Why you shouldn’t list certifications on LinkedIn

The engineer who looks good on paper. This person will simply not list the certification on their profile – they have no reason to! They already have 10 contacts from recruiters each day;
The engineer who doesn’t look good on paper. This person will likely add a certification to their profile. It’s rational – anything that helps them stand out and legitimize their profile, in the absence of traditional pedigree, is a win. That sounds great, right? Unfortunately, here’s the rub. Unless your certification is respected by recruiters and well-established, they will not take it seriously… because it runs counter to everything they’ve been tuned to look for

Our hypothesis was that having one or more certifications on your profile would have a strong negative correlation with your interview performance. Why?

We’ve seen in the past that though having attended a top school doesn’t correlate with interview performance, having worked at a top employer does. We saw above that people who look good on paper aren’t going to be incentivized to put certifications on their profile, which means that we’ve just cut a lot of top performers from the pool.

What the data actually says

In this analysis, we took a list of our users for whom we had interview data and, where possible, analyzed their LinkedIn profiles. We ended up analyzing about 20K LinkedIn profiles, 28% of which had some kind of certification. We then pulled out the top 10 most frequent certification authorities, so we could break them out and do some more granular analysis. These were (in order of frequency, i.e. Coursera had the most hits):

Coursera
LinkedIn
Triplebyte
Microsoft
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Oracle
Udacity
Udemy
HackerRank
Cisco

Because people usually do multiple interviews on our platform, we ended up with about 40k observations (i.e., interviews) in each regression.

Our first result is that people with certifications do worse in interviews, as shown in the bar chart below. People with certifications on their LinkedIn profiles pass interviews on our platform about 53% of the time versus 57% of the time for people without certifications, a very statistically significant difference (p < 0.00001). Remember that these interviews are completely anonymous. The interviewer isn’t basing their ratings on the person’s LinkedIn—just their interview performance.

Notably, the certification “penalty” is equally large whether people had the certifications up in 2021 or 2023. So there’s no sign that today’s depressed labor market changed the nature of the signal.

Indeed, we observe this pattern in the data: people with non-traditional backgrounds are about 30% more likely to have a certification.

Using control of same language and pedigree:

So, LinkedIn certifications are indeed a negative tag for candidates on our platform. This isn’t explained by the kinds of interviews they do. But we can show that part of it is due to the fact that certified people tend to have non-traditional backgrounds. The remainder of the gap is probably due to similar dynamics: you get certified if you have something to prove.

Not all certifications are created equal

This analysis treats certifications as binary. Either you have it or you don’t. But there are a range of authorities out there that give certifications: are any of them a positive tag?