LinkedIn believes recruiters will prioritise skills over degree for hiring in the future: Report

Microsoft’s professional networking platform, LinkedIn, has revealed that in the future job seekers won't benefit running behind educational degrees as recruiters will prefer skills. A report by Bloomberg revealed that LinkedIn sees a future where employers will prioritise applicants’ proven skills like leadership, data analysis and more instead of long-established requirements like college degree or prior job titles.

As per a statement by, Joseph Fuller, a management professor at Harvard Business School, "Skills-based hiring is the great white whale, the holy grail of the labour market."

As per a survey conducted by LinkedIn last month, more than 80 per cent of employers believe that they should hire people based on their skill set rather than degrees that they have. More than half of these employers are still hiring college grads as they are ‘less risky’.

The report added that skill-first hiring is considered a way to expand economic opportunity but there hasn’t been much progress in that direction. This approach can prove to be quite useful for job seekers without a college degree but a good skill set.

Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn Vice President, said: “Skills has been a conversation that has been going on for years, for decades. In those conversations were often the same people: policymakers, academics, nonprofits. Missing from those conversations, almost all of them, were employers.”

He added that due to the tight situation of the job market in the past two years, employers are finally asking the right questions. He said, “Employers are no longer asking: ‘What is this?’ They're asking, ‘How do I do this?’”

The LinkedIn survey also revealed that professionals are taking career breaks and pursuing different dream jobs. It added that over 84 per cent of Indian professionals stated that they are more open to career pivots compared to 20 years ago.

LinkedIn even released fastest growing jobs in 5 fields that do not need a bachelor’s degree. These included consulting, marketing, research, human resources, media and communications.

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