How Does LinkedIn Get You a Job?

Behavior change is hard. Actively changing another person's behavior is even harder. But there are plenty of companies out there that have been able to crack that code. I'm Kristen Berman, behavioral scientist and co founder of Irrational Labs. Each week I get to chat with visionary product and organizational leaders to uncover their insights about user behavior and how they've managed to change it. I mash this up with some of the latest research in the field to get to the bottom of our core psycholog. So let's dive in and unlock the secrets behind the science of change. The Science of Change podcast is presented by Setsale, the world's number one revenue execution platform. If you can believe it, it's been almost two years since the COVID 19 pandemic first appeared in our lives, bringing with it countless behavior changes that have completely rewired how we live. But one area where we've seen some of the biggest changes is the workplace. The pandemic has upended everything we thought we knew about how we work. We've learned how to work remotely, we've learned just how much we value our work life balance, and we've learned that our current job may not be the one for us. So naturally, the way we approach looking for work has changed too. And that's what today's episode is about. My guest is Ada Yu, a director of product management at LinkedIn, where she leads a team that looks for ways to help job seekers find and apply for the right jobs and help job posters find the best candidates. All this stuff is a behavioral scientist's dream job, and talent searching is all classic behavioral science, and Ada and I really cover a lot of ground. We talk about mitigating bias in hiring and how choice overload demotivates job seekers to apply for the right opening. We also cover all the different experiments LinkedIn has run with the ultimate goal of making it easier to do a very hard thing match the right person with the right job. How do you help job seekers who are at the very beginning of the process get from search to hire? And I know LinkedIn does some experiments or have a testing mentality. So if you have any tactical experiments where you've tried to get people through the process or learn something about this process, that'd be great to hear about.

There are a lot of interesting experiments that we've tried, some that have been successful, some that have failed, for example getting people to save more jobs. One of the experiments we did is how do we make the save button more prominent so that we can get more people to express the interest in jobs. But what we learned is by getting people to save, we actually delayed their desire to apply. So what we saw is like fewer people ended up applying to jobs because they had this in their safe bucket and the chance of them coming back was actually lower than if we just tried to get them to apply in the first place. So that's one such experiment. Another one that was interesting is now in the world of mobile, we see this pattern where there's this thing called Infinite Scroll. So you just see job after job and you continue scrolling just like content. And so we thought, why not put that on desktop? Why not? If you think about a search page, what you see is page one, and you go to page two, you go to page three. And so we try to experiment where we put in Infinite scroll. And you would think that would actually be good for seekers because they can now browse through more jobs in an effortless way. And actually this is in search studies, which is these moments of friction actually helps anchor people to the set of results. So one, they know where they are and they can get back to it. And two, it actually forces a decision which is, do I want to look at that last job or do I want to go to the next page of search results? So when we did this Infinite scroll experiment, what we saw is people ended up browsing more jobs that are towards the bottom of their results, but those actually are less relevant than the ones that are at the top because there's no friction in getting to the next page. And the next page ended up scrolling more, but they were getting worse results because they were now seeing less relevant jobs.

Real quick, let's break those two experiments down. Each one may be intuitive after you hear the results, but they actually aren't that obvious or LinkedIn wouldn't have run them in the first place. So the first one. Imagine you're searching for jobs on a Saturday afternoon. You have limited time and are deciding whether or not to apply to the jobs you find. You see two one, apply right now or two, save the job to maybe apply later. You think about your upcoming schedule and decide you'll have more time tomorrow. So you click save. But then tomorrow comes and a friend sends you a text inviting you to brunch. All of a sudden it's five o' clock on Sunday, you're tired and have to start planning for your week. Monday comes around and you're buried in work that saved job long forgotten. What happened. This is called present bias. We overvalue the present moment, typically trading off immediate rewards like brunch. For longer term outcomes like a new job, the intuition for product teams is to allow you more choice. Do it now or later. But we usually forget that later is really code for never. Tomorrow is always a better day. For the second study, when something is unlimited, like job postings placed in an infinite scroll, we have trouble stopping ourselves in the moment. Stopping cues like visual aids, physical barriers or prompts nudge us to stop and think. Here's a perfect example. There's a study where participants were asked to eat potato chips from a can of Pringles. Inside the can, every 7th or 14th chip was dyed red. The people eating out of the can with the dyed Pringles ate 43 to 65% fewer chips than those eating from regular cans. Stopping cues help with self control because they serve as a reminder. They home in on people's attention. Wow, I love this. This is classic behavioral science. We've got choice overload where people, when they have too many options, just don't engage or pick one. It seems like friction here has helped people apply more.

