Skills are STILL the most important thing on LinkedIn for job seekers!

In April 2023, I wrote my longest ever LinkedIn newsletter article all about skills and why they are important for job seekers. Here is a link to it if you'd like to have a read.

It's still regularly in my top performing posts when I look at my analytics, it gets lots of views every week.

There have been quite a lot of changes and new skills based features since I wrote that newsletter, so I decided it was time to write a bit more. I'm going to try to avoid talking about the things in the original newsletter - only if things have changed will I mention them. Therefore, if you're a job seeker and you've not read that last article, then you might want to do that first.

Thanks for reading, and here we go!

LinkedIn are focusing heavily on skill sets for jobs

Starting at the top of the organisation, Ryan Roslansky is always talking about the importance of skills based recruitment rather than education based recruitment, and that vision seems to be the focus of a lot of the enhancements and new features to do with job seeking. In a one of his posts, Ryan references the importance of skills directly 3 times:

1. "The skill sets for the same job has changed 25% since 2015"
2. "Leaders need to be building skills-first playbooks"
3. "Skills that are in demand today might be different tomorrow"

Why do I mention this in relation to job seekers? Well, if that's what LinkedIn are talking about, then that means that the recruiters using LinkedIn recruiter are going to be focusing more on skills, and therefore, you will need to be adapting your profile to have that focus to match to the jobs you are applying to.

If you are in a role that you've been in since before 2015, and you've had a LinkedIn account, it's entirely possible that you've not updated your skills section if you've not been looking for a new role. Much like the CV or resume, people rarely think about adding new skills etc until they need to.

If leaders are in fact building skills-first playbooks, then again, they will be searching for people based on those skills - you need to be checking in with those organisations you want to work for and finding out what are the skills they are looking for and then get them on your profile.

Now the practical stuff and me talking about what's new, changed or removed:

How many skills can I add to my profile?

Since my last newsletter, the limit on skills has changed - you can now have up to 100 skills listed on your profile. That is plenty for most people, however, I do have the odd client who says they need more. You can't display anymore than this, but a work around is that you can upload a CV/resume in the job section on your desktop (then click on Preferences on the left hand side, and then My qualifications). Here you can upload up to 5 versions, and when recruiters run skills based searches, those on your document will be returned in the results if you toggle to Share resume data with recruiters.

Removed feature

You previously could demonstrate transferable skills (it was a Beta feature for things like sales skills) by recording a video that recruiters could see. That has now gone, as has the Take Skills Assessment which allowed you to take a multiple choice test on various IT skills/products. The explanation was that recruiters never looked at the results of these features.

Promoted feature - Explore companies that hire for your skills

Within the job search page on desktop, you may be able to see this feature. It will basically just takes you to that company page, rather than possibly something more useful like curating a list of jobs from that company which do match your skills - but who knows, maybe that is coming.

Job Collections

The idea here is that you "broaden your job search with curated collections". If you click on one of the images, you'll be taken to the job search and presented with jobs that apparently match your skills. I'd say that this is slightly flaky right now. Whilst yes, it does give you some additional ideas for work, you don't seem to be able to filter any further. So for me, I get a list of jobs in the UK which is too wide a search, and I can't add any filters such as experience level, industry etc. If those were added, I can see it could be useful, but right now, aside from maybe giving a few ideas of different sectors, I can't see that it's that helpful.

I clicked on the Easy Apply collection, and I'd say the top one could be a good match if I was looking, possibly the second and third, but not the bottom one - I've never worked in that sector so not sure why that appeared.

Similarly, when I clicked on the Career Growth collection, I disagree that any of the top ones would be that for me.

Am I a good fit?

If you have LinkedIn premium, you will see within the job search that there is some relatively new AI functionality which will compare your profile to the job spec, and show you where there is a good match and where there is a skills gap. I think this is very useful. Really good use of AI to quickly scan through and give you the highlights and then give you some other tasks to do or prompts to check other things.

Skills match filter within LinkedIn recruiter

This is not something you can see, but a recruiter can see for each candidate, how many skills match with their job post. The LinkedIn help page says the following, which again means that it is so important for you to be regularly reviewing jobs and looking at the top skills that recruiters are searching for and making sure they are in your skills section, and listed in other areas of your profile to be picked up as 'implicit skills' (and this is likely to be automated):

"A Skills Match is determined based on how well the skills listed on a member’s profile and their location match the requirements on your job posting. Between a member’s explicit skills, implicit skills, and location, a threshold needs to be met for an applicant to be identified as a Skills Match. The member and the job must be in the same country, except for the European Economic Area.?

• Explicit skills: Skills listed in the member’s skill section of the profile, which are standardized.??
• Implicit skills: Skills that are extracted from text within any section of the member's profile, such as the summary, position description, title, and headline. Implicit skills are extra skills that are not directly editable by the member. Implicit skills add high value to the skill set as they show relevance to the specific job and context in the member’s profile.??

Members can update their profile at any time to improve their chances of becoming a Skills Match. When an applicant meets the Skills Match criteria for a job application, an alert notification will be sent to the job poster in Recruiter.?

Skills Match will save time when searching for the most qualified applicants for your job posting based on skills and location criteria. Skills Match helps to automate parts of the review process by proactively alerting and surfacing the most qualified applicants."

Searching by skill in job search

This is not new, but really useful, and so few people know you can do this.

Instead of putting in a job title, you can list skills in the job search. In the screen shot below, you can see that I've searched for 3 skills - Facilitation, Coaching and Leadership. I just hit return, and am then presented with 2041 results.

What I would do then, is click on All filters and go through and apply location, experience level, industry and check out the returned job titles. This would then tailor the jobs I'm interested in right down, and then I'd set up a job alert to be notified of good matches in future. I think it's a great idea to search for skills rather than job titles - that way you'll pick up any companies who use non-standard job titles.

Top skills and courses

This link will take you to the LinkedIn blog which covers the top skills and courses to help you reach your dream position.

Add Learning Certificates of Completion and Skills to your LinkedIn profile

If you have LinkedIn Learning (normally through a premium subscription), you can add a certificate to your profile once you complete a skills profile. This can be a good way of showing you are continuously developing your skills. You can also use this as something to share with your network as a post if you so wish. This could be a great way of getting some engagement and also reminding some of your network who you are and what you're doing. Here's a link to the help file with a bit more information.

Finally

If you think there's a lot of stuff missing in here about skills, then remember to go check out my previous 2 articles about skills:

Skills are the most important thing for job seekers right now on LinkedIn

Drill down to identify your skills

And actually finally:

I'm launching an email newsletter in November 2024 - if you'd like to sign up, that would be great! I'll be sharing tips for students and career professionals about how to start, manage and develop your career.

Thank you for reading, and as always, I'd love to see your comments and questions about skills!