From LinkedIn Engineering:
“Don’t confuse skills with “that list of skills you entered on your LinkedIn profile”. We intuit skills from MANY places. For example, we will give you “credit” for a skill if you:
-Have it in your profile some place. We convert all the text in your whole profile in to one big field behind the scenes and use it to keyword search for skills.
-Have it in a resume we have access to (this is permission dependent). We scan resumes for skills.
-We also “give credit” for skills based on connections at times. (!!) So, let’s say you have a bunch of connections, and you are all “similar” profiles, and all those other folks have X skill, and you don’t. We will “infer” that you have that skill.”
(Bold is mine – IS)
Let me show you what happens.
Developers in El Cerrito, CA (where I live) with:
- keyword = javascript — 430 members
- (LinkedIn) skill = javascript — 416 members
- Self-entered skill = javascript — 347 members
I.e., searching by “LinkedIn Skills” in that wider sense outlined by the Engineering have found 97% of members with the keyword. The stats are similar if you use other keywords for skills.
How is this useful? I am glad we have the hidden skills: operator to search for self-entered skills.
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