Yeah. So we've also done experiments where they were successful. How do we think about summarizing a lot of information and putting it up front so that people can evaluate and quickly eliminate and self select out of the jobs that they're not interested in? And I think like, salary information is one of those key pieces of information that everyone looks at. And if the salary range is not what you're looking for, they actually self select out. So I think there are good ways to add friction that actually helps the marketplace even if we're not leading to that apply. Another one that we like is if you look at a job details page, we show number of applicants. And sometimes that number is like 200 applicants have already applied to this job. And so someone from behavioral science background might ask, why would you show that that is such a huge number? Like, how is it useful? Actually, when we interview users, what they tell us is this is good indication that either a job is really popular. So if it's my dream job, I would still apply to it. However, if it's it's an okay job and I see 200 applicants is I'm not going to apply to it because there's so much competition already. I think this is useful information for job seekers to decide do I apply or do I not? And similarly, if they see a job that's old but only has one or two applicants, they start to wonder like, is this a good job? Why are other people not interested in it? So I think just showing information and being more transparent with our seekers really helps them to make these decisions.

And does that pan out in the data where if you show the number of applicants that more people are applying, let's say apply more if there's more applicants and apply less if there's less applicants, does that pan out?

So I think there are a lot of confounding factors because the jobs that are getting a ton of applicants, they tend to be the popular jobs at large and recognizable companies. They typically are the ones where you can apply in an easier way right on LinkedIn site. So I think there is bias already of why these jobs are getting more applicants and why it drives even more applicants. So it's not clear that it's just the number. I think the number of applicants is just one factor that goes into that whole decision.

Yep, back to your third priority on diversity and inclusion equity issues. It'd be interesting to look at that from a female, male perspective of if you see a high number as a female, you may say this is going to be too hard and so there could be some gender effect here on seeing applicants. Have you looked at this?

That is an interesting idea that we have not looked at. So we are early in our equity journey, but still something that we do think about is how do we even measure what bias is happening. So to your point, if this number exists, does it affect male and female apply ratios that we have not looked at specifically. But what we do look at is for a male and a female that are of equal qualifications, are we showing them the same caliber of jobs? And if we show them the same caliber of jobs, do they apply at the same rate? If they apply at the same rate, are they getting hear back signals at the same rate from recruiters? And ultimately are they getting those jobs? Like what is the rate between male and female? So those are things that we are all starting to measure and get a better idea of to understand, like how we could nudge people in the right way to drive towards equitable outcomes.

So this is a tough one. There's research out there that shows women are less likely to enter competitions than men. Many things that require some sort of selection process, promotions, awards or admissions for example, require this type of self nomination. But research shows women tend to to demonstrate less overconfidence and thus are less likely to self promote and exaggerate their accomplishments. They're also less likely to seek out risks and competition. Thus women might be less inclined to participate in competitive selection processes. A recent study tried to mitigate this effect, researchers changed the choice architecture around a decision to apply for top positions. Instead of asking applicants to opt in to a promotion, it became the default. If they didn't want to apply, they had to opt out. Evidence from the lab and field study show that a choice architecture in which applicants must opt out from competition reduces gender differences in competition. The study suggests that people should automatically be considered for promotions. If not, fewer women will be considered because they are less likely to enter. This is a bias that may affect who does and doesn't opt into applying for a job. But what about the reverse? What biases are facing employers as they search for candidates and can see very clearly on the LinkedIn profile demographic signals like gender and race.

