You have a great veteran applicant in your pile. Ran a 40-person section at 26. Managed a multi-million-dollar equipment account. Zero days late in eight years. But your req says "Bachelor's degree required." So your ATS knocks the application out before a human ever sees it.

The hire is not the problem. Your screen is. And you can fix it this week.

Skills-based hiring gets talked about a lot. Most of the talk is abstract. "Hire for skills, not degrees." Sounds good. But nobody tells you what to actually change in your req, your ATS, or your scorecard. This guide does. It is the recruiter-level version. We are going to rewrite the screen so qualified veterans stop getting auto-cut.

The point is not to lower your bar. The point is to stop using a paper proxy that misses people who clear the bar a different way. A veteran led people. They owned a budget. They ran hard operations under pressure. They may still have no diploma. They still have the skill. Your job is to build a screen that can see it.

Why Does a Degree Screen Cut Good Veterans?

A degree screen is a shortcut. It says "this person probably has the baseline knowledge." For a lot of roles, that shortcut is fine. The problem starts when the degree is the only door in.

Many veterans built their skills a different way. The military trains people through schools, certifications, and years of hands-on work. A logistics NCO learns supply chain by running one. A signals soldier learns networks by keeping them up in the field. That training is real. It just does not come with a four-year diploma attached.

So when your req says "degree required," your ATS does the math. No degree field, no pass. The application sinks to the bottom or never surfaces. You never get to weigh the 8 years of leading teams against the missing diploma. The screen made the call for you.

This is why the federal government changed course. In May 2025, the Office of Personnel Management rolled out its Merit Hiring Plan. A core piece of it is skills-based hiring and dropping degree requirements that do not need to be there. OPM has been piloting fully skills-based screening for federal IT management jobs. That project began in 2024 and has continued under the Merit Hiring Plan. If the largest employer in the country is doing this, your midsize company can too.

Which Reqs Actually Need a Degree?

Start here, before you touch any wording. Not every degree line is wrong. Some jobs truly require one. The trick is to tell them apart.

Walk through your open reqs and sort each one. A degree screen earns its place when the law, a license, or a real body of knowledge demands it. It does not earn its place when it is just there out of habit.

Most of your reqs land in column B. That is where the easy wins are. For these jobs, the question you really care about is "can they do the work," not "did they sit in a lecture hall."

If you want a deeper read on how to judge one of these candidates once they get through, we wrote a full guide on that: how to evaluate a veteran candidate with no civilian degree. This article is about the screen that comes first.

How Do You Rewrite the Job Requirements?

This is the core fix. Your req language is the filter that fires first. Change the words, change who gets through.

The single highest-impact edit is one line. Swap the hard degree requirement for an equivalency clause. You are not deleting the degree. You are adding a second door.

Notice the last line. "Military experience counts." Say it out loud in the posting. A veteran reading your req does not always know their service maps to the job. Tell them it does. That one sentence pulls in people who would have skipped the role.

Next, cut the inflated "nice to have" list. Reqs pile on requirements that nobody on the team actually has. Each extra line is another reason a strong candidate self-selects out. List what the job truly needs. Stop there.

Last, rewrite your responsibilities as scope, not buzzwords. Veterans speak in scope. People led. Budget owned. Pace and pressure handled. When your req describes the job that way, the right people see themselves in it. For the full breakdown, see our guide on how to write a job description that attracts veterans.

How Do You Fix the ATS Knockout Questions?

Your req language matters. But the ATS does the actual cutting. And the worst offender is the knockout question.

A knockout question is a hard gate. "Do you have a bachelor's degree? Yes / No." Answer no, and the system tags you out. No human review. The application is done.

This is where good veterans vanish. They answer the question honestly. The ATS does what you told it to do. You never see the file. Here is how to fix it.

Most modern systems let you do all three. Workday, iCIMS, Greenhouse, and Lever all support scored screening questions instead of hard knockouts. The setting is there. You just have to flip it.

What Should the Scorecard Look Like?

You dropped the knockout. Now you need something to put in its place. That something is a scorecard built on skills.

