Recruiters Who Focus on Skills See Better InMail Acceptance Rates

If you’re not already familiar with the term “skills-first hiring,” you probably will be soon: 75% of recruiting pros say it’ll be a priority for their company this year, and it’s not hard to see why.

Skills-first hiring — the idea of hiring candidates for what they can actually do, rather than relying solely on traditional signals like education or past experience — offers many advantages, like improving your quality of hire, expanding your talent pool, and reducing bias. 

But here’s another benefit you might not expect: better InMail acceptance rates. 

That’s right: Recruiters with the most skills-first searches see +22% higher InMail acceptance rates, compared with recruiters with the least skills-first searches, according to new LinkedIn data. 

Let’s take a closer look at what this means for recruiters, then look at the industries with the highest (and lowest) proportion of skills-first searches. 

Skills-first searching is a key element of skills-first hiring

When you think about implementing skills-based hiring, your mind might go straight to assessing the skills of candidates already in your talent pipeline. But you should also think about starting further upstream, when you’re still searching for candidates, as this data suggests.

The top 10% of recruiters who tend to filter their LinkedIn searches by skills (and not by degrees, past employers, and job titles) also tend to get a much better response rate on their InMails than their peers on the opposite end of this skills-first scale. 

So, why are skills-first searches correlated with higher InMail rates? 

The answer may be that skills-first searches enable recruiters to find more relevant matches from broader talent pools. If a candidate’s skills are especially well suited to the role being offered, they may be more likely to respond positively when a recruiter reaches out. 

When you focus on skills first and foremost — instead of just looking for candidates from a blue-chip brand or an elite university — you’re likely to find more hidden gems whom other recruiters might overlook. And because you’re reaching folks whom other recruiters neglect, they may be more eager to accept your InMail. It’s all part of filtering candidates in, rather than filtering them out.

So if you’re struggling to find enough candidates for an open role, consider searching by skills first — and avoiding filters for degrees, companies, or experience. 

Industries with the most (and least) skills-first searchers

Now let’s take a look at which industries have the highest concentration of skills-first searchers. Many of these industries tend to be more technical, requiring specific hard skills and advanced subject matter expertise.

If you’re in one of the five industries listed above and you’re not prioritizing skills in your searches, consider this a warning: Your competitors could be way ahead of you. (Fortunately, making your searches more skills-first is relatively easy and well within your control.)

Now let’s turn to the industries with the lowest concentration of skills-first searches. While these sectors surely involve a good mix of hard and soft skills, they may be less commonly used as hiring criteria.

If you’re hiring for one of these industries where skills-first searching is less common, consider this an opportunity: You could gain a competitive edge and find more relevant candidates, simply by tweaking the way you perform searches on LinkedIn.

Methodology

In this analysis, we measure how “skills-focused” recruiters are by looking at the types of filters they use when searching for candidates. They’re considered more “skills-first” if they are more likely than the average recruiter to use skills filters and less likely to use filters related to degrees, company names, or job titles; the inverse is also true. Only recruiters with at least 100 searches on LinkedIn Recruiter over the past two years (March 2021 — March 2023) were considered in this analysis.