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“Our founder likes to think of us as treasure hunters,” says Tim Brown, vice president of talent acquisition at Chobani and one of many LinkedIn customers quoted in a new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Our recruiting team is really out going beyond just pedigrees and trying to discover in candidates’ skills the treasures that can fit into our organization.” 

And if recruiters are treasure hunters, the OECD report on skills-first hiring shows why the smartest recruiters are dropping their outdated paper maps (candidates’ degrees) for state-of-the-art metal detectors (candidates’ skills).  

As a group of 38 highly developed countries — including the U.S., Japan, Germany, the U.K., South Korea, Türkiye, and Mexico — the OECD is a trusted authority on economic policy and practices. The group’s new report, Empowering the Workforce in the Context of a Skills-First Approach, features LinkedIn data and a treasure trove of actionable findings. 

The full report is well worth your time, and we highly encourage you to read it; below, we’ll highlight just the LinkedIn data, some of which first appeared in LinkedIn’s 2025 Future of Recruiting. 

Looking beyond pedigree in favor of potential

The basic idea of skills-first hiring is that when you need to hire someone, you care about what they can do more than where they’ve been. It’s about weighing a candidate’s competencies over their credentials. 

Candidates’ degrees, alma maters, and past employers are all commonly used as proxies for their abilities to do the job — the problem is that, in practice, they’re very poor proxies. 

A skills-first mindset also prizes the capacity to grow, not just what someone already knows. “We look for whether somebody brings that learnability attitude to the table – ‘if I know the problem, I can solve it,’” says Dharmendra Sethi, corporate vice president of talent acquisition and talent management at GlobalLogic, in the report. “In that sense, the main thing that is required from now on is the attitude to learn.  

“There are ways to be able to gauge a person’s attitude and openness to learn and thrive,” Dharmendra adds. “We are talking about the skills-first approach. Why is this philosophy important? Because it enables an organization to be more agile and inclusive and to have a future-ready workforce. That is the core of success in the coming world: It’s no longer a strategy of hiring alone, it’s a combination of ‘build and buy,’ and it’s more build. In the future, skills are the only currency that will work for any organization.” 

Significantly, these days more recruiters are searching for candidates by their skills than by their schooling.

And as you might expect, OECD countries are ahead of the pack on these practices. According to LinkedIn data, 14% of recruiter searches in OECD countries are filtered for skills — that’s over 7x the share of searches which are filtered by degree (less than 2%).

Those numbers compare favorably with the latest global averages, where 13% of searches are filtered by skill and 3% are filtered by degree. 

Why are some organizations quicker to adopt than others? It often comes down to senior-level sponsorship. “Securing leadership buy-in is a big undertaking,” says Erin Colwell, head of talent acquisition at Lucky Strike Entertainment. “Competency-based interviewing and skills-based hiring training is something that often falls on the back burner – other things take priority.”

But that’s no reason to put it off. “You can make skills-based hiring what you need it to be pretty easily,” Erin says. “Together with heads of departments, we worked to make an assessment for managers. We came up with some of the skills that we knew that the manager must possess and we made a test, and now every candidate needs to go through the test in order to get hired. And for the people hired before we developed this assessment, we looked at what wasn’t working, so that we can better catch those things through the assessment going forward.”

Driving quality hires and attracting in-demand talent

As first highlighted in the 2025 Future of Recruiting report, LinkedIn data reveals that companies with the most skills-based searches are 12% more likely to make a quality hire compared with companies with the fewest skills-based searches.

Note that for this analysis a “quality hire” is determined by equally weighing three criteria: demand (whether the hire was in high demand, that is the top 25% of members receiving InMails from recruiters within the last 12 months before hire); retention (whether the hire stayed at least one year at the company of hire); and mobility (whether the hire moved to a second role within the company within a year of the initial hire).

In particular, skills-first searches are strongly associated with that in-demand criteria: Companies with the most skill-based searches are 33% more likely to hire workers in the top quartile of recruiter demand. 

That lift matters most in markets where the right expertise is scarce: “Skills-first is important when it comes to hiring super-niche technical talent – having the ability to identify skills, not just by bringing people in, but also developing people internally,” says Marcus Knowles, talent scout and sourcing partner at Spire Global. “We use a skills-first framework to grow the talent that we have already — that could be people who join us on an apprenticeship or people who grow within the organization and build their skills with us.  

“The challenge we’ve encountered is that the skills we are looking to hire, we don’t have locally. We have to do a global search to bring these people to Spire. We are involved in a partnership with Space Scotland, where we are looking at ways in which we can bridge these skills challenges that we have through education, training, and other platforms and initiatives.

“We have made significant changes to our sourcing and recruiting model over the last 15 months, changing how we source candidates, where we find these individuals, the tools and platforms that we’re using, and how we build our brand with candidates.” 

Daniel Cairney, a talent acquisition partner also at Spire, sums up the case for skills-first hiring practices: What began as a response to local talent shortages became a great way to strengthen inclusion and evaluate candidates on what really matters. 

“A big reason why we’re focusing on skills-based hiring is talent shortages, the challenges we face in finding talent locally,” Daniel says. “That is where skills-based hiring can really help us — it acts as a funnel for candidates but also supports our diversity and inclusion goals in moving away from degree inflation and overreliance.” 

Final thoughts

Skills-first hiring isn’t just a trend; it’s a competitive advantage that shows up in every stage of the talent lifecycle — from sourcing scarce expertise to retaining and redeploying talent as business needs shift. The OECD report and LinkedIn data point to the same conclusion: Companies that prioritize skills today build more adaptable, future-ready workforces tomorrow. The sooner leaders align their hiring playbooks to that reality, the faster they’ll unlock the full trove of talent already hidden in plain sight.

Methodology

A skills-focused recruiter is someone in the top 25% of recruiters using skills-based searches. Companies are considered top performers if over 25% of their recruiters are skills-focused. Companies are considered bottom performers if they have no recruiters who are skills-focused. For quality of hire analyses, we measured quality by giving equal weight to three measures: demand (whether the hire was in high demand, that is in the top 25% of members receiving InMails from recruiters over the 12 months before hire); retention (whether the hire stayed at least one year at the company of hire); and mobility (whether the hire moved to a second role within the company within a year of the initial hire). Note: These are the best metrics available via LinkedIn platform data, though calculating quality of hire at your own company is typically calculated with internal data.