How the New LinkedIn Skill Assessments Will Help Streamline Your Candidate Search

At LinkedIn, our mission is to create a place where everyone has access to opportunities based on the skills they have, regardless of their background and degree. And new research by LinkedIn reveals that this is important to hiring managers as well, with 83% agreeing that skills and credentialing are becoming more important for hiring talent. However,  77% of hiring managers agree it’s hard to know what skills candidates possess without a skill assessment.

That’s why we are excited to announce we are starting to roll out LinkedIn Skill Assessments. Recruiters and hiring managers can utilize this new tool to more effectively pinpoint which candidates are a good match on the basis of proven skills.

Skill Assessments allows members to take standardized, short-form assessments to not only validate, but showcase select skills — from Microsoft Excel to Adobe Photoshop to Javascript — directly on their profile. The assessments are produced by leading independent industry and subject matter experts sourced through the LinkedIn Learning’s network. Members pass by scoring in the 70th percentile or above and can decide whether or not they want to display a badge on their profile.

What’s more, Skill Assessments feed into LinkedIn’s hiring ecosystem in a couple key ways:

Quickly identify candidates with relevant skills

The vast majority of employers (86%) agree that an easy way to verify candidate skills would save them time and help them decide who should move forward in the hiring process. 

With LinkedIn Skill Assessments, candidate search results in LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Recruiter will show member badges, helping recruiters identify and verify skill proficiencies to more easily fill their open roles. Recruiters and hiring managers also now have the option to filter by “at least one passed skill,” floating candidates with verified skills to the top of their search results.

Cast a wider net and increase productivity 

For job posters, you can even suggest candidates take a Skill Assessment when posting open positions and receive a notification when they pass, providing an accurate way to efficiently vet candidates for the skills they need, and view a wider pool of jobseekers.

Unlike traditional interviews, LinkedIn Skill Assessments don’t require the recruiter to be there — it takes the same amount of time to assess 20 people as it does to test 200. Instead, recruiters can focus on analyzing results and making decisions. In addition, the speed and scale of these tests encourage recruiters to assess more candidates — including more nontraditional candidates, further diversifying the talent pool. 

This is good news for both employers and employees. Our recent research found that both parties agree that demonstrating verified skills during the job search process will improve the hiring experience for both job seekers and employers looking to hire. We found that 76% of professionals wish there was a way for employers to verify their skills so they could stand out amongst other candidates. And hiring managers can commiserate — 80% have found candidates do not have the skills they say they did during the interview. 

Skill Assessments are one of many signals that recruiters and hiring managers can utilize on LinkedIn. As more employers are moving to skills-based hiring models, this is the next step in LinkedIn’s role to improve the process of finding and hiring qualified talent with the skills necessary to succeed. Click hear to learn more about how it’s built on our engineering blog.

LinkedIn Skill Assessments will be ramping to all English speaking members globally over the next few months on Mobile and Desktop.

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