How LinkedIn Can Transform Recruiting, Again

A quick google search of “LinkedIn” yields LinkedIn’s homepage with a following description of three tenets; “Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.”

From my perspective, LinkedIn is THE place for managing your professional network and professional identity but currently lacks the products needed for users to create opportunities, build knowledge, and have access to actionable insights.

By addressing both players (job applicants & companies) in the recruitment process, LinkedIn can stand by “Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.” To successfully do this, it starts by defining the basic needs of both players in a recruitment process.

Job Applicants (from a student applicant perspective):

• Need a one-stop shop to apply to multiple jobs
• Need a place to showcase & validate their skill levels
• Need the ability to build relevant skills properly
• Need insights to help break into target industries

Companies:

• Need to find the best talent (determined by company fit, personal drive, and candidate skills)
• Need a uniform place to field talent, build a pipeline, and conduct recruitment
• Want a platform that can track recruitment metrics & give recommended actions
• Need to be on top of current and future recruitment trends

The bolded statements are needs currently seen as unaddressed. Determined as so by personal & friends’ opinions.

To address these needs, LinkedIn has to create a platform that can leverage Lynda.com and which extends past the traditional recruiting cycle (below).

Initialize Skill-Based Recruiting:

Skill-based recruiting directly answers “How well can a person do X?” This is especially useful for recruiters to test hard-skills. Currently, there is no integrated platform for recruiters to view a candidates skills in a succinct format. LinkedIn and Lynda.com are in perfect position to change that. Relating back to user needs, the combination can easily help build, showcase, and validate relevant skills with 2 products.

Certification Program: Use Lynda.com to build & certify skills

The process to create this program goes as follows.

1. Analyze what testable skill(s) employers want candidates to have
2. Determine the level of proficiency needed for those skills
3. On Lynda.com, create offerings that teach & test those skills
4. Label the course pages of those skills as “Company X Verified”
5. Allows users to take the course or skip to the test, with passing scores earning a certification
6. After passing, have the skill show up as “Certified” on User’s LinkedIn Profile
7. Now users can showcase they have a skill specific to the employers need & have it validated through the proficiency test (Where score determines level of proficiency)

For example, if I was applying to LinkedIn’s current Business Analyst position, I would need to know SQL per the qualifications listed. A sample user flow to potentially build, showcase, and validate their SQL skill would go as such:

Skill Ranking System: Companies/Users Can View Most Skilled

The process to create this system goes as follows.

1. User scores & level of proficient from the certification program are grouped together per skill
2. Score Graph & Ranking views are created to view top to lowest scores
3. User’s testing history and quick profile view are attached to that specific user’s node
4. Companies can purchase this data to find the most skilled applicants (Right Side)
5. Users can use this data to view their ranking, ways they can improve, and recommended skills based off their industry (Left Side)

Synthesizing Value

By initializing the impact of skill based-recruiting, the recruiting model fundamentally changes (new model depicted below) in its market, use, and scale.

The new LinkedIn would now be able to capture interactions between practically any student and companies instead of interactions between typically junior/senior students and companies.

Moreover by garnering data about user’s tests, skills of applicants that companies hire, and company/applicant preferences, key insights can be easily derived.

1. By analyzing what skills companies typically hire, industry reports could now depict skill/hiring preferences which would be extremely useful for applicants
2. By analyzing what type of applicants are applying to what companies, industry reports to recruiters could now reveal key trends in real-time

Overall, this new product strategy defines how LinkedIn can change recruitment to be finally faceted through skill, which fundamentally helps achieve users to “Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.”

I would love to hear your thoughts, critique, or support. Thank you for reading.