Skills-first hiring is growing. But who's verifying the skills?

Skills-first hiring is reshaping how Australian businesses build teams. Capability is being weighed alongside formal qualifications, candidates from non-traditional pathways are getting a look in and the talent pool is widening as a result. For diversity, mobility and access to talent, it's a positive shift.

For a large share of roles, this shift comes with an important caveat. In regulated and credentialed sectors like healthcare, aged care, financial services and education, qualifications are mandatory. Skills-first hiring changes how those candidates are assessed and widens the pool you draw from. It doesn't remove the requirement to hold the right qualification, and it doesn't remove the need to check it.

That raises a question most HR teams haven't fully worked through. If capability is now part of the hiring decision, how do you know the capability is real? And where a role requires a qualification, how do you know that qualification is genuine, current and active?

This post unpacks what skills-first hiring means in practice, where the verification gap sits and why confirming that qualifications are genuine and still in force is becoming the backbone of a defensible hiring process.

What is skills-first hiring, and why is it taking off?

Skills-first hiring (sometimes called skills-based hiring) is the move to weigh capability as heavily as credentials. Rather than treating a degree as the only gate to a role, employers also screen for the specific skills the role requires.

Degrees and formal qualifications haven't disappeared from this picture. In many roles, particularly in regulated sectors, the right qualification is a legal or professional baseline a candidate has to hold to do the job at all. Academic and qualification checks remain in high demand for that reason. What's changed is that for roles without a mandatory credential, a degree is no longer the single filter deciding who makes the shortlist.

The shift is being driven by a few things at once:

• persistent talent shortages across healthcare, financial services, technology and the trades

   

• a growing recognition that a degree alone doesn't always predict performance

   

• pressure to broaden the talent pool and reduce bias

   

• the rise of micro-credentials, bootcamps and on-the-job certifications as legitimate pathways.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 39% of workers' core skills are expected to change by 2030. Hiring on fixed credentials alone, in a workforce changing that quickly, leaves gaps.

If a degree isn't the only filter, what is?

Where a role has no mandatory qualification and a degree stops being the sole gate, employers lean on a wider mix of signals:

• self-reported skills on resumes and LinkedIn profiles

   

• assessments and work samples completed during the hiring process

   

• micro-credentials and short courses

   

• professional memberships, registrations and industry certifications

   

• formal qualifications and academic achievement

   

• past role titles and described experience.

Some of these are verified. Many are taken at face value. A candidate ticks a box, lists a certification or names a course, and the recruiter moves them forward. Skills-first hiring works well when those claims hold up. It struggles when they don't.

‘We're seeing more clients weigh skills alongside degrees, which is a good thing. The risk is what happens to the claims that sit underneath. A lot of teams are hiring on what the candidate has written about themselves, and the assumption is that someone, somewhere, has checked it. Often no one has,’ says Neil Rose, Referoo CEO.

Where's the verification gap?

The gap sits in the space between claimed and confirmed.

In traditional hiring, a degree gave employers a third-party signal. A university had assessed the person, awarded a qualification and the employer could rely on that as a baseline. It was an imperfect signal that was at least verified by someone other than the candidate.

A skills-first approach brings in more signals, and more of them are self-attested. Three things commonly go unchecked:

professional qualifications and licences, including whether the person actually holds the credential they claim
industry memberships and registrations, particularly in regulated sectors like financial services, healthcare and aged care
micro-credentials and certifications, many issued by providers HR teams have never heard of.

Holding a qualification isn't the same as being able to do the job

Confirming a qualification exists is only half the job. In a lot of roles, the qualification has to be current and active for the person to legally or professionally do the work. A credential that has lapsed, been suspended or fallen out of good standing can mean the candidate isn't allowed to perform the role at all.

A few common examples:

• A Working with Children Check (WWCC) confirms a person holds an active clearance to work with children. An expired or suspended check means they can't legally take the role.

   

• An accountant practising as a CPA needs current CPA Australia membership in good standing, not a qualification earned years ago and since lapsed.

   

• A health practitioner needs active registration with AHPRA, the national health practitioner regulator, to practise. Registration that has expired or been restricted changes what they can lawfully do.

   

• A financial adviser needs the right ASIC authorisations in place and current.

In each case, what matters is whether the credential is live, current and in good standing at the point of hire. That distinction is where a lot of risk hides and confirming it is exactly what a qualification check does.

What happens when a check is skipped or a credential has lapsed?

The downside risk is real and growing. Resume fraud has been climbing for years, and a wider set of self-reported signals gives candidates more places to embellish. For roles in regulated sectors, the consequences go beyond a poor hire. They include compliance breaches, audit findings, professional indemnity issues and reputational damage. A lapsed registration that no one caught can be just as damaging as a fabricated one.

There's also a quieter cost. When skills-first hiring is paired with weak verification, it undermines the people the model was designed to help. Candidates from non-traditional pathways with genuine, current credentials get grouped in with anyone willing to overstate their experience, and the credibility of the whole approach takes a hit.

How does verification fit a skills-first world?

A skills-first approach pulls in candidates from all kinds of pathways. Some hold formal qualifications and many won't. The job of verification is to confirm whatever evidence of capability a candidate brings, in whichever form it shows up, and to confirm it's current.

In practice, that means a flexible verification model. Where a candidate holds a qualification, licence, registration, micro-credential or professional membership, check that it's genuine and still in force. Where they don't, lean on other verified signals like detailed reference checks, work history verification and role-specific referee questions that probe the actual skills the job calls for.

Done well, verification:

• confirms qualifications, licences and memberships are real, current and in good standing where they exist

   

• validates micro-credentials and certifications from non-traditional providers

   

• uses targeted reference checks to verify on-the-job skills for candidates from non-traditional pathways

   

• picks up fabricated credentials, exaggerated claims and lapsed registrations before they reach onboarding.

Every candidate gets a fair, verified path through the process, whichever route they took. That mix of reference checks, qualification checks, background checks and Right to Work checks in a single workflow is the model Referoo Hub is built around.

‘If skills and qualifications are now the basis of the hiring decision, then verifying them can't be a tick-box at the end. It has to sit at the centre of the process. And it has to confirm the credential is current, because a qualification that's lapsed tells you very little about whether someone can do the job today,’ Rose adds.

What should HR teams actually check?

The right mix depends on the role, but a defensible skills-first process generally covers:

• professional qualifications: confirm the qualification, membership or certification is held, current and hasn't lapsed

   

• industry registrations and licences: AHPRA, ASIC, legal practising certificates, trade licences, WWCC

   

• membership of professional bodies: current and in good standing

   

• academic achievement: confirm university degrees, diplomas and other higher education qualifications have been awarded where the role requires them

   

• background checks: police checks, financial history where role-relevant

   

• reference checks: focused on the specific skills the role calls for

   

• Right to Work: non-negotiable for every hire.

The aim is to make sure the things you're now hiring on, the skills and the qualifications behind them, are confirmed by someone other than the candidate and confirmed as current.

Skills-first hiring is here. Verification needs to keep up.

The shift to skills-first hiring is the right move for most organisations. It widens the talent pool, reduces bias and reflects how work actually gets done. The model holds up when the skills and qualifications you're hiring for are real and in force.

That means treating verification as part of skills-first hiring from the start. A mix of qualification checks that confirm credentials are current, plus well-designed reference and background checks for everyone else, is how HR teams keep the upside of skills-first hiring without inheriting the risk.

Want to see how Referoo Hub bundles qualification checks, reference checks and background checks in one place? Book a demo.