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As talent leaders prepare for the incoming Trump Administration, and concerns rise about what that will mean for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts within their workforces, I suspect employers’ focus on skills-based hiring strategies will only continue to grow. The increasingly popular efforts—in which college degrees are eliminated from certain hiring requirements in lieu of specific skills people have obtained, whether through school, experience or other training—tend to have a de facto byproduct of improving diversity.
Opening such positions to those without degrees creates opportunities for underrepresented groups for whom the cost of college has been out of reach. Yet the focus remains on measurable skills rather than diversity “targets”—while also having a business benefit. Skills-based hiring “is a safe place to still navigate and focus on finding unique and diverse talent without actually implicitly saying this is a DE&I effort,” says Debbie Dyson, CEO of OneTen, a nonprofit aimed at helping organizations hire people without four-year degrees.
The problem? Too many companies remove degrees from their job descriptions—but then do little to actually hire those candidates. Forbes got an exclusive look from OneTen at a new case study of one company that has had success hiring non-degreed workers—and retaining them. For more on Cisco’s work with OneTen, check out our spotlight below, along with the latest headlines and insights on the future of work from Forbes.
HUMAN CAPITAL
On Friday, a federal judge in Texas blocked a rule from President Joe Biden’s administration that expanded overtime protections for workers by requiring employers to pay overtime premiums to more salaried people. The rule would have had the potential to make about 4 million more salaried workers eligible for overtime pay, the Labor Department said. The first phase of the rule went into effect on July 1 and raised the salary threshold from around $35,000 to almost $44,000, and the next increase—which would have gone into effect next year—would have raised it to nearly $59,000. The new threshold for overtime eligibility will now revert back to $35,500—though it’s unclear whether employers that have already implemented the rule at the lower level would reverse course.
The role of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, in the upcoming Trump Administration became clearer last week as President-elect Donald Trump tapped him to lead the meme-friendly “Department Of Government Efficiency.” Though exactly what the commission will do is still not entirely known, Musk called on X for something most hiring managers know is a tall order: “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
Silicon Valley immigration attorneys are fielding hundreds of inquiries from existing and potential clients, many from tech workers worried about their H-1B visas, which are granted to highly-skilled foreign-born workers, reports Forbes’ Amy Feldman. A big unknown for tech workers is whether Trump’s ties to Silicon Valley through Musk and Vice President-elect JD Vance will shield them from his anti-immigrant push, Feldman reports.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Enterprise AI startup Writer announced Tuesday it has raised $200 million in a Series C funding round co-led by AI-focused venture capital firm Radical Ventures, Iconiq Growth and Premji Invest, a private equity firm owned by billionaire Azim Premji. Founded in 2020, Writer is now valued at $1.9 billion with about $320 million in total funding, Forbes’ Rashi Shrivastava reports. She writes that Uber is using its version of Writer to generate responses to the most common customer support questions; Qualcomm’s legal teams use it to manage hundreds of trademarks and find market trends; and Dropbox leans on it to generate SEO blogs and proofread content. Now, the company is planning to build AI agents, which can access external tools and autonomously carry out actions.
One of generative AI’s most promising uses is its ability to write code. While some companies—like Microsoft-owned Github—offer “copilots” that use AI to make coding suggestions, other companies have created “agents” that carry out entire coding projects. Codeium, a buzzy AI startup that already makes its own copilot, recently unveiled a new tool called the Windsurf Editor that does a little of both, Forbes’ Richard Nieva reports.
GENDER + LEADERSHIP
Contributor Josie Cox reports on a major annual report published recently that shows the proportion of people who admit to feeling comfortable with a woman in leadership is on a downward trajectory across some of the world’s most advanced economies. This year’s Reykjavík Index, which measures perceptions of women and men as leaders across 23 economic sectors, has fallen to its lowest level since measuring began in 2018.
FACTS + COMMENT
A new report from the global recruiting and talent company Randstad finds that female workers often receive less priority in accessing AI tools on the job.
35%: The percentage of female respondents who said they have been offered access to AI by their employers, compared with 41% for men.
