LinkedIn Tools: Skills

I am in the process of trying to figure out what application customizations work and which ones are a waste of time.

I still think cover letters in tech are a waste of time, but I am willing to test a number of other items. Today’s commentary is on LinkedIn Skills

TL;DR - If most people don’t use the features in LinkedIn, the recruiters will find them useless. If I test something and I feel it is unrealistic that the competitive candidates will fill it in, I walk away. I think the LinkedIn Skills fall into this bucket. It seems LinkedIn is desperate to get me to fill these things in so that they can predict better roles. But the things they are asking are soo very basic, it isn’t helpful to use their preset form.

For example: The skill: Communication

Which roles did you use this skill? All of them.

And that was the case for 90% of the skills they claimed I didn’t have! It made me quickly lose trust and decide to put my efforts in other directions.

Before today, they didn’t have communication as one of my skill sets in my profile. It is in my profile in the form of individual resume lines but I didn’t take the time to weed through thousands of keywords to describe what I do to LinkedIn word by word. I could pick through the list with a number of frustrated comments, but I will limit my comments to this: LinkedIn product team, I feel for you. This isn’t easy to match people to roles but I don’t see how this is ever going to work.

If this was a product sense question, I might say my solution would be for people with 5+ years of experience in a role, maybe default to those being the skills and asking them to confirm unless they are specialized, like Generative AI.

Why can’t LinkedIn scan my job descriptions and pick up these skills? Can’t it tell from the job title that I have these skills?

There are only 2 items on this list you really need to ask me. That also begs the question: Is there even a point in forcing the addition of tags to your system??