Reshuffling how Employers Use Credible Skills Signals: An Introduction

Removing bias from hiring processes such that we can achieve more equitable outcomes is a complex problem. Individuals, companies, systems, and society combine various forms of explicit and implicit bias that at times seem impenetrable to even the most well thought out efforts to level the playing field. 

This is a problem I’ve been thinking about one way or another almost my entire career. While I’ve seen bright spots, I still don’t have a comprehensive solution to put forth. However, my colleague Liz Wilke introduced me to a framework that helped me better organize my thoughts on the issue: the credible skill signal. 

I first heard Liz talk about this concept in fall 2019 at a conference put on by the World Association of Public Employment Services, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, and the Inter-America Development Bank. The concept gave me a new way to organize what I was hearing in terms of solutions to the oft-repeated adage “talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.” At LinkedIn, we’ve been talking about this in terms of the network gap and skills transferability. In the broader workforce development arena, this conversation often focuses on assessments, certifications, and credentials. Liz wrote an article about how 30 million American workers need better ways to signal their skills last month. 

But what is a credible skills signal in the first place? I’m defining a credible skills signal as some indication used by an employer to give them enough confidence that a candidate has the skills and abilities required to do the job such that they offer an interview. Employers may explicitly call out the signals they’re looking for in a job description. In other instances, the desired signal may be more implicit (i.e. can be validated by a network of partners). Regardless, a candidate must leverage at least one of the credible skills signals to get through the earliest phases of a hiring process to the point where they’re offered an interview. In these cases, credible means verifiable and understood by the employer not simply self-identified by the applicant. 

In this article, I’m going to outline what I’ve observed to be the predominant skill signals. We know that these credible skill signals are not perceived the same way for different candidates and that some signals are more biased than others by default (and possibly by design). That is for a variety of reasons, racist tendencies and professional culture inertia chief among them. I’ll use other articles to break down each signal in greater detail, the extent to which its use contributes toward and/or reduces inequality, and what can be done so that the signal can be used to further promote equity rather than erode it. Let's start with a brief list and description of the various skill signals often discussed in the workforce and economic development fields.

In the context of skills signals, credentials stand out as the most often discussed. Credentials are something you can add to your resume or profile that says some accredited institution, professional association, or other trusted organization issues to say you completed some kind of program, ideally with some basic level of proficiency. The program typically includes some combination of class time (in-person or online), hours worked, and an assessment or exam. Here are broad categories of credentials:

• Degree. Degrees are granted by recognized and accredited education institutions. This category includes a high school diploma all the way to a doctorate and everything in between, although undergraduate degrees are subset of degrees researchers and practitioners have been scrutinizing the most as of late. Undergraduate degrees are often included as a requirement in job descriptions, especially for jobs in the knowledge economy. In many cases, possession of a bachelor’s degree tends to be a less accurate proxy of actual skills to do the job than other signals, but it represents a blunt way for employers to narrow the application pool and identify candidates with other desirable characteristics, often related to teamwork, discipline, and critical thinking. Large efforts are underway by various groups, such as Opportunity@Work, to encourage employers to rethink the current emphasis placed on college degrees such that workers, known as STARs (skilled through alternative routes), that have the requisite skills to succeed regardless of academic background are more likely to get the job. Overemphasis on college degrees also puts Black, Latinx, and other workers of color at a disadvantage given the differences in educational attainment across racial groups.

