Skills-Based Hiring: How to Make It Work for Tech Roles

Most tech job postings still list an academic degree as a requirement. In practice, many employers treat it as a formality and hire on other signals instead. The real question is what employers use instead of a degree, and whether it truly predicts who will perform well.

This piece is for CIOs, Heads of Digital Transformation, and senior HR leaders hiring for cloud, data, and engineering roles. If your shortlists keep looking the same, the reason may be the filter you rely on once academic qualification stops mattering.

Why are employers moving away from degree requirements?

In Singapore, the shift has already happened at scale. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) found that academic qualifications were not the main hiring factor for 79.6% of vacancies in 2025.

Four in five employers now say a degree is not what decides the hire. For tech roles, this makes sense. A cloud certification earned last year says more about current ability than a degree earned a decade ago. Employers who have made the switch also report faster hiring and a wider range of candidates to choose from.

That raises a simple question: if the degree doesn’t decide who gets hired, what does?

What replaces the degree in the hiring decision?

For most employers, experience takes precedence, especially in tech, where tools, platforms and hardware change constantly. These employers require someone who keeps with those changes and constantly adapts to them. MOM’s survey of the vacancy trends in 2025 also indicated that relevant experience ranks as one of the top two hiring factors for around seven in ten vacancies, with skills and abilities second.

The problem is how that adaptability gets measured. Years of experience are easy to read on a CV, so they become a shortcut. Yet experience mostly shows where someone has worked and for how long. It says far less about whether they can handle the tools and problems the role involves today.

Picture a manufacturer hiring a data engineer. The posting may list a degree, but the hiring manager is open to candidates without one. The recruiter, however, still screens for three years at a recognisable firm. As a result, a self-taught engineer who has built strong data pipelines never reaches the interview stage. On paper, the company hires on skills, but in practice experience decides who gets through.

Research from the United States shows how common this is. Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute studied large employers that removed degree requirements from their job postings. For every 700 people these companies hired, fewer than one was someone without a degree who would have been turned away under the old rules. In other words, the job ads changed, but the way candidates were screened largely stayed the same.

Why are some tech roles still hard to fill?

Overall, hiring in Singapore has become easier. Long-unfilled vacancies are now at less than half their 2015 level. However, employers still face difficulty in hiring for specialised roles such as software development, data science, and systems programming.

Employers name two main reasons: candidates lack specialised skills, or they lack enough work experience. Nearly three in four of these hard-to-fill roles also ask for two or more years of experience.

These two reasons are closely linked. An experience requirement limits the pool to people who have already done the job somewhere else. In a specialised field, that pool is small, and every employer is drawing from it at once. MOM’s report encourages employers to move beyond this “plug-and-play” approach. Testing what candidates can actually do brings in capable people who built their skills through a different route.

Which hiring methods actually predict job performance?

In 2022, a team led by Paul Sackett reviewed decades of studies on how well different hiring methods predict performance on the job. Structured interviews came out on top.

A structured interview asks every candidate the same job-related questions. Each answer is scored against the same written criteria. The research found that this format is more than twice as good at predicting performance as a free-flowing conversation.

The reason is that in an unstructured interview, each candidate gets different questions, and the interviewer’s impression does most of the work. Rapport, confidence, or shared background can easily outweigh ability. Structure removes that noise, so the hour spent with a candidate produces a far more reliable answer to the ability question.

Job knowledge tests and work samples also rank highly. Both ask the candidate to show what they know, or to complete a small piece of real work. That is what skills-based hiring was always meant to be.

How can enterprises change from experience to skill-based hiring?

The first step is to be honest about what is really doing the screening. If years of experience have replaced the degree, decide which experience the role actually needs. A data engineer may need hands-on work with a specific cloud platform, but not necessarily three years at a well-known firm.

From there, define the handful of tasks the new hire must deliver in their first six months, and build interview questions around those tasks. Every candidate should answer the same questions, and every answer should be scored against the same rubric, so decisions rest on ability rather than impression. For technical roles, a short work sample that mirrors the real job shows how someone performs on today’s tools, which is the adaptability employers are looking for. Finally, track how each hire performs once they start, so the hiring process gets sharper with every round.

All of this takes more effort than relaxing a degree requirement. It is also the part that changes who actually gets hired.

Where does nSearch fit?

nSearch Global works on the roles that remain hardest to fill. That includes cloud engineers, data engineers, cybersecurity specialists, DevSecOps engineers, and AI/ML practitioners across Singapore, Malaysia, the UAE, Thailand, and India.

Through Staff Augmentation, enterprises can bring in specialists for a defined scope while their internal hiring process catches up. Through Managed Services, they can hand over ongoing delivery entirely. Either way, critical projects keep moving while the skills gap is being closed.

Contact us at nsearchglobal.com/contact.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is skills-based hiring?
Skills-based hiring means choosing candidates based on their proven ability to do the job, rather than on formal qualifications. In practice, it relies on job-specific assessments such as structured interviews, job knowledge tests and work samples. Removing a degree requirement from a job posting is only the first step.

Does removing degree requirements improve tech hiring?
On its own, rarely. Research from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found that most employers who dropped degree requirements made little change to who they actually hired. Hiring improves when employers replace the degree with a direct test of skills.

Why is skills-based hiring not working for many companies?
Most companies remove the degree filter and quietly replace it with an experience filter. Experience is easy to read on a CV, but it shows where someone has worked rather than what they can do now. As a result, the candidate pool stays largely the same.

What is the most accurate way to assess technical candidates?
Structured interviews are the strongest single predictor of job performance, according to a 2022 review published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Every candidate answers the same job-related questions, scored against the same criteria. Adding a short work sample gives an even clearer picture.

How common is skills-based hiring in Singapore?
Very common on paper. Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower found that most employers no longer treat academic qualifications as the main hiring factor. Specialised tech roles remain harder to fill, largely because many employers still screen heavily on years of experience.

Which tech roles are hardest to fill in Singapore?
Software developers, data scientists and applications and systems programmers are among the specialised roles most often left unfilled for long periods. Employers most often point to gaps in specialised skills and relevant work experience.