Skills-based hiring could get 19x more workers — LinkedIn survey

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — Companies with a skills-based hiring approach could find 19 times more workers than those relying on degree requirements.
According to the employment-focused platform LinkedIn, skills-based hiring could also help industries struggling to fill open roles and bring in a diverse group of workers.
“Employers have long relied on proxies like education or years of experience in a given role to signal that a candidate was capable of performing a job. Now we are seeing more weight being put on having the right skills,” said Rand Ghayad, head of economics and global labor markets at LinkedIn.
And some places have already shifted to skill-based hiring over the past year.
About 45% of employers using LinkedIn for recruiting explicitly used skills data to fill open roles, up 12% from a year prior. Meanwhile, 19% of U.S. job postings no longer have degree requirements, up from 15% in 2021.
Looking ahead, 75% of recruiters told LinkedIn that they expect skills-first hiring to be a priority for their company within the next 18 months.
“Skills will count more and more when there is slack in the labor market,” added Ghayad.
“The bottom line is that the value of skills isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, we are seeing that employers are putting more weight on it when faced with larger pools of applicants,” he says.