How Year Up CEO Gerald Chertavian is breaking open the college-to-career pipeline — and how you can do the same

On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving particular problems.

This week, my guest is Year Up CEO Gerald Chertavian .

How would American business change if companies could hire the best candidates versus how things work today: the best candidates who also went to the right schools? How would lives and generations be impacted by people getting into good jobs that were previously inaccessible to them? 

Those are the the society-bending question Gerald Chertavian has been asking himself for more than two decades. 

The former Wall Street executive and tech founder set out to disrupt the college-to-career path after working closely with a New Yorker who was never going to get in the pipeline. Gerald, then a young executive, was a Big Brother in his free time, and paired with a pre-teen named David. His time mentoring and coaching David gave Gerald his first desire to solve America’s opportunity gap crisis.

“[David] had all the motivation, all the work ethic, all the ambition, but it was things like his ZIP code, the bank balance of his mom, the school system he attended, and indeed the color of his skin that was limiting his opportunity to reach his potential,” Gerald told me. 

Millions of youth have been left behind in today’s workforce simply because they didn’t attend college. And who gets left out is jaw dropping: As Gerald point out, by requiring four-year degree as a condition to apply for a job, companies exclude 83% of Latinos and 75% of African Americans.

“We do a disservice to folks by actually viewing it as a monolithic path, one way only, go to college, graduate at 22, when that is not the lived experience of the vast majority of Americans in our country,” Gerald says.

That’s where Year Up comes in. Gerald launched Year Up in 2000 to close the opportunity gap. The non-profit trains young workers, especially those from underrepresented communities, and helps place them in well-paying jobs. But it only works if companies embrace the idea that most skills are learnable — and learnable anywhere.

Talent pipelines for workers without bachelors degrees can increase 9-fold globally when using a skills-first hiring approach, according to LinkedIn data. That number doubles in the US. A skills-first approach can also increase female representation in the workforce, especially in jobs where women are the minority. And these days, recruiters on linkedin are 50% more likely to search by skills than by years of experience. That number is only expected to rise in the coming months. 

Year Up works with some of the biggest companies in the country. My question was how executives and managers who wanted to do this on their own could make a difference. He had three pieces of advice that stuck with me:

1. Examine why you're asking for degrees for the jobs you're posting. You'll often find that, except for positions that require explicit training in certain areas, a degree is just a shortcut for locating someone who might fit in. Force yourself to go through the re-credentialing a set of jobs. Year Up estimates that most companies could reduce their 4-year-degree requirements by at least 50%.
2. Think about how you're going to keep this expanded talent pool in the door. Just hiring based on skills and finding new talent isn't enough. Your drop out rate is going to spike unless you do the work to help people fit in. Gerald suggested adding one simple question to your conversations with people who work for you: Ask them point-blank how they’re feeling about belonging. “Look, do you feel like you belong here?" is how he puts it. This is especially important if your workplace is full of people with advanced degrees. "You may be underrepresented, whether it's by race or gender. Ask people authentically, ‘How do you feel? Do you belong?’ Because the reality is that we have normalized certain behaviors in corporations that sadly make some people feel like they belong less.”
3. If you're going to do something as bold as challenging how you hire, you'll need to win both hearts on minds internally. When Gerald is trying to get alignment on his vision, he starts with data: "We can now prove that, when you require a 4-year degree for a role that doesn't need it, you pay 11% to 30% more in salary, it takes you longer to hire the individual, you get less diverse talent, and they turn over more quickly," he points out to HR managers. Then he asks the CEOs to take part in programs with the Year Up students. "Once an executive sees our young people, gets to know them, it's amazing how they change," he say "I've got examples of Fortune 50 CEOs who have called me and said, 'Gerald, I'm standing next to your young adults. They're amazing. We want to hire them.' And part of me thinks, 'What were you thinking about them before?' ... We consciously connect our young people to powerful actors on the stage, whether it's political, executive, or otherwise, and it is amazing how many of those folks come back and say, 'Man, this is the talent we need. I now believe something differently. I can now act differently.'

Finally, I loved how much David, Gerald's student from the Big Brother program, is still with him. As he said, "I'm pretty clear that, often, changing your behavior first requires you to change your beliefs, and changing beliefs is about how you feel about something, it's not just what you think about it."

Sometimes a feeling — backed by conviction, data and, in Gerald's case, 20 years of pushing — can change deeply held beliefs at some of the biggest companies in the world.

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