Entrepreneurs, hire employees with no college degree, look for skills and certifications.

The U.S. economy is in a very interesting place right now. Amidst all the issues of inflation, interest rates and politics, the U.S. economic engine just keeps right on going. And that’s potentially a problem for startups in finding good talent. Sure, there has been some ‘right-sizing layoffs’ at major firms but that’s more due to over hiring in the past three years versus the economy. Even with right sizing, the competition for jobs is high. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics for April, 2023, there are 10.1 million open job listings in the USA. So where will future talent come from to fill these jobs? Probably not from college graduates.

The number of actual college attendees and graduates has been falling steadily now for several years. In the fall of 2022, about 17.9 million students were enrolled in degree-granting colleges and universities in the U.S. This is down from 21 million in 2010. Meanwhile the cost of a college education has risen for four years ranging from $105,000 for public in state universities to $220,000 for private universities. What’s interesting is a report from the Burning Glass Institutestating that the percentage of jobs requiring a college degree fell from 51% in 2017 to 44% percent in 2021. And according to Gallup, the percentage of U.S. adults ages 18 to 29 who view college education as ‘very important’ dropped from 74% to 41% in just the past six years. But there is another important trend rising, and that is, the number of companies not requiring a college degree.

Companies, especially those in technology, have been trying upskilling, reskilling, and quicker background checks to get enough of the talent they need amid labor challenges. Now they’re trying something else: requiring no college degree. And this list of companies is not only impressive, it is continuing to grow. Companies that are now hiring without a degree include IBM, Accenture, Okta, Dell, Bank of America, Google, Tesla, Delta Airlines, Apple, Costco, Whole Foods, Hilton and Starbucks. In place of four-year-degree requirements, many companies are instead focusing on certifications and skills-based (work experience/knowledge) hiring to widen the talent pool.

So, with no college degree, what do you look for in potential employees for your startup? Well, let’s start with the five insights listed below.

Communication skills. It’s really hard to acquire good communication skills, unless, you well, communicate often. Previous jobs in hospitality and service, tourism and retail as well as other customer facing jobs, teach real world skills in how to communicate, negotiate and handle customers. There are a lot of things companies can train people on but communication is hard to teach on the job in real time.

Adaptability. IBM surveys the top 1,500 CEO’s every year and asks them to list in priority order, the top attributes new employees have to have to be successful in their company. Citing the rapid pace of change, for 2022, they picked as their number attribute, creativity. Why? They cited that the problem-solving capability of a new employee was critical, due once again to the pace of change and the competitive marketplace. Finding someone to add to a startup who can be adaptable is critical, as every day in a startup is like being on a rollercoaster.

Certifications. One of the few ways a new employee can hit the ground running and be valuable on day one in a startup might be due to either a skill or industry certification. If a new employee gets added to the data analytics team and they are Tableau certified, awesome. Hiring a new employee to handle your social media and they know how to utilize Hootsuite, great. And if all your applications are in the cloud, adding a person with any cloud certification will make your life easier.

Job skills. The ability for a new hire to perform several key tasks based on skills or work experience is very important to startups. Why? Because there is no real training in most startups. It’s Hell’s Kitchen in a good way. So, finding employees that have these skills who can be accretive on day one, so key to the rest of the team.

Curiosity and desire. This could be one of the toughest things to discern or interview for. How do you measure curiosity or someone’s innate drive or desire to make a change in their life or up their game? Do they just want a job or are they hungry to be a part of something potentially great? Steve Jobs once said to a Pepsi executive, ‘ Do you want to sell sugar water or change the world?’ All things being equal, you might be wise to hire for these two things over job knowledge and train them to do the work. It would be very difficult to teach someone to be curious and almost impossible to spark their desire.