LinkedIn releases new report showcasing how gender impacts the candidate journey

Today, LinkedIn released a new Gender Insights Report to shed light on how women and men engage with jobs differently on the LinkedIn platform.

In recent years, gender diversity has been a hot topic for companies; however, advancement toward a more diverse workforce has been slow across industries. In analyzing interactions between companies and candidates, from engagement with jobs and applications to company hires, we’re providing actionable insights that can help companies looking to create a more gender-balanced and inclusive talent pipeline.

Here’s what we found:

• Women tend to be more selective about the jobs they apply to than men - Although both genders browse jobs similarly, they apply differently, with women 14% less likely to apply for a job after viewing it compared to men.

• Men are more likely to ask for a referral - Men show a 68% likelihood to “Ask for a Referral” before applying to a job, compared to women’s 32%.

• When women do apply, they are more likely to get hired - Despite applying more conservatively, women are 16% more likely than men to get hired to the jobs they apply to. If women only apply when they feel extremely qualified, it makes sense that they'd have a higher success rate — but that high rate could also indicate that women feel discouraged from showing interest in riskier stretch opportunities.

• How recruiters reach out matters - Once a recruiter views a woman’s profile, they are almost just as likely to reach out via InMail, as compared to men (just a 3% difference); the challenge, however, is that when women appear in Recruiter search results, they are 13% less likely to be viewed by recruiters than men.

• Salary matters for women - It’s also important to provide salary information in a job description, as 68% of women say salary range and benefits is the most important part of a job description. This could be an encouraging signal for women that the company is committed to fair pay.

For companies, understanding your current gender-focused outreach methods on LinkedIn can be a guiding factor to developing a data-driven sourcing strategy to increase the number of women in your pipeline. Whether that lead to strengthening your employer brand or changing the language in your job descriptions, we hope these insights lead to meaningful progress when it comes to gender balance in the workforce.

See the full report here.

 

Methodology

Behavioral data: Behavioral insights for this report were generated from the billions of data points created by more than 610 million members in over 200 countries on LinkedIn today. All data reflects aggregated LinkedIn member activity during the full year 2018, unless otherwise stated.

We have inferred the gender of members included in this analysis by classifying their first names as either male or female, or by pronouns used on their LinkedIn profile. Members whose gender could not be identified as either male or female were excluded from this analysis. This analysis only includes members located in countries where we could infer gender for at least 67% of the member base.

Survey data: Research data in this report comes from two surveys. In April 2017, 6,536 LinkedIn members across 20+ countries were asked about their experience on the job and to project into the future. In April 2018, 376 men and women from LinkedIn’s Insight Community panel were shown job descriptions, asked to highlight most relevant areas, and asked which sections were most important to them.