Employers often include experience requirements in job postings to screen for strong candidates, lower training costs, and reduce the risk of hiring unqualified workers. However, Indeed job posting data shows that mentions of experience requirements in job ads have declined in recent years, likely due to a shift in who employers want to hire and growing support for skills-first hiring. Less focus on tenure, in addition to a long-term decline in educational requirements, may give job seekers with the right skills a chance to pursue opportunities that may have previously been closed to them.
While there are several ways to define experience requirements, this analysis focused on job postings that provide a specific number of years attached to desired qualifications. Many US job postings on Indeed mention general qualifications like “experience in nursing,” but as of April 2024, fewer than 1-in-3 (30%) US job postings included a year-specific requirement (i.e., “3+ years in a nursing role”). This share is down substantially from about 40% in April 2022.
This broad decline in experience requirements suggests that employers aren’t simply shifting the number of years’ experience required of applicants (from, say, 5 years to 3 years), but are instead removing those specifics altogether. In the last year alone (April 2023-April 2024), the share of published US job postings that did not include any years’ experience requirement or explicitly asked for candidates with no experience rose from 60% to 70%.
Many factors may be influencing the recent decline in years’ experience requirements, but a few stood out in this analysis. First, there are clear differences in how occupational sectors leverage experience requirements and how many years’ experience they typically ask for. Second, employers and workers seem to be responding to labor market conditions and a potential shift toward skills-first hiring practices.
For more insights, read the full article here.
Source: Indeed Hiring Lab
