Seven in 10 employers who answered the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Job Outlook 2026 survey say they use skills-based hiring for entry-level candidates, up from 65 percent a year earlier. NACE published the figure in January 2026 and has repeated it in several releases since. This analysis lays out what the survey measured, how employers say they apply the practice, how it relates to degrees and grade point average, and what the data cannot tell a reader.

What NACE asked and who answered

NACE fielded Job Outlook 2026 from August 7 to September 22, 2025. It received 183 responses: 170 from NACE employer members, equal to 22.7 percent of eligible members, and 13 from nonmember companies. NACE's employer members are organizations that recruit college students and graduates, so the results describe employers active in campus hiring rather than U.S. employers overall. The survey's main job is projecting hiring for the next graduating class; the skills-based hiring questions are one part of it.

How employers say they use it

NACE's write-up of the survey, by Kevin Gray, reports these figures:

  • 70 percent of respondents use skills-based hiring, compared with 65 percent the year before.
  • 71 percent of this year's employers use the approach at least half of the time.
  • Interviewing (87 percent) and screening (65 percent) are the recruiting stages where it is used most often.
  • 81 percent use skills-based practices when writing job descriptions, and 58 percent when building interview rubrics.

The write-up does not state the base for each percentage, so it is not clear whether the stage and frequency figures refer to all 183 respondents or only to employers that use skills-based hiring. NACE's January 23 press release restates the data more broadly: more than 80 percent of employers list the skills they want in job descriptions, and most consider demonstrated proficiency in competencies such as teamwork and critical thinking when deciding whom to hire.

Degrees, GPA and demonstrated skills

The largest change in NACE's data concerns GPA. In 2019, 73 percent of employers screened candidates by GPA, and many set a minimum, typically 3.0. In the 2026 survey, 42 percent do. NACE also reports that demonstrated proficiency in key competencies figures into hiring decisions for 73 percent of employers that do not screen by GPA and for 67 percent of those that still do, so attention to skills is not confined to employers that dropped the GPA filter.

NACE's pages on the survey do not report how many employers have removed a bachelor's degree requirement. Because respondents recruit on campuses, the numbers speak mainly to how employers evaluate college candidates; they do not measure whether employers hire people without degrees. NACE president and chief executive officer Shawn VanDerziel said in the January release that employers are moving toward skills and away from degree and GPA filters, which he said widens the pool of candidates.

A spring update to the survey, fielded February 12 to March 17, 2026, with 185 respondents (142 members and 43 nonmembers), found teamwork, problem-solving and communication at the top of the attributes employers look for on resumes. More than half of respondents named 10 or more skills.

The student side

NACE's 2025 Student Survey, sponsored by Indeed and conducted April 1 to May 30, 2025, drew 13,684 college students, among them 1,479 bachelor's-level graduating seniors in the Class of 2025. Nearly nine in 10 seniors had taken part in a program or activity to build career-related skills, and nearly half were asked to demonstrate skills through an assessment while applying or interviewing. Fewer than 40 percent said they were familiar with the term skills-based hiring.

Put side by side, those answers indicate that many students went through skills-based steps without knowing the label. NACE suggests that employers name specific skills in job and internship postings, say which skills interns will build, explain steps such as behavior-based interviews and share sample questions, and work with campuses on student preparation.

A second employer survey for comparison

Western Governors University's 2026 Workforce Decoded survey, conducted by Centiment from June 24 to July 7, 2026, among 3,128 U.S. hiring professionals, uses a much larger sample and is not limited to campus recruiters. In it, 73 percent of employers called college degrees important (up from 68 percent in 2025), 91 percent called certificates valuable indicators of skills, and 42 percent said they plan to focus more on skills than on degrees. In that survey, regard for degrees and certificates rose in the same year that a large share of employers said they would weigh skills more heavily.

What the numbers do and do not show

  • They show a rise in self-reported use among campus-recruiting employers, from 65 to 70 percent in one year, on a sample of 183.
  • They show GPA screening falling from 73 to 42 percent since 2019, although NACE's summary does not say whether the 2019 figure came from the same question and sample.
  • They show where in the process employers say they apply skills-based methods, chiefly interviews, screening and job descriptions.
  • They do not measure outcomes, such as whether skills-based processes change who is hired, how those hires perform or how many lack a degree.

Readers citing the 70 percent figure can describe it accurately as the share of responding NACE survey participants, most of them member employers that recruit on campus, who report using skills-based hiring in some form.

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