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Bank Of America Headquarters As Revenue Seen Declining In 2016
Keane, Chris—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Bank of America's spring Small Business Owner Report is out, and it has a few interesting bits -- for example, only 15% vote purely based on their perspective as a small business owner.

Among the various takeaways from the survey was some insight into how small business owners hire people. The first major takeaway from the study was that education may not be considered as critical a filter on resumes. Asked to evaluate the most important hiring criteria, employers chose skill level by a huge margin, at 49%. Behind were fit with company culture at 24%, work experience at 24%, and education in last with just 3%.

Besides tending to favor skill over any other quality, small business owners overwhelmingly preferred Gen-X employees over other generations. While Baby Boomers were fairly unloved at 8%, Gen-X employees were preferred by 47% of employees, a factor of almost 6X. Millennials were in the middle, preferred by 26% of small business owners.