A scorecard is just a short list of what the job needs, with a score next to each. It keeps your bar high and your screen fair. Everyone gets graded on the same five things. The degree is no longer the gate. The skills are.

Here is a simple skills-based scorecard you can adapt for a column B role. Score each line 0, 1, or 2. A total of 6 or higher moves to a phone screen.

That last line is worth a note. Veterans can pull a Joint Services Transcript. It is scored by the American Council on Education and recognized by thousands of colleges. It tells you how much college-level learning their training was worth. Ask for it. It is an outside grade on a degree-free background.

The scorecard does one more thing for you. It keeps every reviewer honest. No more "I just had a good feeling." Everyone scores the same five skills. That is fairer for the veteran and safer for you.

How Do Structured Interviews Lock It In?

The screen got you a fair pool. Do not blow it at the interview. An unstructured chat brings the degree bias right back in through the side door.

Here is how that happens. A reviewer who likes degrees will, without meaning to, grill the no-degree candidate harder. Same job. Different bar. A structured interview stops that. Everyone gets the same questions, scored the same way.

Build your interview around the same skills as your scorecard. Ask situation-based questions. "Tell me about a time you led a team through a problem with no clear answer." Then listen for how they think, not for where they learned it.

Veterans can read flat on paper and in the room. They undersell. They use acronyms. They credit the team. None of that means they are weak. It means your process has to dig one layer deeper. We cover the room itself in how to interview a veteran candidate the right way.

How Do You Decode the Background Without a Degree to Lean On?

Without a degree as a shortcut, you have to read the experience itself. Good news. The experience is rich. You just need a way in.

Military titles and codes do not match civilian ones. A "92A" or "platoon sergeant" tells you nothing on its own. So map the role to a civilian skill set. The free O*NET military crosswalk does this. Type in the code, get the civilian match.

Then read the duties, not the title. A supply sergeant ran inventory, vendors, and accountability for high-value gear. That is supply chain work. The label is military. The skill is not. To go deeper on this whole method, see how to map a military career field to your open reqs.

Three quick examples of what the codes hide:

• 25B (Army IT specialist): built and ran secure networks, often for hundreds of users in the field. Maps to IT support and systems admin work.
• 92A (Army logistics): managed inventory, supply chains, and property worth millions. Maps to supply chain, warehouse, and operations roles.
• HM (Navy corpsman): delivered front-line medical care under pressure. Maps to many clinical support and healthcare ops roles.

None of those three needed a four-year degree to do the work. All three would clear a skills-based scorecard. A degree screen would have cut every one of them.

How Do You Roll This Out Without Breaking Anything?

You do not have to flip your whole company at once. Start small. Prove it. Then scale.

Pick one or two open reqs from column B. Rewrite the degree line. Turn off the knockout. Build the scorecard. Run one cycle. Watch what happens to your applicant pool and your hires.

The federal pilot worked the same way. OPM did not change every job at once. They started with IT management, proved the model, then built out. You can borrow that exact approach at your scale. The Department of Labor's hire-a-veteran resources are a solid place to ground your own rollout.

One more reason to keep this clean: a skills-based screen also reads better. A veteran applicant who sees "military experience counts" and a fair process tells their network. You do not just hire one. You become a place veterans point each other toward. We dig into that in how to evaluate a veteran's resume and our recruiter checklist for screening veteran applicants.

Where Do You Find the Veterans to Screen?

A better screen only helps if veterans are in your pool to begin with. That part is on your sourcing.

Best Military Resume sits on a large, growing pool of veteran and military spouse candidates. More than 1,000 new veteran profiles get added every month. Over 60,000 resumes have been built on the platform. These are people who have already translated their service into civilian terms, so the skills are easy to see.

If you want direct access to that pool, partner with us. We will connect your open reqs with veterans whose skills already match. Your new screen gets the right people to grade.

Drop the degree screen where it does not earn its place. Rewrite the req. Re-wire the ATS. Score the skill. Then go find the talent. The veterans are out there, trained and ready. The only thing standing between them and your team is a screen you can fix this week.