Funny you bring that up because we actually have a feature in our recruiter products and when a recruiter uses our paid product, we have a feature that the companies can turn on that's called hide candidate names and photos.

Nice.

So if they turn this on, we actually obfuscate the name and turn it into a four letter acronym. And there was a lot of thought behind why an acronym? Why not a number? Why not a combination of numbers and letters or randomly generated things? So it's obfuscated into a four letter acronym and the photo is just an icon. And so we believe that by doing this, recruiters don't have to use that snap judgment to make decisions and really focus on the skills and experiences.

And what percentage of recruiters are turning this on actively.

This is relatively new and you can imagine we need to educate our recruiters and help them understand what this will add to their workflow. And so we're still in the early phases of rolling this out.

Hopefully in the future we'll get maybe a default on yes, where folks have to turn it off.

This is interesting because this is my personal perspective, but I think companies are in different stages of this journey and I think this could really help a company that is at the beginning of their diversity and inclusion efforts to remove that bias. But there are companies that are actively seeking out diverse candidates and as a result, this may not actually work for them because they may not get the proportion of diverse candidates that they're seeking.

There's a really good study around this. In 2012, researchers at Harvard University sent 5,000 resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago changing only the name of the applicant to sound traditionally black or white. Resumes with white sounding names were 50% more likely to be called for an interview than equivalent resumes with a black name. That's an advantage equivalent to approximately eight years of working experience. The gap further increased when considering resume quality. High quality resumes were more beneficial for applicants with white names, suggesting that white applicants were judged more on their merits than black applicants. Name based discrimination is persistent even when the applicant's resume signals English language proficiency or when the vacant position relies heavily on unrelated skills. More recently, in a study conducted just this year, researchers found that firms hiring in STEM fields rated minority and female candidates significantly lower than white males among STEM majors. In order to get the same rating as a white male with a 3.75 GPA, minority and female candidates needed a 4.0 silver lining. There was no disparity found in race and gender when employees were recruiting among students in the humanities, social sciences and business fields. Maybe we go back to more signaling and decision making as it relates to job seekers. LinkedIn has, during COVID came up with a clever label to put on profiles. So basically, if you're a job seeker and looking for work, you can now put on a looking for work tag to your name. It's kind of like folks have probably been to parties by which it's what is it? Green, yellow, red? And this signifies if you're single or if you're with somebody. Yellow I've never been too sure about. But it makes a market more transparent when you can signal to other people your status. So tell us about any learnings from this journey of having Open to work on your profile.

Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Open to work. The photo frame that you See today on LinkedIn came out of our response to Covid. So when the pandemic hit, as you know, a lot of companies announced mass layoffs due to the uncertainties and the lockdown. And at that time, what we saw were tens of thousands of members updating their LinkedIn profiles themselves to publicly announce that they have been laid off and really doing that to ask the community for help. What we found is the LinkedIn community pulled together and offered help time and time again. We saw these requests met with encouragement and advice and referrals and resources for job opportunities. And so when we saw this happening, we actually thought we should just make it easier for our members to do that officially on LinkedIn. So that's why we created the Open to work feature so that people who have been laid off can ask for help. And I think one thing that it did is, is to destigmatize this idea that if you're laid off or you're out of work, that you're not as valuable of an employee And I think that destigmatized it and also like, really got the power of the whole community to give you more support. So what have we learned? Members with the open to work photo frame on average are 40% more likely to receive an InMail from recruiters.

Ooh, that's great.

Yeah. And 20% more likely to receive messages from their community. So I think the destigmatizing and getting more support is definitely happening. And since launching this, what we see is there's a lot more job postings now. Companies are now starting to hire at a much more rapid rate than we expected. And so we have recently launched the open to hiring photo frame to help job posters be more transparent about them looking for work and getting people to reach out to them.

It also goes along the lines of if we just make things easier that people are already doing, they'll do it more. And so you basically took the product inside that people are already asking their friends and their colleagues or past colleagues for help. The Easy Apply button strikes me as kind of the same thing where you basically have made something wildly easier for people to do. Maybe explain what the Easy Apply button is and then any learnings from launching this?

