If there's anyone who's likely to know about what goes into finding a great employee, it's going to be a guy who has spent his career putting together a team of great employees to create an app that can help businesses to find great employees.
Yes, LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner, is a man who knows what it takes to build a great workforce, and according to him - traditional methods of sourcing staff are on their way out.
The job-focussed social platform boss looks for qualities like passion and fire, a great work ethic, perseverance, loyalty, and a growth mindset over more traditional things like degrees from specific universities, or how quickly you can neck a pint.
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Speaking about the issue, at the ASU + GSV Summit in San Diego, California Weiner said: "These are qualities that you don't necessarily pick up from a degree.
"There are qualities that have a tendency to be completely overlooked when people are sifting through resumes or LinkedIn profiles. And yet, increasingly, we find that these are the kinds of people that make the biggest difference within our organisation.
"Increasingly I hear this mantra: Skills, not degrees. It's not skills at the exclusion of degrees. It's just expanding our perspective to go beyond degrees.
"We used to pride ourselves on recruiting from an incredibly short list of universities, and a lot of companies in the Valley did the same thing," said Weiner.
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"We're certainly not alone. We recently conducted a little bit of research leveraging LinkedIn profiles and looked at tech workers within the Valley, and only five percent of them came from non-traditional backgrounds."
Increasingly, a number of well-known companies are beginning to think outside of the box when it comes to hiring, after realising that there is a lot of talent to be found outside of the traditional avenues.
In an interview with the New York Times, Google's former head of HR explained why there is an increasing number of employees at the tech giant without any university degrees.
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"After two or three years, your ability to perform is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different," Bock told the paper.
"You're also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently."
More and more large businesses are beginning to adopt this sort of attitude and LinkedIn is most definitely one of them. It's great news for those of us who have felt held back by our lack of qualifications.
"Yes, [computer science] degrees from specific schools can lead to us finding incredible talent, said Weiner. "But it's not the exclusionary domain of incredible talent.
"We're looking for people with the dedication, with the work ethic. We want to give them a shot. And what we're finding is, these people are incredibly talented, and they need a chance."
Featured Image Credit: LinkedInTopics: Google, University