Hiring For The Future, Not The Past

For almost two decades now, LinkedIn has been the place where talent and opportunity meet. When that happens at a massive scale, hundreds of millions of people all over the world are able to find new jobs, learn new skills, make new connections and launch new careers. As we look ahead at the decades to come, we know that there is a new era emerging in how talent and opportunity meet, one that will expand the ways that people can access jobs and the ways that employers can diversify teams. 

For a long time, the way people got hired was based solely on the job they had, the degree they earned or the people they knew. That's starting to change. People now better understand and articulate the skills they have and the skills they need. And businesses are looking not just at those familiar credentials but also at the skills that job seekers from often overlooked communities have to get the job done. We want to help accelerate that shift. Since last June, Microsoft and LinkedIn have helped more than 30 million people worldwide gain access to digital skills, and today we're extending our commitment to skills by helping 250,000 companies make a skills-based hire in 2021.  

Here’s why a dynamic path to employment is so groundbreaking. At the most basic level, it’s about driving more equitable outcomes. Study after study shows that a college diploma is linked to economic success. But today that path to a degree or experience often helps those who are best off get further ahead. Companies compete with each other to poach current employees instead of diversifying their workforce by hiring or training people with the necessary skills from often overlooked communities. And cuts in apprenticeships mean the few who can get trained have a leg up on those who can thrive with the right guidance. As the saying goes, talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not; we have to find a way to let talent shine. 

For far too long, we have used degrees and experience to assess talent because we didn’t have anything better. We need alternative, flexible and always-accessible paths to well-paying jobs. Schools, governments, companies, individuals — we all need to help transition the hiring market from focusing solely on titles and companies, degrees and schools to also focusing on skills and abilities. 

I’m committed to LinkedIn playing a leading role in getting us there because what employers really want to know, especially in a time of unprecedented change, is whether a person can do a job. Their skills. Skills, whether learned from a Harvard degree, an online course, or an apprenticeship, are what gets the job done. The impact of that is beneficial for everyone. It will mean more opportunity not less, more prosperity not less, more growth not less.

Our current system also ignores the speed and increasing demands of today’s economy. A degree is an achievement, but with careers stretching to half a century, a one-time intensive period of study is not enough. The reality is that with the current pace of technological change, everyone needs to continuously expand their skills. Global competition and AI-driven changes mean that, as the New York Times recently wrote, even “Phil in accounting” is at risk of being displaced. Schools don’t have the real time information to cater coursework to current day needs or employers, nor is it easy for students to showcase their evolving skill set in ways employers trust or understand. I believe in the human potential for growth and change. I don't believe people are disposable when their jobs disappear, and I know the fear and anxiety that comes with worrying about how you’ll get back on track if the axe does fall. 

Take the food servers who've lost their jobs due to the pandemic. They have 70% of the skills needed to be a customer service specialist, which is one of the most in-demand jobs on LinkedIn. But they don't know that and the people hiring customer service specialists don't know that. If they did, we may have seen a significant shift of out of work food servers into in demand customer service roles instead of seeing food servers go on unemployment and customer service roles go unfilled.

At LinkedIn, we have a very clear vision: to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And I can’t think of a more important time to remove barriers and open up on-ramps that allow all of us to realize our career goal, no matter where we are in our journey, no matter what choices we made at 17, no matter our family’s income. 

I believe that change will come through a skills-based approach to opportunity. Here’s what we’re doing and where I think it will lead:

First, we are helping everyone speak the same "skills language." When you and I talk about what we’re proficient at, it’s almost impossible to know if we’re talking about the same thing: For example, an important skill in an evolving digital economy is helping your company rank high in search engine results. Most companies call that Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, across the LinkedIn ecosystem we see the same skill set described in many different ways in many different languages:

If two people can’t describe a skill in the same way, imagine how hard it would be for employers in Peoria and Perugia to agree that a candidate has what it takes to do a particular job. Today, we often rely on a diploma and references as a proxy for proficiency: ”She’s got a degree from Vanderbilt and has been promoted twice; she must be good.” A common skills vocabulary will enable us to signal what we’ve learned and be globally transferable.

By standardizing what people say they know across hundreds of millions of LinkedIn profiles, we have developed the world’s most comprehensive skills taxonomy. We’ll be expanding access to this LinkedIn Skills Graph to help create a common skills language for individuals, employers, educational institutions and government agencies to improve workforce planning, hiring and development programs. A university, community college or vocational school could use this data to create courses that teach the skills directly tied to local roles in demand. A company could expand it’s hiring pool by ensuring it’s using universal language to attract new employees. Everyone speaking the same skills language is a critical way we bring transparency and inclusivity to hiring, promotions and education. 

For example, LinkedIn is partnering with the World Economic Forum (WEF) on their Reskilling Revolution Initiative which aims to provide one billion people with better education, skills and jobs by 2030. This work brings together business and policy leaders looking to future-proof and boost people’s skills and livelihoods in the face of expected job displacement in the post-pandemic economic recovery, creating a new vision for global education, skills and employment. Using our Skills Graph, we work with the Forum’s New Economy and Society team to identify skills gaps across industries, geographies and labor market segments to help people build the skills for the future.

