Boston, October 2025
Skills-based hiring has won the argument. After years of pledges to look past the degree and hire for what people can actually do, 2025 is the year the practice went mainstream — employers say they now hire on demonstrated ability more often than not, and the grade-point average is quietly disappearing from the screening process. There is just one problem: having decided to hire on skills, employers cannot reliably measure them.
That gap — between the hiring philosophy everyone has adopted and the evidence almost no one can produce — is the defining recruitment story of 2025. According to Ewance, a challenge-based learning-and-recruiting platform where students solve real-world challenges tied to their field of study and earn verifiable certificates, the movement has outrun its own infrastructure: the will to hire on skills is there, but the proof is not.
The measurement gap, in two numbers
The clearest snapshot comes from LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 — a global, interested-party source, but a revealing one. It found that 89% of talent-acquisition professionals say measuring the quality of a hire is increasingly important to their work. Asked whether they can actually do it, only 25% said they feel confident they can. Nearly nine in ten know what matters; barely one in four trust their ability to measure it.
A four-to-one gap between what recruiters want to know and what they can actually establish is not a rounding error. It is a structural blind spot at the centre of how organisations choose who to hire.
Recruiters are not lacking conviction; they are lacking instruments. Almost everyone now agrees the goal is skill. But when three out of four admit they cannot reliably measure it, every hire becomes a guess dressed up as a decision.
— Ewance's founder
Why is skill so hard to measure?
The honest answer is that hiring has always measured skill by proxy. A degree stood in for capability. A grade stood in for diligence. An interview stood in for how someone actually works. Each proxy was a convenient approximation — and each is a poor one, because none of them shows the candidate doing the work the job will require.
The proxies are now failing faster than ever. A degree title says little about applied ability; interviews are noisy and easy to rehearse; and in 2025, even self-reported skills are suspect, as generative AI makes it trivial to claim fluency a candidate does not have. Strip away the proxies and the uncomfortable truth is exposed: most hiring processes were never set up to measure skill directly at all.
The GPA is quietly being retired
Nowhere is the shift clearer than in what employers have stopped looking at. According to the US National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), fewer than 40% of employers now screen candidates by grade-point average — the third consecutive year that figure has stayed below the historic norm. The academic transcript, for generations the default sorting mechanism for early-career talent, is being set aside.
In its place: skills. NACE finds that around two-thirds of employers now use skills-based hiring all or most of the time. The direction of travel is not in doubt — the question is what employers put in the gap the GPA leaves behind.
Dropping the GPA was the easy part. It was always a blunt instrument. The hard part is what replaces it — because if you retire the transcript and put nothing verifiable in its place, you have not modernised hiring, you have just made it more subjective.
— Ewance's founder
What does skills-based hiring actually need?
A hiring philosophy built on skills needs a currency of skill: evidence that is specific, comparable and hard to fake. Self-reported skill lists fail all three tests. So do most interviews. What survives is demonstrated work — a candidate visibly solving a problem of the kind the job demands, captured in a form a recruiter can inspect and trust.
That is the missing infrastructure. The movement has the demand (employers want skills) and the mandate (they have dropped the old proxies). What it lacks is a reliable supply of proof — and that, not enthusiasm, is the bottleneck holding skills-based hiring back from delivering on its promise.
From claims to proof
Closing the measurement gap means moving from what a candidate claims to what a candidate can be shown to have done. That conviction is why Ewance was built: it runs challenge-based projects with university students — real problems tied to their field — and turns the work into a verifiable certificate a recruiter can independently check. The skill is not asserted; it is demonstrated, and the demonstration is the credential.
Its read on the data is grounded in the field. Ewance's founder has spent more than a decade at the intersection of education and industry, and the measurement gap is the complaint that surfaces most consistently — from the recruiters trying to hire on skill to the students trying to prove they have it.
Skills-based hiring does not fail for lack of belief. It fails for lack of proof. Give recruiters verifiable evidence of demonstrated work and the 25% who trust their measurements becomes a majority — because for the first time they are measuring the work itself, not a proxy for it.
— Ewance's founder
Recommendations
Ewance's founder offered the following for employers and the institutions preparing graduates:
- Replace the proxy, do not just remove it. Dropping the GPA only helps if verifiable evidence of skill takes its place.
- Measure work, not self-report. The skills recruiters most want to assess are the ones candidates can most easily overstate.
- Make skill comparable. Evidence a recruiter can inspect side by side beats a CV bullet that has to be taken on faith.
- For students: collect proof as you learn. A portfolio of demonstrated, verifiable work is the currency a skills-based market actually pays in.
The employers who win the next decade of hiring will not be the ones with the boldest skills-based mission statement. They will be the ones who can actually prove the skills — because they asked candidates to show the work.
— Ewance's founder
Sources
All figures are drawn from the original sources below; Ewance conducted no proprietary survey for this release. NACE data is US-based; LinkedIn is a global, vendor-sourced survey attributed as such.
- LinkedIn, Future of Recruiting 2025 — 89% of talent-acquisition professionals say measuring quality of hire is increasingly important; only 25% feel confident they can measure it. Global, vendor-sourced (interested-party); figures are attitudinal.
- National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), Job Outlook 2025 — around two-thirds of employers use skills-based hiring all or most of the time; fewer than 40% of employers screen candidates by GPA, the third consecutive year below the historic norm. US.
