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Good or bad, habits are hard to break. Good habits come to feel natural, while bad habits stubbornly stick around — even when you know better. Most recruiting professionals understand the importance of skills-based hiring, but that’s not always reflected in their day-to-day habits. 

One skills-based hiring habit that already feels routine for many recruiters: ensuring your job posts include the specific skills that you’re looking for (instead of simply implying skills from experience or education).

Seven in ten (70%) job descriptions posted in the last year on LinkedIn do incorporate concrete skills. And it’s a good habit for good reason: Job posts that include skills see a nearly 20% higher view-to-apply rate compared with posts without skills. In other words, job seekers are almost 20% more likely to apply to a job post that incorporates skills. 

Yes, that does mean 30% of job posts could be easily and meaningfully improved, just by including specific skills. But by and large, it’s a good habit that’s become second nature for most recruiting teams. 

However, there’s also a bad habit that has stayed stubbornly common: searching for candidates without searching for skills. Read on to see how rare this skills-based hiring practice still is, along with a look at which industries do it best (and worst) and which are actually improving. 

Skills-based searches and why it matters

First, let’s skip right to the takeaway. If you only remember one thing from this blog post, let it be this: When searching LinkedIn for candidates, you can and should make it a habit to include a filter to look for specific skills. (LinkedIn’s new AI-assisted search feature prompts you to do just that.) 

Despite the simplicity of this tactic, just 13% of candidate searches performed by recruiters included a skills filter.

It’s a super simple tweak that can make a world of difference; an earlier analysis of LinkedIn data found that recruiters who searched by skills more often see up to 22% higher InMail acceptance rates. 

As to the “why,” it’s for the same reasons that underpin skills-based hiring in general: Sourcing and assessing candidates by skill (rather than by experience or education alone) results in a broader and more diverse talent pool, even as your search becomes more finely tuned to your specific needs. 

By focusing on what the candidate can actually do, rather than what their credentials imply, recruiters can help make better hires. 

Which industries are best (and worst) at skills-based searching

While the overall rate of recruiter searches with the skill filter is just 13%, in certain sectors it’s encouragingly higher. And it might not be the industries you expect.

Prior to seeing the results, we hypothesized that the tech industry might be near the top, since engineering roles rely on so many specific skills (such as programming languages, testing and debugging, DevOps, etc.). In reality, recruiters in the technology, information, and media industry did have an above-average share of skills-based searches at 14%, but recruiters in other industries easily outpaced them.

The industries with the best skills-based searching habits were consumer services, entertainment, education, government administration, and utilities, with 17% to 18% of all their searches including a skills filter. Recruiters in these sectors more often home in on candidates by focusing on must-have skills — likely because the roles in these spaces tend to be highly specialized, regulated, or dynamic.  

On the other hand, the industries with the lowest share of skills-based searches tend to focus on more entry-level roles, such as administrative support, food service, and retail, that don’t call for specific hard skills. Even so, recruiters in these sectors may be neglecting soft skills such as communication, adaptability, and problem-solving they could be searching for. 

Finally, let’s look at which industries have seen the greatest improvement over the last year, in terms of skills-based searches.

The wholesale industry, for instance, improved from a rate around 10% to 13%, a relative increase of 24% in just one year. These shifts show that it is possible to meaningfully change habits quickly — especially when the change is as simple as adding an extra search filter to get more targeted results. 

Final thoughts

Incorporating skills into job posts and candidate searches isn’t just a good habit — it’s a transformative one and can significantly improve hiring outcomes. By focusing on specific skills, recruiters can attract more qualified applicants, build a more diverse talent pool, and ultimately make better hires.

Methodology

The timeframes for the yearly analyses (and YoY comparisons) are July 2023 – June 2024 vs. July 2022 – June 2023. The average view-to-apply rate for LinkedIn premium job postings with and without skills is compared to highlight the impact of adding skills to job descriptions. Only skills explicitly mentioned in a job description are included. LinkedIn Recruiter search activity in the last two years was analyzed, excluding searches where industry information was null. Industry refers to the industry in which the recruiter’s employer belongs. We limited our analysis to industries with at least 100K searches in each 12-month period. 

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