LinkedIn’s rolling out a new tool which will recommend skills you should consider adding to your profile based on ‘trending skills’ amongst others with the same job title or history.
As explained by LinkedIn:
“To give you more insight into in-demand skills so that you can stay ahead of the curve, we’re rolling out a new monthly notification that suggests relevant trending skills among people with your same job title. If you already have this skill, consider adding it to your LinkedIn Profile — skills are one of the top ways that recruiters search for candidates on LinkedIn, and those with five or more skills on their profile are discovered up to 27 times more in searches by recruiters.”
In addition to the notification, you can also click on the skill to learn more about it, including which companies are hiring based on that ability. There’ll also be links to LinkedIn Learning courses you can take to improve your knowledge on that particular element – so if you don’t have it as a skill, you can learn and stay up to date, helping improve your prospects.
It’s the latest in LinkedIn’s efforts to better utilize its vast professional dataset, which is unmatched by any other organization. LinkedIn, which now has 530 million members, has access to a wide range of career insights, including commonalities in development and advancement, and data on how long people stay in each job, with each company, etc.
That data can be used to construct very detailed overviews of a person’s possible career path – as far back as 2014 LinkedIn were already using their data insights to build probable career progression maps for certain users.
The potential value of such application cannot be overstated – essentially, LinkedIn could take a listing of your interests and passions, along with your academic results, and provide a likely career pathway, which would not only project where you’re likely to end up (based on others with similar traits), but also where you’re likely to be happiest.
Of course, that’s the next level, LinkedIn’s not offering anything on this front as yet, but there’s little doubt that LinkedIn’s vast data resources could provide greater knowledge insights, which could enable users to make better career decisions – and enable recruiters to make far more informed candidate selections.
This new addition is just another step along this path – a small one, for sure, but another hint at what’s to come, especially now that LinkedIn has the resources of Microsoft behind it. Recommending potential skills to add is another refinement, but soon LinkedIn will be able to provide more personalized, in-depth career insights, making it a key platform for all job seekers and students.
Those developments have the potential change HR and recruiting as we know it. It’ll take some time, but LinkedIn’s continuing on its path to building the essential career platform.