Yeah. So LinkedIn offers ability with some of our job posting partners where you can look for jobs on LinkedIn and apply while staying on LinkedIn's platform. And as a result of that, we have so much information from your profile and other resume information that you've given us to power those applications so that you don't have to refill it out. And so it creates a much more seamless experience for job seekers. So I think the next question is, does that mean people will just mass apply every time they see an easy apply button? Yes, I'm sure there are some seekers that do it and they search out this button in Mass Apply. But at the end of the day, job seeking is personal. Nobody wants to get rejected. So job seekers want to apply to jobs that they want to hear back from. In fact, one of the biggest pain points for job seekers is application black hole. I spend time and I apply to all these jobs, but I never hear back. So I don't think the goal of a job seeker is just to find these jobs so that they can massively apply to them. But what we do see is jobs with this way to easily apply. What we do see is they do get more applicants than jobs that don't have this.

That would make sense. You reduce the barrier and more people will apply. Any thoughts on quality of applications? So basically, if you have to work a little bit harder for something. You may put in more effort, your application could be more personalized, et cetera, versus easy apply. It's also a signal to the recruiter that you've put in very little effort to applying, and so it's harder for the recruiter or the employer to figure out who's serious because they haven't given a chance to display any effort.

Yeah. So if you think about it from a hiring efficiency perspective, number of applications that get you to a hire, you can say using that metric, yes, jobs with easy apply because they just have more applicants. In general, the apply efficiency is going to be lower. And so yes, I would agree in general that is true.

Sorry, but I'm going to quickly interrupt myself again because this was a really key part of our conversation. So we only have a limited amount of attention and mental bandwidth to devote to decision making at any moment. When given too many options or faced with a complex or uncertain choice, we face what is known as cognitive overload. In these situations, we often procrastinate or opt out of taking action. We're hardwired to make these decisions in ways that limit the amount of cognitive effort required to take the easiest option available to us, and usually that is to take no action at all. Cognitive overload can occur at any time when we're faced with multiple complex choices, but it is especially prevalent in contexts of stress, scarcity and uncertainty. By the way, Irrational Labs experienced this personally on LinkedIn's platform as an employer, we recently posted A Position and the number of applications and variety of qualifications was overwhelming. I just didn't have time to sort through all the profiles to figure out who should move on. So we ended up switching to another job platform that allowed us to add more friction and narrow the applications. Sorry Ada, how do you present the information to recruiters? So imagine 100 folks apply to their job. How do you help the recruiter sort through that amount of information?

So let's talk about traditionally how we think about it. And then in the new world, where right now is a seeker market, there are a lot more jobs available than seekers. So in the new world we can talk about it pre and post pandemic. So pre pandemic we already knew that this was a problem. Are there seekers that are qualified but not getting the attention they need from posters? So how do we rank individuals based on their qualifications? How do we showcase individuals that we think are qualified in a digestible way? Similarly to how job seekers when they view a job details? We try to Summarize information at the top so they can easily go through it and understand the qualifications. We want to do that on the poster side. So we have a bunch of things that we do to try to highlight why this person is a fit. Where have they gotten referrals? Or do you have shared connections so you can reach out and get more information about the candidates? So what I'm talking about now is, hey, macro conditions have changed. This is a seeker market now. And what that means is the supply and demand curve has really changed and there aren't enough seekers in some industries to fill the jobs. And so I think one thing that's going to need to happen is employers are going to have to get creative and think about non traditional people to fill these roles. And so I think there are a couple of avenues here, which is, number one, people with career gaps, especially women. More than 2.5 million women have left the workforce since COVID And so as in person, schools are reopening and kids are starting to go back to school. I think there will be a surplus of talent in that population. So how do you think about attracting those candidates? Another one is internal mobility. Employers are starting to invest in hiring internal candidates that have proven themselves in another function, but may not necessarily have the experience experiences for their specific role. And then I think the other change here that happened is how do you think about expanding geographically? Before you were very limited in finding candidates within, let's say a 30 mile radius of your office, but with remote work now you can now expand that to globally. I think there will be just an influx of more diverse candidates. And then finally, I think how LinkedIn is helping is we have a product called Skills Path. To your point earlier, right, how do we think about Easy Apply versus creating more friction to show that you're really interested? Our product of Skills Path is one where you can take some LinkedIn learning courses, take an assessment to prove that you have these skills now, and then get connected to employers more directly. And so we actually announced the partnership with Singapore's National Jobs Council to launch this Skills Path in Singapore. And the target is to have many, many companies start using this to fill roles that they traditionally can't fill with people that have more diverse backgrounds.