71%: The share of men in the report that said they have AI skills, compared with 29% of women
“We’re not just looking at a gender gap—we’re looking at systematically excluding half our workforce from the future of work itself.”—Julia McCoy, CEO of AI tech consultancy First Movers, told contributor Tor Constantino
WHAT’S NEXT: CISCO AND ONETEN ON SKILLS-BASED HIRING
“Skills-based hiring” has become all the rage for many employers, with grand announcements about removing college degree programs. But in many workplaces, its implementation isn’t making much progress: Earlier this year, a report from the Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit research organization that studies the workforce, found that while results vary widely by company, progress has been decidedly slow in the aggregate. In the report, researchers estimated that firms increased the share of workers hired without a degree last year by only about 3.5 percentage points.
All of which makes companies that can show real progress worth a look. Cisco, the tech infrastructure giant, reports that 30% of its “emerging talent” (or entry-level) jobs were filled by people who don’t have degrees in 2023. Meanwhile, 42% of its business units hired employees without a bachelor’s degree.
How did Cisco do it? Part of the answer comes from an initiative the company has with OneTen, a nonprofit that works with corporations to help hire workers without degrees into “family-sustaining jobs.” In a new OneTen case study shared exclusively with Forbes, the organization outlined key steps Cisco took to make progress.
“The uniqueness, I think, of what [Cisco] did is they did this more intentionally than I’ve seen others do,” says Debbie Dyson, CEO of OneTen.
One key tactic? It’s easy for hiring managers to be risk-averse, worried that the non-degree candidate they’re considering won’t work out and that they will have wasted budget on an ineffective hire. And so, Cisco removed that concern, creating a centralized budget that individual business units could tap to pay for the non-degreed hires they made via OneTen.
“It de-risks it,” says Kelly Jones, Cisco’s chief people officer. “For [managers] who might be a little bit concerned about whether or not this is going to work—in areas that we really feel strongly that it would—it de-risks the decision.”
Then, because retention has been strong—some 96% of OneTen hires were still on board a year later, and promotion levels are at or above the general employee population— “you get a comfortableness with it from leaders who have done it,” Jones says. “You don’t have to continue to centrally fund it because they’ve seen that it works.”
Another key factor, Jones says, has been making sure managers on the teams hiring non-degreed workers are ready for it. “It took a little bit of education,” says Jones. “People are used to what they’re doing and there’s nothing so emotional as someone who has a connection to the place they went to college.” Those managers also need to be prepared that there will be some skills which, for those who didn’t go to college, may need more time to develop, such as practice on team-based work. To help, Cisco extended its orientation and training period for these new hires to nearly three weeks, and leaned on OneTen to help develop those skills.
Even calendars matter when it comes to getting organizations to think about making skills-based hiring efforts more effective. Cisco has been getting away from timing its hiring to the school calendar year. “[Leaders are] used to hiring from universities on an annual system,” says Jones. “[We’re] going to those leaders and saying, ‘we’d like to carve out a percentage of these requisitions that you normally reserve for college hires, and we’d like to use them in our rising talent program.’”
OneTen’s case study of Cisco’s efforts mentions a range of other practices that have helped, such as enlisting well-placed “ambassadors” or “champions” to get people on board and working with an ecosystem of outside partners, says OneTen’s Dyson. “They actually instituted the change management practice of ensuring that the company understood the intention of this skills-first approach.”
While the program helped with DEI, it also had business benefits. “Skills-based hiring did help us increase our diversity,” Jones said, calling it just “one of the spokes in the wheel” around efforts on inclusion and belonging. “But I would say it was one of the things. It’s also really good for business, because what we found with these hires is you have higher retention rates. There’s a stickiness with these hires that come in through these programs.”
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
Why bosses admit to faking ‘fauductivity’ more than their employees
‘Hushed holidays’ are the new 2024 workplace trend
Why neurodivergent employees are your company’s new superpower
VIDEO
QUIZ
Which of the following officials are considered potential contenders for Trump’s Department of Labor position, according to a report by Bloomberg Law?
- Andrew Puzder, former CKE Restaurants Holdings Inc. CEO
- Patrick Pizzella, former deputy secretary of labor during the first Trump Administration
- Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management
- All of the above
Check out whether you got the answer right here.
