Skills-based hiring

How Removing Some Requirements from Your Job Descriptions Can Lead to More Inclusive Hiring

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It was almost a passing note in President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union address. Tucked in amid the headlining particulars about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing pandemic was a brief promise to U.S. workers that they would be given “a fair shot” and companies would “hire them based on their skills not degrees.”

But what does that really mean to an aspiring project manager in Texas, salesperson in Maine, or software engineer in California? Just what does skills-first hiring look like?

LinkedIn can provide one answer to what it might look like because we ran an innovative pilot program in which we hired 13 customer support consultants by removing the basic qualification — 2+ years of customer service experience on email, chat, and phone — from the job description and focused on skills rather than experience or education.

As an added bonus, we also gave prospective applicants access to free LinkedIn Learning courses geared toward helping them develop the skills needed for this role. And anyone who passed the two-part skills assessment was guaranteed — that’s right, guaranteed — an interview with LinkedIn.

Significantly, most of the consultants hired in this pilot did not meet the company’s previous basic qualification (BQs). 

“This is exciting,” says Kristen Hansen, the recruiter who worked on this pilot, “because traditionally these candidates would not have passed through for an interview.” 

Here’s a look at how LinkedIn built out this skills-first hiring pilot — as well as the benefits and lessons learned:

1. Rewrote job descriptions to emphasize the skills needed to do the job well rather than the traditional qualifications

The first and perhaps most important step in skills-first hiring is rewriting job descriptions — eliminating the BQs and pruning the preferred qualifications.

Before the pilot program, LinkedIn’s job descriptions for customer support consultants had this as a basic qualification: “2+ years of experience in customer service or account management supporting a product/solution. Utilizing multiple communication channels (email, chat, and phone).” That was supplemented by 10 nice-to-have “preferred qualifications.”

Original "Customer Support Consultant" job description posted by LinkedIn: Basic Qualifications: 2+ years of experience in customer service or account management supporting a product/solution utilizing multiple communication channels (email, chat and phone) Preferred Qualifications: -- Experience in one or more of the following areas: Marketing, Advertising, Sales and/or Recruiting -- Excellent verbal and written communication skills -- Experience working in a contact center -- Direct work experience in dealing with difficult customers -- Strong proficiency with the Internet -- Experience in technical and product support/troubleshooting -- Experience analyzing data -- Expert knowledge of MS Office -- Ability to multitask using different media -- Adapt at cross-functional team or individual partnership

In the replacement job description, there is no BQ and just three “preferred experiences,” which touch on communication skills, collaboration, and work experience “dealing with challenging customer situations.”

Updated job posting for Customer Support Consultant position at LinkedIn: Preferred Experience: -- Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to explain complex messages to customers via telephone, email and chat -- Direct work experience in dealing with challenging customer situations -- Adept at cross-functional team collaboration with the ability to interact with all levels of the organization

Further down the reworked job description, the nine job responsibilities remained largely the same, though the more recent posting has a modified introduction and an added explanation of how the assessment and interview process were going to roll out.

The new introduction starts with LinkedIn’s vision statement and then signals that this job posting will be distinctly different from most others a job seeker has likely read: “We fundamentally believe everyone deserves a shot, regardless of where you went to school, where you grew up, and what opportunities you’ve had in the past.”

LinkedIn drew a line in the sand: It would be hiring for potential not pedigree.

The new posting also added a quick overview of the assessment process: “As part of the interview process, you will be asked to complete a multiple-choice assessment. If you pass the multiple-choice assessment, you will be invited to complete a video interview.”

2. Embraced the upsides of providing a learning path to help candidates develop the role’s essential skills

When prospective applicants went to the landing page, they were given access to a video about the pilot program and a quick overview of the hiring process. Significantly, they were also offered a link to content at LinkedIn Learning: Becoming a Customer Support Specialist.

This ungated learning path included more than six hours of content in the form of eight courses that ranged from Customer Service Foundations to Customer Service: Problem Solving and Troubleshooting.