That's wonderful. And for background, this is the dream for kind of an equity type hiring is that it's a skills based assessment. It's not about the college that you went to, it's not about the top name employer that you had when you first started out. These are kind of typically the Heuristics and the decision heuristics that employers use in order to qualify you quickly.

Can I add a comment to that though? I think skills based hiring could be a solution to driving more equitable outcomes. I think it has to be done intentionally for that to happen. Like it's not a guarantee. And what I mean by that is who has access to courses in education? How do we think about women taking online assessments that are timed and pressured versus a man? So I think it's one lever to help us get there, but I don't think it's guaranteed.

I'm with you. I think we haven't figured out how to do assessments or maybe LinkedIn has in some ways, but a lot of employers have not figured out how to do assessments in a way that predict candidate performance on the job. And we'll have to get there if you want a more equitable workforce. I am struck though that the LinkedIn learning, and this is a personal thing, if people take a LinkedIn learning course, it actually may be a negative signal that they don't have the experience before and they're having to take a course, an assessment on LinkedIn in order to get that experience. How do you think about the mental model of doing assessments on LinkedIn and having that be a positive versus maybe a questionable signal?

So what we do know is people with that skills assessment badge will get reached out to more often than people without. So I think there are two different reasons why you would do it. One is because the job requires it. You don't know how to prove that because you're from a diverse background, you take the course and prove your skill. The other one is what we hear from more experienced folks is I am taking the assessment just so they recognize that I have that skill already. So I have never heard of it being seen as like, oh, having it is negative on your profile because remember on your profile you could just add skills without any verification.

Yeah.

So I actually think this is a step in the right direction of us having more verified skills.

Let's go back into the job seekers process for a bit. So basically, as somebody looking for a job, I should be applying to some subset of jobs and probably some subset of jobs that I'm maybe not as qualified for as other jobs. Maybe because I'm trying to increase my level. How many jobs should folks apply to and how much should we be stretching in our application world? And maybe the follow up question is how do you help people handle rejection?

I think helping people handle rejection is a really interesting way to reframe the problem. So from a job seeker's perspective, though, even getting that rejection is better than the application black hole, which is you never hear back because at least there is some feedback. So the way I thought about this is how does LinkedIn help nudge people to apply to jobs where they won't get rejected or where they will hear back? And so what we do is we provide details of why they're a good match. Here are the skills that you have that match the skills of that job description. Here are connections that you have in common with this company. And the reason we put that is because we know people who have connections at a company have a much higher chance of success. And if you can get that referral, we know that you're four times more likely to end up with that job. So that's what we do. The other thing we could do is how do we send them notifications so that when the job is posted, they're one of the first people to apply? Because we know that if you're one of the early applicants, your chance of being viewed by the recruiter and hearing back is actually higher. So the way I think about it is how do we make sure we nudge people towards the right jobs to apply to? But we do know that the majority of applications do not hear back. So on the bottom end of it is how do we provide the resources, the network, and the guidance to help people move on and go to other jobs?

How many jobs should folks apply to? This is kind of like a dating market, right? Where you're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At some level, you have to date a fair amount of people before maybe find your match. And it's very easy to give up too early because the process is long and demotivating throughout it. And kind of the name of the game is, at least in dating, is probably to continue. What does it look like for job seekers? How many should they apply to? And maybe what's the lumpiness of it? Is it like the dating market by which people have stints of going on dates and then they take a break from the apps and they come back? What does it look like for you guys?

