for STAR across the last 20 years, there was kind of a precipitous decline in opportunity.
We’ve actually started to see how STARs are experiencing more opportunity in the last five years. I think there’s now a question for us at this current moment of can we actually start to look past the degree and start to see skills more and actually reverse this trajectory that STARs have experienced in the labor market? In the next five years alone, employers will be making more than 60 million hiring decisions about who they bring in to gateway and destination jobs.
If we were to support access for STARs into those roles, suddenly you have a different-looking labor market, right? One that is more inclusive, that is actually valuing skills and supporting the mobility of the American workforce.
Nick: I’ve talked to employers in fields that are in demand and they say, “Hey, this is our reluctance in terms of hiring people who don’t have the perfect skillset. We don’t think they’re able to do the job today.” How do you engage with that?
Papia: The truth is I have a lot of empathy for employers. Many of them are receiving in some instances hundreds, thousands of applications for a job and it is really hard to to understand, “Well, who does have the skills to actually do this incredibly difficult job I need to have filled and I get to make x number of hires per year? They’re all high stakes [decisions]. I really want to make sure I’m bringing in excellent talent and I want them to have all the skills on day one.”
We deploy a lot of different methods to [identify skills and fit] across employers. We put folks through interviewing processes and we run skills-based interviews, but we also deploy methods like internships-to-hire and contract-to-hire, which are ways that actually allow us to understand if someone actually brings the skills into the role that are necessary [to do it].
Suddenly, you open the aperture quite a bit and you can actually see that there are many jobs that have transferable skills, and there are many ways to think about building a more inclusive skilled talent workforce within your own organization. Some of the employers that have started down that path and that journey, they’re doing things a little bit differently than they had when they weren’t deploying those methods, but they have found a lot of success in them.
Nick: Are there any jobs that when you work with employers that they are surprised in terms of how transferable the skills are?
Papia: If you study how workers make transitions in the U.S. labor market, all of us, regardless of degree attainment, make transitions where we use our skills from our previous job and transfer them into the newer job. If you study those for STARs what you find is when they experience upward mobility they move to a subset of jobs that we call “gateway and destination jobs.”
These are jobs that allow workers to move from lower-wage occupations into middle- and high-wage occupations and experience wage mobility. What we see across those pathways is STARs do not experience those pathways equitably. Black and Hispanic STARs are less likely to make those upwardly mobile transitions. Alongside women, when they do make those transitions, they don’t earn the same wages.
But we care a lot about these gateway and destination jobs because they’re exactly the jobs that have offered STARs mobility historically in the United States. And so to answer your question, Nick, part of what becomes interesting is to study what are those gateway and destination jobs and how are STARs actually fairing in those precise jobs? If you go back to the year 2000 and you look at all gateway and destination jobs in the U.S. labor market, some 200 of them, what you find is that STARs made up more than half the workers in those jobs. So these are skills-based pathways that lead to these jobs. STARs were [represented as] more than 50 percent of [all] workers in those jobs.
Then you track the labor market for the next 20 years, and what you find is that gateway and destination jobs grew proportionally to the overall labor market. But even though STARs made up more than 50 percent of those jobs in the year 2000, they’ve gained access to less than 10 percent of those jobs. They’ve lost access to millions of job opportunities.
The types of jobs that we’re talking about are jobs like diagnostic technician, sales representative, customer service representative, computer support specialist, HR assistant. These are jobs that we knew historically you could gain skills and transfer those skills into higher-wage opportunities. These are precisely the jobs that are starting to be stripped away from this population. Not because the skills disappeared but because the hiring signals changed.
Nick: Where I feel like I hear the most promising things in skills-first hiring is in the public sector. Things like, “Oh my God, we got talent that we never would have gotten before we took off degree requirements.”
Papia: The state of Maryland issued an executive order in 2022 to remove degree requirements for their state roles. Since that time in 2022, there are now 32 states that have followed with either executive orders or legislative action. It’s been extraordinary to see some of the results.
[Our team] was analyzing some data from states where we’re able to get internal advancement data. We found that over the course of last year, STARs actually experienced a 7 percent gain in advancement, right. They’re seeing real results and outcomes as a result of the hard work.
Nick: Wrapping up, this is definitely an unsettled time in workforce. Where do you see skills-first hiring being a year from now, two years from now?
Papia: I think as a field we’ve generated a deeper understanding of the proof of concept in many respects. I think the opportunity in front of us right now, especially as we start to see impacts from AI on the labor market, is really to scale [more opportunity for more workers] at this moment through recognition of skills in the American workforce.
I think we’ll be further in that journey a year or two from now because I do see this as a way to truly elevate opportunity for so much of the skilled workforce in America right now that it isn’t getting the chance to show what they can do to employers. So I feel very hopeful.
Card subject to change.
Thanks to Papia for joining me this week. I think this conversation outlined so much of what’s happening in the labor market and stuff I’m thinking hard about for 2026.
Speaking of which, this will be the last Tuesday edition of JOBS THAT WORK until January as I take some time off to rest, relax, and prevent an organized uprising from my two velociraptors kids over… let’s say, cookies. Before the break, I wanted to tell you how grateful I am to the readers of this newsletter. JTW regularly charts in the top business newsletters on Substack thanks in no small part to the evangelism of my readers. Thank you so much, and I’m looking forward to sharing all the things I have planned for next year.
It’s not next year yet, though. This week’s edition of THE MONEY will again find you on Thursday, when I plan on offering you some thoughts on where the Workforce Pell rulemaking hearings landed. I’ll also update you on the grants I’m keeping an eye out for as the year closes, and there probably will be a reason to gesture at Congress and groan in a way that summons the spirits of the past and the future.