Second, we will help professionals gain and demonstrate their skills. No matter how well we understand skills, it means nothing if we can’t help people develop them. And that’s why ongoing learning and upskilling is critical. We use data from our Economic Graph to help identify in demand skills and help people understand what jobs match the skills they have. And today on LinkedIn Learning we help you learn the exact skills you need to acquire, taught by the best instructors in the world, and easily accessible anywhere and anytime. Guided projects give you hands-on, relevant, and confidence-building experience. You can link courses together into Learning Paths, based on the skills you need to get the job you want. These Learning Paths help bring communities of learners to work together and motivate each other.

It doesn't matter how much you know if you can't demonstrate it, though, which is why we give you multiple ways to demonstrate your skills. Communication skills, for example, can be demonstrated by creating a video of yourself using a new feature called "Cover Story." We also enable you to demonstrate more technical skills through the more than 100 assessments we created for in-demand skills, such as Excel, Lightroom, and React (see examples here). So far, members have added 8 million skill assessment badges to their profiles. When these members apply to relevant jobs, they stand out with their skill badges and are 20% more likely to get hired. We're also making this framework accessible to other companies, too, so that they can develop their own assessments and certifications on our platform.

You shouldn’t have to switch companies to get ahead. We’re going to also help employees and employers level up their own people by showcasing companies who invest in training their current employees and make it easier and cheaper for them to do so. We will give companies the tools to invest in their own employees and to incentivize them to learn new skills with the launch later this year of our skill-building platform that will bring all of a company’s learning resources together in one place. We will provide hiring managers with lists of current employees who we think are talented and should be considered for the job and promote internal job openings to current employees who are likely to be a good fit. In a skills-focused world, companies are going to find that promoting from within — especially via non-traditional pathways — opens them up talent they hadn’t noticed before

Third, we will help employers find and hire those professionals. Companies realize that hiring candidates based on where they went to school or where they work is extremely limiting. They know they're missing out on millions of creative, diverse, and loyal candidates by limiting themselves to those applicants with traditional backgrounds. But hey, that’s the system, right?

We're changing that. In our recruiting products — the most used recruiting system in the world — we will promote a skills-based approach to hiring. We’re going to reach our commitment to help 250,000 companies make a skills-based hire in 2021 through our new and existing hiring products. We will train recruiters and hiring managers to be more open by de-emphasizing things like school and company names in candidate search. Recruiters who use our tools will soon gain even more power to search by skills and skill groupings. And we're going to change members' profiles in our recruiting products to emphasize skills along with experience.

We describe this as hiring for the candidate's future potential, not their past history. With this skills-based approach, diplomas and titles will soon sit alongside assessments, certifications, endorsements, and other alternate methods for determining capability and fit throughout the LinkedIn ecosystem.

All of this should help once-hidden candidates come into the light. But, we’re not content with “should.” To push innovation forward, you’ll see us explore innovative approaches like allowing recruiters to hide non-skills related parts of people's profiles or enabling employers to interview control groups of candidates who didn't pass their initial screen to see how they do. We will be using the power of machine learning to do good by helping employers overcome their own biases using their own real data. We will showcase applicants whom we think are great nontraditional candidates that they passed on. We will highlight recruiters who do an exceptional job finding great nontraditional candidates to their bosses and companies who do so to the world. LinkedIn Lists, like our Top Companies lists, will reward companies who promote diversity and inclusion in hiring, and who do better than their peers at hiring--and retaining--a diverse workforce.

And one of the most exciting ideas we’ve been piloting in this space has been a product called Skills Path. We quite simply asked ourselves “how do we connect companies and potential employees by training someone with the exact skills necessary for a specific role.” Skills Path allows companies to define a set of skills they need for roles and then have a fast path to hiring candidates. Potential employees have access to free, curated LinkedIn Learning courses to gain those skills and once they’ve completed an assessment, they earn a phone screen with the company, which in many cases will lead to a job. We’ve tested a similar solution and it increased hiring efficiency. Now have given nearly a dozen employers — including BlackRock, Citrix, Gap Inc., GitHub, Gusto, Microsoft, Prologis, Ralph Lauren, TaskRabbit, and Wayfair — access to Skills Path. 

The pilot companies in our test of Skills Path are looking forward to seeing candidates they never would have considered before for roles ranging from customer service representatives to data analysts to supply chain coordinators. “As a company that is inclusive by design, we invest in talent practices that enable us to reach the broadest candidate base possible," said Meghan Kelly, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Gap Inc. “Participating in LinkedIn’s Skills Path pilot will help us connect with candidates faster based on core skills and potential rather than traditional experience or credentials, which creates access for an even more diverse talent pool.” An approach like this means job seekers with no advanced degree — or no degree at all — now have a fairer shot at getting hired. 

A vision this bold to materially improve the way we connect talent to opportunity isn’t something LinkedIn can do alone. Schools, governments, companies and individuals all need to come together to help transition the hiring market from focusing solely on titles and companies, degrees and schools to also focusing on skills and abilities. The common goal we all share is increased and broadened prosperity. Schools want to help their students rise, governments want their citizens and companies to succeed, companies want to hire the best and help their employees thrive. We need your help to unlock and reward the talent that is everywhere, just waiting to be revealed.