So I think there is no magical number of jobs you should apply to. What I mean by that is, if you're early in your career, it could be a very different story than if you're looking for something very specific. What we do see is the people that are more successful usually are the ones that either, yes, apply to a lot of jobs and end up getting one of them or they actually apply to very few jobs that are very selective in how they apply. So it's almost like bimodal.

So while the time it takes to land a job will always vary depending on the circumstances US Unemployment Unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the median unemployment duration in May 2021 was 19.3 weeks, or about 5 months. But we definitely don't assume it would take us five months to find a job. If we found ourselves unemployed, we tend to be inherently optimistic. We assume it would take us much shorter. A survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey asked unemployment insurance recipients if they expected expected to be employed within four weeks. The survey questioned respondents at regular intervals, which allowed the researchers to determine how their expectations changed over time. The data shows that the participants overestimated their likelihood of finding a job in the near future. In the New Jersey sample, on average, 26% of respondents expected to have a job in one month, while the actual rate of employment in one month is 10%. Basically, we always start off optimistic, but once the rejections start coming, we start to adjust our expectations, though likely not enough. And we also become less happy, which makes perfect sense. Imagine sitting down on a Sunday and applying for six jobs. It was hard work, but fast forward two weeks and you haven't heard anything back or you've interviewed once or twice only to lose out to someone else. This may be normal, but it doesn't feel normal. Rejection hurts.

I don't track the time spent on coming up with this application, but my guess is they just have more time to spend. They take more care, they do more research on the company to understand fit. So as a result of that, they are personalizing their cover letters, tailoring their resume or their profile specifically to those jobs so that they can get in front of the recruiter. So I think it's just a matter of are they spending the time and making sure they're doing all the right things to have that higher chance of hearing back?

LinkedIn basically has taken and indeed and other folks have taken what was classically a very analog process of applying for jobs and moved it online into a marketplace by which my digital resume matters more than maybe my PDF one and my posts on my social platform could matter even more. So what are some of the high level changes that have changed kind of the behaviors of job seekers or hiring managers in this relatively new world?

In this relatively new world? And I'm going to talk also about the pandemic because the pandemic has really created, accelerated this new world. And it has caused a sharp shift in how people interact and find opportunities. Absolutely, I agree with that. Companies are rethinking their entire working models, their culture, company values. And then employees and job seekers are rethinking not just how they work, but why they work and looking for opportunities that match their needs and their lifestyle. And so getting a better job isn't just a better title and more pay. It's greater flexibility, a more inclusive environment, or companies that align with my values. So how do we find more fulfilling jobs? And so really, it's just a more dynamic relationship between employers and employees now. So a couple of more specific changes. I think career paths become less and less linear. In the last 18 months, a lot of people have re evaluated their relationship with work. People want more stability. They want companies that fit in with their family and their lifestyle. And I think the result is what I call pandemic clarity. And I'm sure you've heard of the great resignation or the great reshuffle that's happening right now where people are just quitting their jobs to find more fulfilling things to do. And so I think career paths become less linear. I think another trend is remote work is here to stay. We've seen the percentage of remote jobs on our platform increase. We've seen seekers looking for remote jobs. That activity has increased. So I think employers are starting to offer more flexibility.

What is the percentage of remote jobs and folks who are accepting remote jobs?

Yeah. So the funny thing is, earlier you asked me what are search patterns and search behaviors? And they're relatively stable, meaning people will always search for manager. But when Covid hit, we actually saw a huge increase in search for remote jobs. And that trend is continuing to be elevated. So what we saw is 1 in 8 US job postings on LinkedIn now offer some type of remote option, which is a significant increase from before, which was around 1 in 70.

Wow. Yeah, we're going remote.

Yeah. So as people are pivoting and discovering new career paths, I think what this really translates to is skills is going to become more important and skills becomes a new currency of how you find jobs. If you think about it, a job can really be broken down into a set of skills. And if you dig into some of the data, what you do learn is, for example, a food server has a 71% skill overlap with a customer service specialist. And that is a job that is really high in demand. So as career paths become less linear and less constrained by geographic locations, I really think there's a big push to understand skills and to use skills to really fill the demand of these new jobs that are coming up.

