Gen Z Could Wave Goodbye To Résumés. Most Companies Have Switched To Skills-Based Hiring
Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist
TestGorilla’s State of Skills-Based Hiring 2025 surveyed 1,084 people involved in hiring in the US and UK in April 2025, and 85% said they used skills-based hiring. Yet 67% of the same respondents still used résumés.
The iCIMS June 2025 Workforce Report found that 95% of surveyed recruiters used skills-based practices, but only 28% ranked skills as the leading factor for entry-level candidates, behind experience at 37% and education at 34%. The shift is real, but it remains mostly additive.
Skills-Based Hiring Still Includes Résumés
In TestGorilla’s April 2025 cross-sectional survey, 76% of respondents used skills tests while 67% used résumés, and participants could use several selection tools within the same process. Because TestGorilla surveyed hiring participants rather than conducting a census of companies, its headline adoption figure does not mean résumés have disappeared.
At entry level, the iCIMS June 2025 survey found that 46% of talent-acquisition professionals used scorecards or rubrics to evaluate skills, although recruiters collectively gave greater weight to experience and education. The iCIMS report did not publish the recruiter sample size, limiting how confidently those percentages can be generalized.
Gen Z respondents appeared open to another format. In iCIMS’ one-day online survey of 178 Gen Z job seekers on May 29, 2025, 44% viewed a skills test or simulation positively, while 6% found the approach frustrating and preferred relying on résumés. That small sample reflects those respondents, rather than an entire generation.
Policy Changes Rarely Transform Hiring Alone
A February 2024 Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School study linked Lightcast job postings with online career histories from more than 65 million US workers. It tracked 11,300 employer-and-occupation combinations at large organizations for at least one year before and after degree requirements disappeared.
The study found an average 3.5-percentage-point increase in hires without bachelor’s degrees in affected roles. Because only 3.6% of roles removed degree requirements, the researchers estimated a system-wide increase of 0.14 percentage points, or approximately 97,000 additional workers among 77 million annual hires, fewer than one in every 700.
Implementation varied sharply. The February 2024 study’s analysis classified 37% of participating firms as leaders producing sustained change, while 45% showed no meaningful hiring change and 18% initially progressed before returning to previous patterns.
The analysis was observational, relied partly on workers’ online career histories and treated degree-requirement removal as a central marker of skills-based hiring, so it cannot establish that policy changes caused the outcomes. Still, the same study found that workers without degrees at leading organizations had retention rates 10 percentage points higher than colleagues with degrees and received a mean salary increase of 25% when entering formerly degree-gated roles.
The Burning Glass Institute’s January 2026 Skillability Index, combining job postings with more than 65 million US career histories, developed measures for more than 30,000 companies across 255 industries and nearly 1,000 occupations. Only 965 companies had complete information across every metric, and performance could differ across advertising, hiring and internal advancement within the same organization.
Skills Searches Expand Gen Z’s Potential Reach
The LinkedIn Economic Graph Research Institute’s March 2025 report, using member data through January 2025, modeled talent pools that included workers whose recent occupations shared at least 50% of a target job’s leading skills and had demonstrated transitions into that role.
LinkedIn estimated that the median potential talent pool for US Gen Z workers was 17.6 times as large as one limited to equivalent previous job titles, compared with 15.7 times for millennials and 15.3 times for Gen X. These figures represent potential reach, not interviews or offers.
LinkedIn’s model included active members with valid skills information regardless of whether they were seeking work, while skills could be listed or inferred from job titles and fields of study. It also excluded education and other selection signals to isolate skills-based searching.
Applicants Need Both Credentials And Proof
Deleting the résumé would be premature. A stronger approach is to turn it into a compact index of evidence, connecting important skills to projects, results, work samples or other concrete demonstrations while retaining the experience and education information recruiters still use.
Applicants should also expect role-specific tests, simulations, structured interviews and portfolio reviews to supplement the original application rather than shorten the process. For now, the most practical strategy is to prepare both a résumé that clears conventional screening and credible evidence of skills that can influence the eventual hiring decision.