Amy Schultz, then head of recruiting for the LinkedIn product team and now the global head of talent acquisition at Canva, notes that you can’t make this kind of coursework mandatory for a job application in the U.S. “That was an early learning from the legal team,” she says. “They said, ‘No, you can’t make people learn stuff to apply for a job.’” Still, this kind of content can help candidates who choose to look at it strengthen their skills, boost confidence, and pass the assessments.

“People,” Amy says, “couldn’t believe that LinkedIn was going out of its way to help job seekers and set them up for success in interviewing for a role.”

The learning path did seem to set applicants up well: Candidates who engaged with the learning content passed the multiple-choice test 44% more often than candidates who did not.

3. Built a thoughtful assessment and made it easy to use

An effective skills assessment is critical to skills-first hiring. LinkedIn started by bringing in an organizational psychologist. “We really needed to understand exactly what a customer support consultant does,” Amy says. “What are the core skills and the core day-to-day duties that they do? Understanding those helped us both develop learning content to help build those skills and the assessments to validate that candidates have those skills.” 

The psychologist interviewed current consultants to get a feel for what their typical day is like. After creating a set of questions, the psychologist went back to them for validation. LinkedIn landed on a process that started with a 20-question multiple-choice test and, for those who passed, moved to a video assessment, where candidates recorded answers to questions about how they would handle different customer scenarios.

Kristen reviewed and evaluated each of the videos that was submitted. While this required an up-front investment, it really paid off when Kristen did her phone screens, where she didn’t have to do the usual experience validation. “By having assessments,” she says, “I was able to cut my recruiter phone screen time in half.” 

Kristen was also able to move straight from the phone screen to onsite batch interviews, in which hiring managers from each line of business would tag-team interview candidates. This also reduced the time to fill. 

4. Found effective new employees who didn’t meet previous BQs

If skills-first hiring were an old-fashioned job description, recruiting efficiency and added diversity would be the preferred qualifications; the basic qualification would be to create opportunities for professionals who had the right potential but not the right pedigree.

The pilot worked: More than half the people hired in two rounds of the program did not meet LinkedIn’s earlier basic qualification.

Kylie Sveum was one of the people hired in the first round. In her previous job, Kylie had been a senior program associate for Global Brigades, a nonprofit that brought mobile medical clinics and public health infrastructure projects to rural Panama.

“The people back in the U.S. that I would tell what I was doing,” Kylie recalls, “they would say, ‘Oh, that’s great. You must be learning so much.’” Everyone told Kylie she was punching a ticket that had “future work” written all over it — everyone, that is, except potential employers.

“They wouldn’t see a big company name or see experience working with millions of dollars,” she says. “There were definitely some jobs that I thought I could do well at and excel in. But some of them, I just didn’t check the box they were looking for.”

She saw the customer support role on LinkedIn, applied, and passed her assessments. “The skills assessment portion of the interview process,” she says, “helped me to think, ‘I do have these skills. I’ve never done this exactly and I don’t know much about the technology side of things, but I do have the skills they’re looking for.’”

Final thoughts: Skills-first hiring will become the ‘rhythm of the business’

Both Kristen and Amy, like President Biden, are bullish on the long-term possibilities of skills-first hiring.

Kristen cautions that for highly technical or more senior roles the skills evaluation and training will be more difficult and complex to create. “But for support,” she says, “this could be an amazing opportunity to scale and make it the rhythm of the business.”

Amy agrees. “Skills-based hiring and skills-based learning,” she says, “are for sure the future.”

If you’re interested in learning more about building skills for the future, register for Forward, LinkedIn’s virtual event at which global talent leaders will discuss the disruption reshaping work. The event will feature a deep dive into the opportunities and challenges of a skills-first talent strategy with Sean Hudson, head of learning and development at Pfizer, and several other major talent leaders. You can register here now.

*Photo by Yannic Läderach on Unsplash

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