That's great. It's a really nice insight. How do we get people to think like this? So I think there's probably from the macro perspective this is very a nice insight of food service workers could be customer service workers and yet actually doing a job training program or getting folks confident enough to apply or employers confident enough to hire without too much background. Is there a mental model switch that job seekers need to have to go out of their swim lane?

We've actually seen engagement with LinkedIn learning product increase 50% year over year. So I think that shift is already happening. At the same time we have seen more job posters remove the four year degree requirement and adding some skills requirements. So I think that shift is already happening and it will continue to happen. So for example, LinkedIn has partnered with Microsoft and they've already helped upskilled 30 million members of the workforce so that they can learn new skills and connect to opportunities.

Are there other things we haven't touched on that's on your equity and inclusion roadmap?

On the equity inclusion roadmap. So mitigating bias, hiding candidate names and photos. So there's a lot. Like I said, we're early in our journey. So one, we want to be able to measure bias and understand how to mitigate it. Next, we want to provide tools for recruiters and hiring managers so that they are recruiting without bias, like high candidate names and photos. How do we then also provide insights for them to take actions that will increase the diversity of their population pool? So for example, if you increase your search to include these skills or these functions or these locations, could you increase the diversity of your pool? One of the things LinkedIn recently launched is what we call self ID. Could we ask our members for this information so that we're not guessing at our company's building a more diverse workforce and we will have the information to do it. So the last part of the strategy here is how do we empower seekers to identify companies who are committed to diversity and succeeding in diversity? So not yet rolled out, but could we help companies declare that they're committed to diversity and then how do we verify that they're actually making progress towards those goals? So these are questions that we constantly think about and are on the roadmap.

That's wonderful. That's great. One of the sad things in this world is we tend to value our network in hiring. So if I have an open position, I may blast my network and obviously what we know about networks is they may be less diverse than the hiring candidate pool should be. So there's something about posting and searching and making the application process kind of more equitable. How should we think about this for reaching out to our networks and trying to insert a more diverse group when we're reaching out to people we know?

Okay, so I think you're absolutely right, but I think there are a couple of levels to it. If you think about Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, he popularized this idea from a research paper, I think, from the 70s called the power of Weak Ties. In that paper, what they're saying is you need to have really strong ties with close friends and family. But what that study showed is the chance of you discovering new ideas and opportunities and more diverse ideas and opportunities is really much higher with a larger pool of weak ties that you have, which is your network. These are coworkers and people who you may not call in an emergency, but they know who you are and would be willing to make these do these small favors, such as making an intro and making a referral for you. And I think really, LinkedIn took this idea and democratized it so that everyone can have a useful network. And that's exactly what you're talking about. Right. How do we think about building a network that can have all of these powerful side effects? And how do we think about building a more diverse network? So the advice to people in building a more diverse network is just to go reach out to people who may not look like them or may not be from the same company or same educational background as them. And how do they do that? They can join groups of similar interests where they can find people from different areas, different countries, or different backgrounds. So I think there's so many ways you can do that on LinkedIn.

Yep. And kind of the Internet, the Internet is known for getting us maybe more in our in groups. Right. More in a rabbit hole. But it also allows us to dip a toe into Reddit forums by which are very unlike maybe any of our current friends. And so as much as we give the Internet a little bit of hard times for getting us polarized, it also does allow us to step out if we want to. And you're basically saying you can use it to step out.

You can absolutely use it to step out. And I think with any powerful tool, you can use it for good or evil.

I think my favorite is still the saved. I love the saved idea where people put it in their saved account and then don't come back to it. It's kind of like a wish list. Airbnb has a wish list, or you have things in an E Commerce wish list. It's like people just don't come back.

Yeah. And that's like classic behavioral science. Right. You could totally see why people would save more and then not end up applying because they've taken the action and gotten that dopamine hit of like, I accomplished something.

