‘Skills-first hiring will become the gold standard,’ LinkedIn report finds

The business and employment social media platform, LinkedIn, has released a report on the future of recruiting, in which it lists 17 predictions on what employers and employees will expect from each other, based on current trends.

The Microsoft-run social media platform has more than 900 million users spread across 200 countries and territories worldwide.

The report found that that when looking for job candidates, recruiters are 25 per cent more likely to search by skills than they were three years ago, and 50 per cent more likely to search by years of experience. Recruitment pros predict that skills-first hiring will become a priority for their company in the next 18 months.

This reorientation towards skills is taking a step away from the conventional approach of looking at whether the potential candidate has a degree. Research cited by the report demonstrates that workers who didn’t get a degree but have experience perform almost as well as graduates on critical measures like productivity.

Skills have become a critical resource for companies. This sentiment echoes a recently published policy note by a local expert which emphasised the need to focus on addressing the skills shortage in the country to increase productivity.

When LinkedIn’s report looked into what was most important for prospective candidates, it found that compensation was at the top, followed by a work-life balance and flexible working arrangements. This was closely followed by the importance of potential career advancement and also skills development.

Taking a closer look at the up and coming generation of workers, Gen Z (born after 1996), the company found that they were 47 per cent more likely to prioritise advancement in the company than Gen X (born between 1965 and 1981), 45 per cent more likely to prioritise the development of new skills and 17 per cent more likely to prioritise an inclusive and diverse workplace.

“Gen Z is almost 50 per cent of our workforce, and we’ve learned to respect and adapt to their ways of working. Gen Z doesn’t live to work, they think corporate jargon is silly, and they expect to be paid fairly,” said Ruben Santos, HR strategy and programmes lead at Ahold Delhaize, a multinational retailer.

On the matter of internal mobility, companies found that employees stayed up to 60 per cent longer at companies which had a high degree of mobility.

The full report can be found here.