Leveling the Job Seeker Playing Field

As a Recruiting Leader, I need to balance making hiring processes both efficient and inclusive. In recruiting, we directly impact not only on someone's immediate career trajectory, but also someone's ability to launch into a new career path of their dreams. At LinkedIn, we want to level the job seeker playing field. Our goal through our products is to improve hiring efficiencies and enable diverse, qualified applicants to get into a recruiting pipeline, despite a lack of traditional experience. That’s why we we want to shine a light on a job seeker's skills, not just their resume.

To do just that, we recently piloted a new approach to hiring for Customer Support Consultant roles based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Whether a job seeker comes from a traditional customer support background or not, we want them to have the opportunity to demonstrate the skills that would make them a successful Customer Support Consultant at LinkedIn. We also tapped into our LinkedIn Learning resources to provide job seekers a pathway of free, optional courses designed to develop their customer support skills.

Here's what the process looked like:

• We removed Basic Role Qualifications*
• We added an optional LinkedIn Learning Path to re-skill + assessments to validate skills
• Candidates who performed well on assessments were accelerated through the interview process and guaranteed an interview with a LinkedIn Recruiter

Wait rewind. Guaranteeing candidates a job interview? If you’re in recruiting reading this, you probably have all the same reservations that I did! What if the interview volume is too big to manage? How will that impact candidate experience? Will doing so many interviews make the hiring process too long? 

Through our pilot, these concerns were alleviated. In fact, the hiring efficiency gains were 8X’d!  Our normal funnel ratio for this type of role is 200 applications for every 1 hire. However, through this process, we considered more candidates, cut recruiter interview time in half and ended with 20 candidates for 8 positions. How’d we do this? By introducing the optional, free learning path paired with skills based assessment and a video interview. 

While these efficiency gains exceeded expectations, our true north was helping to bridge the traditional experience gap and this process surfaced talent we otherwise would have passed on because they didn't meet the usual basic requirements. In fact, 100% of our hires would not have met basic requirements! I now can’t imagine missing out on this great talent. Here’s a few more insights into the widened talent pool: 

75% of on-site interview ready candidates did not meet basic requirements

• 60% did not have a college degree
• 30% came from the retail/food industry (not a traditional industry Tech hires from)

A lack of traditional job experience doesn’t mean you don’t have skills. When we launched this hiring program a few months ago, the world felt very different than it does today but as I reflect on our pilot learnings, it has even more potential for impact. If your company would be interested in partnering with LinkedIn to pilot this process, please feel free to send me an InMail.

Creating, launching and now scaling this transformative program has been a true collaboration between many people at LinkedIn. A big thank you to Ryan Roslansky and Jeff Weiner for the inspiring vision, Allen Blue for sage advice and support, our Exec Sponsors Hari Srinivasan, Joanna Pomykala and Brendan Browne for pathing a way, to the project team: Jill Senechalle, Dhara Kothari, Talia Arbit, Almeera Jiwa Pratt, Riley Sisk, Rohan Punamia, Sheng Wu, Ginny Borelli, Kristen Hansen, Ben Olson, Magaly Green, Wei Xiao and to the team who are now helping to scale with our customers externally: Carrie Bloch, Rahul Gupta, Shu-Yi Zhou, Neha Ajmani, Faith Brill and Celeste Richman. Sometimes inclusion, innovation and change really does take a village!

*Basic Requirements defined as: 2+ years of experience in customer service or account management supporting a product/solution utilizing multiple communication channels (email, chat and phone)