New Skills-First Tools to Hire and Develop Talent

A year ago, we set out to create a world of work that focuses on helping companies take a skills first approach to talent development. A world where we hire for skills and abilities, not only degrees and past job titles.?

Today, as we enter a new world of work spurred by the pandemic, this is even more important. In many places, there are more jobs than applicants, and it’s making companies prioritize new ways to attract and retain talent.?

The skills needed to do our jobs are also changing faster. Given the constant changes in tools and technologies, recent LinkedIn data shows the skill sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015 and by 2027, this number is expected to double. This shift means we need to all focus more on skills – not just as we think about hiring for future opportunities, but developing our skills to stay competitive as we settle into the new world of work.?

There’s no silver bullet to helping the world move from credentials to skills, and over the past year, we’ve worked hard to intertwine skills more deeply in all our products at LinkedIn. As a result, more and more hirers are using skills to find talent: 40% of hirers on LinkedIn explicitly used skills data to fill open roles this year, up 20% year over year. What’s more, these hirers are 60% more likely to find a successful hire than those not relying on skills as a part of the hiring process.

As our CEO Ryan Roslansky shared today, this is just the beginning of our skills journey. Today, we’re launching new tools and features to continue to help companies hire for skills and help members build the skills they need to grow in their careers.

Skills as the way to hire and develop your talent?

To truly create a skills-first labor market, it starts with companies focusing on skills as a way to hire and develop talent. For most of our lives, the way people got hired was based primarily on the degree they earned, the job they had, or the people they knew.

We aspire to change this. We want LinkedIn to be a place that inspires a mindset shift - where hirers can efficiently find qualified candidates based on their skills. That’s why we’re bringing skills to the forefront in LinkedIn Recruiter, so hirers can easily search and filter for candidates who best match their skill requirements. And soon, we will provide recruiters with even more context as to where a candidate has used a skill– like from a specific job experience, or while getting a certain certification.

We’re also now showing hirers which candidates are strong skill matches in Recruiter, as well as spotlighting an expanded pool of qualified talent to hirers based on the skills they’ve previously searched for.?

And when it comes to developing talent, we are making key investments to accelerate the capabilities of our skill building platform, LinkedIn Learning Hub. Employees will soon be able to pinpoint the skills they need to be successful in their organization–easily discovering engaging, role-specific content and internal job opportunities based on their career goals. And with internal mobility being such a critical career development and talent retention priority, we’re excited to welcome members of the Paddle HR team to LinkedIn and tap their expertise to help us deliver on the talent development needs of our customers.

Helping members stand-out and find jobs based on their skills

We know that in order for hirers to find talent based on skills, we need to help our members with simple and credible ways to showcase their skills. And our members agree: members are adding skills to their profiles like never before – 286 million skills were added in 2021 alone!

To continue to help our members showcase their skills, we’ll soon provide the ability for members to add context about how they know their skill on their profile. By associating experiences and certificates with skills, members can explain to hirers more about what they know. For example, you’ll soon be able to say you have five years of Python experience based on your last role or you have a year of Design Thinking experience through an internship - signaling to companies even more that you have the skills to do the job.?

And by adding more skills, we can then better match our members to job opportunities and surface more relevant jobs based on how their skills match.?

Empowering members to? further develop their skills

Knowing that the skills our members need to achieve their career goals are changing faster than ever before, we’re also continuing to invest in new ways to learn in real-time, like our live events that tap into the power of the LinkedIn community. In the last year, our instructors have hosted over 500 live events ranging from topics like The Rise of Black Entrepreneurship to Landing Your Dream Job to Making Sense of Ethical Challenges in Web3, showing us how powerful it is when we give our members the opportunity to invest in themselves.

Even if you don’t have a LinkedIn Learning subscription, we’re making it easy for you to take your career development into your own hands, learn the right skills for the moment you’re in, and achieve your goals. Today we’re also launching LinkedIn Learning Pathfinder – a new experience to help anyone learn the skills they need for their next step - all free until April 30th. Simply choose a career goal, discover new skills needed to help you achieve your goal, and get a list of LinkedIn Learning courses customized for your goals.?

We are excited about the opportunity ahead and also recognize that creating a skills-first labor market will take time. We certainly can’t do it alone and encourage you to join us in our journey and share your ideas and learnings along the way. We’re just getting started!?

If interested to learn more about how business leaders around the world are embracing a skills-first approach to talent, you can catch the highlights of our virtual event, Forward, that happened today at 8:30am PST.