Why your skills matter more than your degree 

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Why your skills matter more than your degree’

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. This week we’re taking a look at how recruitment is changing. Employers can now select people for their skills rather than solely on their educational qualifications or a previous job title. That’s a huge shift, but it’s not the first change that’s happened in the 21st-century world of hiring. I’ll be talking to Josh Graff, a senior executive at LinkedIn, the professional networking site that’s now 20 years old. And it’s been instrumental in changing how employers find new staff. And I’ll be hearing from my FT colleague Andrew Hill, a longtime observer of the changing world of work. Since we recorded this episode, LinkedIn has announced a restructuring and hundreds of job cuts among its 20,000 employees. I asked Josh Graff what the company was aiming to achieve when it was first set up. What were people meant to do on there?

Josh Graff
LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman and several others from PayPal and Socialnet in Silicon Valley in 2003 and pretty early on, he and his co-founders appreciated that your professional network builds over time and those relationships, how you’re connected to others can be immensely helpful. So the site then officially launched on the 5th of May 2003. I believe it took a year to reach our first million members, and then today we’re at 930mn members with three new members joining a second.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, and one of the big things it’s done, I think, is it’s changed the landscape of recruitment and finding a job. And that’s happened in quite an interesting way. Could you paint a sort of picture for the listeners on how some people have gone from what we might call active recruitment, ie looking for a job, to a more passive way of finding a job?

Josh Graff
In the early days, LinkedIn pioneered passive recruiting at scale. Recruiters used to rely on classified job ads and job boards to find talent. Job seekers were either in a job or they were looking for a job, But there wasn’t anything in between. And that all changed when we launched LinkedIn Recruiter back in 2008 to help companies to find passive candidates. And that’s those who may not have necessarily been searching for a job but might be a great fit. And this was a paradigm shift at the time and really changed the recruitment industry forever.

Isabel Berwick
One of the early adopters of LinkedIn as a social networking platform was my FT colleague Andrew Hill, the paper’s chief business writer. Andrew, what prompted you to sign up?

Andrew Hill
I joined because my colleague John Gapper was writing about social networks and it must have been about 2004, which apparently because I earned a badge for this, put me in the first million UK users of LinkedIn. And I don’t remember frankly using it other than gradually as people joined it, they found me there and, you know, asked to link to me and so on.

Isabel Berwick
Did you think it would take off or were you quite scathing?

Andrew Hill
I did go back to look at the article that John wrote, actually at the time. And one thing that you can say about LinkedIn is that it has survived. I mean, some of the other networks that he mentioned in that column were Friendster, Tickle, Crime, Orkut, Wallop, Meetup, Ryze and Spoke. And other than Orkut, which I think was briefly big in Brazil, I don’t think any of those others I’d even heard of when they existed, let alone now.

Isabel Berwick
They sound like hideous dating apps. And they were all workplace platforms, were they?

Andrew Hill
They were social networks. I think some of the later ones, Ryze, Spoke maybe those were more workplace. But LinkedIn is the survivor, so it deserves some kudos just for still being around.

Isabel Berwick
So two decades on, as Andrew says, LinkedIn has seen off many early rivals. But I asked the platform’s Josh Graff whether younger people are still taking to the network and using it as enthusiastically as millennial and Gen X workers have done. There are many other places with workplace content now, not least TikTok, and lots of online ways to connect and network. So I kind of perceive it as an older person’s platform and it might just be the algorithm feeding me that. But how many Gen Z jobseekers, for example, are there against the original users who are probably in their forties and fifties now, people who’ve essentially grown up with LinkedIn?

Josh Graff
I think five to 10 years ago that perception was probably fair. But today there’s 930mn members. There’s a really broad spectrum of demographics and industries. Gen Zs are actually our fastest-growing member segment. And if you look at student sign-ups in particular, they’re up over 70 per cent.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. Do you have the sort of demographic breakdown for each sort of cohort, like Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X?

Josh Graff
I don’t have the specific breakdown for each demographic, but I do know that Gen Zs are our fastest-growing segment at the moment.

Isabel Berwick
I suppose they’re coming into the workforce, aren’t they? So we hear a lot about purpose and culture being important to jobseekers and I think that’s especially for younger workers, but It’s a bit nebulous to explain. What does it look like in reality? Can you track those things on LinkedIn? I’m always a bit sceptical.

