LinkedIn launches Connected Apps: your skills can now be verified

LinkedIn has rolled out Connected Apps, a new feature that lets people verify skills on their LinkedIn profiles through third-party apps. Users can connect supported services, and LinkedIn says locked skill summaries that can’t be written or edited by hand.

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LinkedIn says Connected Apps will also alert users when those summaries change, which gives recruiters something more concrete than self-written skill claims or the usual endorsements. At launch, LinkedIn says the feature works with Descript, Duolingo, Lovable, Relay.app, and Replit. Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, GitHub, and more are on the way.

This builds on LinkedIn’s earlier Skill Assessments, which gave users badges for passing tests. Those assessments caught some criticism, and the reason wasn’t hard to see: tests can be easy to game, and they don’t always show the kind of work someone actually does in real situations.

The feature also fits the broader move toward skills-based hiring. LinkedIn points to research saying skills are five times better at predicting job performance than education alone. It also cites another study that found an 89% improvement in retention among high performers.

If you use LinkedIn to hire, or you’re using it to find work, this looks worth checking out. There are still open questions, though, especially around privacy and fairness.

People have to give these apps access. Candidates who don’t use supported platforms, or who simply decide not to connect them, could end up at a disadvantage. That matters for LinkedIn too, especially with its 1.3 billion members, according to LinkedIn, and quarterly revenue up 12% from a year earlier, according to Microsoft.

LinkedIn says Connected Apps is available now through the platform as the company continues the rollout.