We'll end with this question. This is something we ask most guests. So basically, in the very beginning of filming, when we're moving from just taking pictures and photography to films, the first film was actually filmed from one angle only. And so you just set the camera, you know, you kind of hit record and the actors go nuts, but you're catching them from one angle. In hindsight, you could say, like, just move the camera. And so it's an interesting observation to think about. In hindsight, that's obvious to us. But in the moment when people are moving from photography to film, that just wasn't as obvious. When we look back at the job market in the future, what will be obvious to us then that isn't obvious to us now that we should have just done?

Okay, I think it goes back to a lot of the things that we already talked about. What is currently the way people still think about applying to jobs and recruiters thinking about hiring candidates. It's really still based on what has this person done, what schools did this person go to? Does this mirror my idea of what the candidate is? And I think in the future we will realize that it's not really based on your pedigree and it's really based on your skills and the potential for you to do that job. So I think really democratizing opportunities based on what someone is actually capable of rather than where they come from, I think that is going to be a key insight for the jobs marketplace and a change that I will really welcome.

That was ada Yu of LinkedIn. So let's zoom out and go back in time. In the 1970s, the American economist Michael Spence introduced the concept of market signaling. It was a seminal contribution to economics. The idea is simple. Spence studied workers investments in education, a specific type of education, kind of like grad school, that doesn't directly contribute to an employee's productivity on the job. He wondered why someone would spend time and money on this type of education and concluded the reason workers may nevertheless invest in this education is that it may serve as a signal to potential employers that they are more productive, AKA better than the average person. Potential employers cannot observe the ability of workers before they hire them. But they know that investing in education is cheaper for highly able workers. Therefore, education serves as a credible signal of unobserved productivity and is rewarded with a higher wage. As education is correlated with productivity, it has a sorting effect. But that was then. The world, in case you haven't noticed, is changing. Spence may still be right. We need costly signals to help ourselves stand out. But will education stand the test of time? Education from an Ivy League school does not mean you can code in JavaScript or design in Figma. Of course, education is still a signal, but it isn't as strong of a signal as it once was. So what's the problem? Most platforms still highlight education front and center. Indeed, breezy and yes, LinkedIn LinkedIn seems to be addressing this with assessments and learning skills. But will it be costly enough? If anyone can add a skill or take a two day assessment, is this enough for an employer to move them to the top of the list? I doubt it. We need better ways to do skill assessments and qualifications that help employers find candidates without relying on education name brands. Of course LinkedIn says their assessments are working and people who take assessments get more inbound. But I'm a bit skeptical it's not their algorithm promoting these people. Still, it's a nice start. We've actually seen dating apps try to help people sort in creative ways. You can send people a rose on Hinge, but you can only send so many roses. So if you get a rose, you know it's meaningful. This signals to the recipient a more costly signal than simply a like or a message that says hey babe. By sending them a rose you made a choice. And there are other approaches to sorting. We hear of a designer who got a job at a tech company by proactively redoing the company's website. This is the opposite of the easy Apply. It's the put in a lot lot lot of effort and hope it pays off approach. Regardless, the future of job marketplaces is changing. These job platforms are marketplaces, and these need to work harder to help sort both sides. Which candidates are right for employers and which employers are right for candidates? It's a hard problem, especially now with the prevalence of remote jobs, and so even geography is no longer a relevant filter. The big risk, I think, is that marketplaces allow for too much choice. When the job platforms don't do well at filtering for the best candidates and put the burden on employers or job seekers to find each other, we're at risk of people making non optimal decisions either not finding the right job or not finding the right candidate. The stakes are high. Our workforce is changing, and job platforms will need to change with it. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the Science of Change on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts. And while you're at it, why not give us a review? Writing a review takes only seconds and is wildly helpful for the show, and we'd love to hear what you think. The Science of Change podcast is presented by act on the Moments to Lead to a Sale. Visit them at Setsale co or on LinkedIn to learn more about the world's number one revenue execution platform. This podcast is produced by me, Kristen Berman, and StudioPod Media. Our executive producer is Rachel Roberts, and all episodes are written by Jack Buer.