Josh Graff
Out of interest, why are you sceptical?

Isabel Berwick
’Cause I think a lot of people do purpose-washing and just use those. I mean, you know, #purpose is easy to write, but you know, how does one track it? If you’re looking for a job that matches your values, how would you track that on LinkedIn or look for it? Or how do employers find people?

Josh Graff
Pandemic was a catalyst which had a profound impact on how people work. And then since the pandemic, many people are re-evaluating not just how they work, but why they work. And traditionally, compensation, job title and prestige have been some of the top factors people look for when searching for jobs. And don’t get me wrong, salary will always be important to people, but company values are increasingly becoming a deal-breaker, particularly for younger generations. We just ran a study of over 10,000 people, and more than two-thirds of professionals in Europe wanna work for companies that share their values. Half of them, over half of them, in fact, said they wouldn’t work for a company that doesn’t share their values. Not even a pay rise would change their minds.

Isabel Berwick
And how can they demonstrate that they have got those kind of values and purpose?

Josh Graff
We launched a job search filter on LinkedIn to help people find companies that share their values. And when I say values, that could be diversity, equity, inclusion, sustainability, employee wellbeing. On the other side, we’ve encouraged companies to showcase their values on the company page, and since October last year, 40,000 companies have filled out their commitment section on their company page and they’re uploading evidence to support those claims. And what I found particularly interesting here is that we’ve seen a significant increase in jobs referencing work-life balance, for example. And if you look at the number of jobs referencing culture or values, that’s up 150 per cent year over year.

Isabel Berwick
And also people are getting wise to flannel. I think people are starting to have to prove what they say.

Josh Graff
Absolutely. And that’s why like on the company page where people are writing about their commitments, not only are companies writing about their commitments, but we’re encouraging them to upload the evidence, the proof points to demonstrate that as well.

Isabel Berwick
So, Andrew, we’ve heard from Josh there about the great things that employers are claiming, but you and I have had many conversations about what I would call the dread word, purpose. It’s always seemed to me very hard to pin down. So Josh makes a case there for how LinkedIn can help people find employers that match their own beliefs and principles. Is it significant that employers are talking about their purpose on LinkedIn?

Andrew Hill
I think it’s quite significant that there are more of them doing so. I mean, that just suggests to me that what started as a sort of not quite a fringe movement, but certainly an outlier has moved to the mainstream. And I think that means that it’s now a sort of entry-level requirement for an employer to talk about values and to make their case for being purposeful. And I think, again, it comes back to evidence and you’d hope that anyone applying would not just go by the pitch, but would say, OK, I want to dig down into that. There may be some place for LinkedIn to make it easier to do that and for employers to advertise, if you like, their own purpose. But again, you know, come with a certain scepticism. This is advertising in the end. Clearly what’s in the nice video that you might produce may not be the same as what you find when you enter their corporate culture.

Isabel Berwick
One of the other areas of recruitment which has changed in the past few years is a shift from hiring people solely based on their education and qualifications to a model that is recruiting people based on the skills they have. So I asked Josh about how LinkedIn plays into that because it can sift through people for the right skills.

Josh Graff
For me, this is the next frontier in recruiting, the idea of hiring on skills and potential versus just education and experience. I am acutely aware that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. And by hiring people on skills and not just where they went to university or what job title they hold today, you can massively broaden the talent pool, which is great for diversity and attract some amazing talent. Forty-five per cent of hiring managers are using our tools to hire on skills.

Isabel Berwick
Andrew, is hiring for skills as important and as widespread as Josh is suggesting? I think lots of people are still wedded to making sure that applicants went to the right university or business school, or maybe that they’re coming from a job with a prestigious job title.

Andrew Hill
I think that’s hard to gauge. I think the job title is still the main thing that you put on LinkedIn, and I suspect that is still the main thing that recruiters advertise for. But certainly this unbundling, if you like, of what lies behind the job title and particularly the unbundling of what lies behind the qualification is something that LinkedIn has pushed very hard and that some recruiters, many recruiters or big companies recruiting have started to look at. And that’s been accelerated too by the pandemic, I think, which made lots of companies realise they had people internally even who had particular skills that weren’t being used and that suddenly had to be pushed to the front during pandemic when it was all hands to the pump.