• Certification. Certifications are often tied to more occupation-specific skills and can be achieved in significantly less time than a degree. As an example, companies like Salesforce, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will certify workers in their own products to help ensure their ecosystem of partners and customers have the workers they need to get the most from their products. Additionally, many professional associations offer certificates to recognize professionals that have received additional training in their field. Some certifications are achieved alongside or after a college degree while others can be achieved without a postsecondary degree. 
• License. Many professions require licensure by a government body before being able to work in that profession. They’re designed to ensure professionals in licensed fields abide by a set of rules and regulations to protect the public, but sometimes serve as a way to limit entry into the profession. License requirements, including the need for a license, will vary by state and profession. In some cases, a professional licensed in one state will not be automatically licensed in another state, even if they have multiple years of successfully working in that profession. In that sense, a license represents permission to practice that profession but can become blurred in terms of its strengths as a signal of skill or ability.
• Micro-credential. Distinct from degrees and certifications, micro-credentials cover a specific skill or skills and are attained by demonstrating competency in the skill(s) via practical application. As we continue to break occupations into the distinct skills required to fulfill that occupations’s typical responsibilities, micro-credentials are a method, usually online, to validate skill proficiency. Issuing organizations will award micro-credentials for successful demonstration, regardless of where the job seeker learned the skill (i.e. classroom, on the job, etc.). In that way, they can serve as a type of equalizer between those with academic vs. hands-on experience. 

Of course there are plenty of credible skills signals beyond credentials that can convey your ability to succeed in a job:

• Prior work experience. I hear this a lot. The best way to determine if someone can do a job is if they’ve done the job before. Recruiters and hiring managers will look at a candidates’ prior work experience to see if they successfully demonstrated the skills in prior jobs, most importantly their most recent position, to assess the likelihood they’ll be successful in the new role. A prior role similar to the role to which they’ve applied (similar in terms of title or industry) typically increases a candidate’s chances of getting a job. In this sense, it can put workers trying to switch occupations or industries at a disadvantage without pairing this with other signals the employer understands. It's often the case that recruiters and prospective hiring managers, and similarly jobseekers, have a limited view of what counts as applicable prior work experience or are not aware of the skill similarities between the position for which their hiring and other jobs.
• Portfolio. In some instances, a portfolio of work based on projects from work or outside of work (through volunteer or civic activities, self-challenge, etc.) can also demonstrate your ability to fulfill the requirements of a job enough to get to an interview. In today’s digital world, a portfolio could be a website, a Github repo, or some other online place where you keep examples of your work. Depending on the role, a portfolio may be able to replace prior work experience, especially if you’re trying to switch into an occupation very different from or at best tangentially related to your prior job (i.e. fitness trainer to software engineer or art teacher to UX designer).
• Network validation. This is “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” in action. And this goes deeper than a skills endorsement on LinkedIn, although those are better than nothing. It can look like having a friend or colleague vouch for you to a potential new employer that you have the skills, wherewithal, grit, etc. to do a job that your academic training or prior experience may not clearly indicate you’re prepared for. Or in many cases, it looks like your network giving you an edge over similarly qualified applicants. Sitting at LinkedIn where we talk each and every day about how much relationships matter, we see how powerful your network can be in helping you get a job. We also see how unequally networks are distributed.   
• Assessment. In this case, I’m referring to assessments that do not directly lead to a certification or credential. These may be assessments developed by a single employer or coalition employers and used prior to offering an interview, as well as assessments developed by some learning providers, such as new assessments added by LinkedIn. These could be the type of technical assessments that could validate for a potential employer that a self-taught software developer who hasn’t built software professionals before has the skills required for the job.

• Training program participation. In some instances, participation in a training program could be the requisite signal that a potential employee has the skills for the job, and that could be the case even if the training program does not directly lead to a certification or leads to a certification that does not neatly align with the job opportunity in question. This signal borrows thematically from the network validation and credential signals. One of my favorite training programs that’s achieving success in this way in Climb Hire. 

The transition to a skills-based labor market where opportunity is more evenly distributed will require a reevaluation of the weight employers place on these various signals. It will also require that our education and workforce systems think critically about how we can better signal to employers that program participants have the skills to succeed in their open roles. In some instances, that will mean developing credentials valued by employers. In others, it could mean integrating network and social capital building into the curriculum. 

I’m looking forward to exploring these signals and how we can use them as levers to make our economy more equitable.