Find Talent for In-Demand Jobs by Eyeing Alternative Talent Pools
Hiring for the most in-demand roles is never easy — by definition, you’re facing intense competition from other companies, all vying to hire candidates from the same limited pool of talent.
Today, we’ll look at new data from LinkedIn suggesting that those talent pools may be wider than you (or your competition) realize.
Read on to discover which in-demand roles are mostly filled by hires you might not consider, where to look beyond the usual suspects, and why certain skills are especially transferable.
Source candidates who aren’t in the roles you’re hiring for
When sourcing candidates, it’s natural to begin with folks who already hold the job title you’re looking to fill. For instance, if you need to hire a project manager, reaching out to existing project managers is a logical first step. The only problem? That’s precisely where everyone else is looking too.
Consider this: more than 80% of people who started a new job in the past year came from a different occupation. In other words, four out of five of those workers were hired for positions that they didn’t currently hold.
In fact, many people came from a different department or function entirely — though it depends on the exact role, of course. While over 70% of store associates came from jobs outside of sales, for example, only 15% of registered nurses came from jobs outside of healthcare.
To get a better understanding, let’s start by looking at all the top 10 most in-demand jobs overall, as measured by the number of paid job posts for these roles on LinkedIn. For six of the roles, a majority of people hired actually moved from a different function.
If you’re recruiting for one of those six roles, you may find that a broader skills-first search is particularly profitable. Many of these roles are in the sales function or the retail industry and call for valuable soft skills like customer service, communication, or planning.
Let’s briefly reflect on roles that might not benefit as much from looking outside their function. Jobs like registered nurse and software engineer are highly specialized and call for precise hard skills like phlebotomy or Python programming, respectively.
Generally speaking, then, it seems that roles which are more reliant on soft skills will benefit the most from a wider search. That’s especially important to keep in mind when considering candidates who lack experience in the exact role, industry, or function that you’re hiring for.
Operations and the talent opportunity of transferable skills
So, where’s the best place to find candidates with strong soft skills? The answer may be simpler than you think. On LinkedIn Recruiter, just set the “function” spotlight search filter to “Operations.”
Broadly defined, operations refers to “the part of the business that provides customers with the goods or services that they ordered,” according to the BBC’s educational resources for business students.
And operations was the single most common previous function for each of the six in-demand roles we identified above.
The data above suggests you may be able to find plenty of “hidden gem” candidates by searching for people currently in operations, even if the job you’re hiring for isn’t in operations.
Why? More than any other function, operations has a large overlap of skills required for the most in-demand jobs — skills like planning, coordination, and customer service, to name just a few.
Your next great sales hire, for example, may be developing exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills from their current job as an operations manager in a completely different industry.
And to perform even better, more sophisticated searches on LinkedIn, you should strongly consider a skills-first approach — which can be as easy as using the skills spotlight filter in Recruiter. By prioritizing a candidate’s skills, rather than their job title, you’re focusing on what really matters while also casting a wider net than the competition.
Final thoughts
In an increasingly competitive talent market, thinking outside the box is a necessity. Casting a wider net and focusing on transferable skills can open up new talent pools you may have overlooked.
The next time you’re sourcing for in-demand roles, remember: The best candidate for the job might not be in the function you’re looking at — they might be hidden in operations, wielding a host of transferable skills.
And by focusing on skills rather than titles, you’re not only expanding your candidate pool, you’re also homing in on what truly matters for success in the role.
Methodology
For this analysis, the most in-demand jobs are those with the highest number of premium job posts from January 1, 2023, to March 31, 2023, excluding roles with fewer than 1,000 job posts in the quarter and roles for which the majority of job posts come from a single company. For job changes, we examined the aggregated and anonymized data of LinkedIn members with full-time employment who changed job titles in the last 12 months (May 2022 to April 2023), excluding career starters who don’t have a previous job transition.