Isabel Berwick
Yes, ’cause I was gonna ask you, you go to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos every year, and they talk a lot there about skills for the future. You know, what is the talk now, what are hirers looking for?

Andrew Hill
Well, I mean, one thing I’d say that whatever one might think of Davos as a kind of schmoozing event is that the World Economic Forum has been very hot on this issue of skills and produces quite a lot of quite interesting work predicting what skills might be needed. And this year I chaired a panel actually about skills with people from Adecco, the big recruiter; Accenture, obviously a large consulting firm; Workday; Lynda Gratton from London Business School was on it as well. And they were all very adamant that they were now looking at . . . Ellen Shook from Accenture — she’s the head of HR — there’s talked about potential over pedigree and skills being combined with other things like learning agility and aspiration to try and beat the dominance of the job title as a way of assessing people. And Accenture, for example, is doing lots of apprenticeships. And of course, if you look at skills over job title and qualification, it’s quite a good way of increasing diversity of recruitment.

Isabel Berwick
So, Andrew, when we started this episode, you were saying you were an early adopter of LinkedIn, but you didn’t use it much in the beginning. How do you use it now and what would you say are its advantages and disadvantages?

Andrew Hill
Well, one thing that we haven’t mentioned, admittedly, is a niche preoccupation for you and me is that it is a very useful journalistic tool. I mean, it is almost unheard of not to search for somebody and find that they haven’t got a Huntington profile of some sort. I’m always a bit admiring of those who, you know, very important people who either don’t have one or just have the one job that they’ve got — CEO of the biggest company in the world or whatever. But if you’re looking for other people — and indeed I’ve used a lot, giving away trade secrets here — when you’re researching companies and you’re looking for people who might have left that company or might still be in the company, I think it’s quite useful for a discussion, as again, you and I have found when we post something, the conversation underneath any article that you post or link to an article is sometimes a bit more rational.

Isabel Berwick
I mean my main beef with it is it’s not very funny.

Andrew Hill
No, it takes itself much too seriously. I feel like there’s a missing element of LinkedIn. I don’t know whether it’ll ever happen. Maybe with the gradual deterioration of Twitter for those sorts of things it might do, but it is quite hard to find a sense of humour out there on LinkedIn, unfortunately.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, well, perhaps I’m going to start a one-person campaign to make it funnier.

Andrew Hill
The other risk is that I think anyone who’s in any kind of white-collar job is eventually going to be on LinkedIn calling themselves a consultant, (Isabel laughs) because ultimately we’re all going to be there. I mean, I checked this morning, there’s 27mn people calling themselves consultants on there, on LinkedIn and the ones who aren’t consultants and many of those who are are all gonna be thought leaders, ’cause there are a good half a million, I think, of those out there. So, you know, it’s coming to us all thought leaders and consultants for the rest of our careers.

Isabel Berwick
Andrew, thank you so much.

Andrew Hill
My pleasure.

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Isabel Berwick
I had no idea there were so many recruitment and connection platforms around at the start of the 21st century. And LinkedIn’s a great survivor. You know, it’s now owned by Microsoft, and it’s part of the infrastructure of professional working life. But we’d never know what’s around the corner. You know, if I’ve learned anything from looking at the world of work, it’s that disruption happens where you least expect it. I think what we can say is that skills-based hiring seems to be gaining traction. And what do I mean by that? I mean that a wider pool of diverse candidates might be able to apply for jobs that in the past were kept for graduates of prestigious universities, for example. That’s got to be a good thing, and that’s powered by more data being available. So let’s just hope there’s nothing more sinister than that coming down the pipeline. But I guess we just have to accept that more and more information about us is gonna be out there. I also like the virtual networking that LinkedIn still offers. That part hasn’t changed. It’s a place where people are respectful. I just think we need a bit more fun.

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With thanks to Josh Graff and Andrew Hill for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts — I do read them — and please do get in touch with us. We’re at workingit@ft.com or I’m Isabel Berwick on LinkedIn. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our relaunched weekly Working It newsletter. We take a sideways look at the biggest workplace stories, I answer your problems in the new Office Therapy column and we have the best workplace and management stories from across the FT. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. This episode of Working It was produced by Audrey Tinline. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa with mix from Jake Fielding. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.